Welcome!
What’s Coming...
Jenny Carter
I’m so glad you are here! I have a lot to share with the resistance - work that will change how you see our shared fight on a foundational level.
I’m in the final stretch of building out the organizational framework and loading in the foundational content. Once everything is in place, I’ll begin releasing my core content on a consistent schedule.
A quick word on who I am...
I am a biblical scholar and a medically retired pastor. For more than two decades I studied the New Testament in its original languages and planted small house churches built on the early Christian model the text actually describes. I love Jesus, deeply, and I have loved him and allowed him to love me for a long time. That love is the engine behind everything here.
Severe chronic pain ended my in-person pastoral work and turned me into a full-time online activist. The same disability that took that career is what makes this writing possible. Writing is one of the few things that holds my attention above the pain - which is part of why I produce as much as I do. Writing is a coping mechanism, and it seems to really help people. I’ve always been a two birds, one stone kinda girl!For more than a year now, I have been writing and teaching on Facebook, in a pluralistic community I have built and genuinely treasure. Believers, skeptics, lifelong atheists, exhausted former evangelicals, secular leftists, progressive Christians - people from every walk of life and belief system, all in the same room, doing the work together. The teaching there draws out something the Bible has to offer everyone, regardless of where they stand on the spiritual claims: a deep, practical wisdom about how to recognize authoritarian power and resist it. That wisdom is in the text, and it has held up for thousands of years. You do not have to share my faith to use it. The community that has formed around this is the proof for me that the work reaches across lines the regime needs people to stay divided behind.
My physical condition is extreme. Picture a stage 4 cancer patient, except I am not dying. I have lost the beautiful life my husband Paul and I built, most of the physical world, and the version of my life I expected to be living. I have not lost what I have to offer. And despite all of it, I am genuinely happy. I mean that. I get to do resistance work full-time, with more time and space to think and write than my old life ever allowed.
What I am building here is not ordinary, and I am not going to pretend otherwise! Eighteen months of focused work has produced a thesis and a body of writing I have not seen anywhere else, and I believe it has something real to offer every single person in this resistance - the worn-down resister, the grieving believer, the secular reader who has been right about the Christian right all along and just never had the receipts, and anyone trying to think clearly while everything around them is built to make that harder.
What I’m building is really different...
After eighteen months of research and writing, I am finally at the formatting stage of a body of work I have not seen anywhere else - five parts in total, a foreword and a four-part argument. I will introduce it properly in the section below. Here is the part worth saying up front: the work uses three independent academic fields, working separately for decades, to prove something the resistance has needed proven for a long time. Sociologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, theologians, and historians have each made pieces of this case. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, has held all three fields together at once and let them deliver a single converging verdict on the movement we are up against. That is what this body of work does.
The biblical leg of the argument uses what scholars call a historical-grammatical hermeneutic - the standard interpretive method taught in mainstream seminaries. It seeks the author’s intended meaning in its original language and historical context, rather than importing modern agendas into the text.
What this does...
Everything I publish here builds out of the thesis. If you want to get the most from anything else I post, I want to encourage you to read or listen to the foreword and my four part thesis.
The foreword is currently live, and Part 1 of 4 drops on Sunday, May 16th, 2026.
The thesis proves that one specific movement - Christian Nationalism primarily, and the broader Christian right that carries it - is forming people in the opposite direction from what Jesus taught and lived, and from what biblical Christianity, read accurately, actually is.
Three independent academic fields - neuroscience, political science, and the biblical text read accurately - all arrive at the same diagnosis.
Jesus’s own ministry is the clearest record we have of the alternative. It is not abstract. It is a documented life: how he moved through occupied territory, how he treated outsiders, how he confronted unjust religious power, and the resistance method he taught and lived. That thesis sideways into the five areas every resister living under a religious authoritarian system needs to keep sharp.
Some posts will hand you tools and small practices you can use on your own time - nothing demanding, I know you are already carrying enough. Most posts will sharpen and maintain those capacities passively as you read or listen. The reading itself is the practice. Some of what I write may challenge you. Most of it will feel like exhaling.
The five core content areas:
The rest of my writing and content will seek to accomplish work in five key areas:
Restoring and sharpening moral perception - because authoritarian environments wear down the cognitive capacity required to see clearly, and rebuilding it is the first act of resistance.
Delegitimizing corrupt authority - because the religious right’s power runs on a religious cover that collapses the moment the text is read accurately.
Discursive resistance: training and tools - because Jesus modeled a specific kind of resistance built on speech, presence, and refusal of automatic thinking, and those tools still work.
Building resistance solidarity beyond purity - because a movement that fractures over small disagreements cannot outlast a regime that fractures nothing.
Removing shame and recovering growth - because shame is one of authoritarianism’s primary weapons, and a person who has stopped shaming themselves is a person who can finally think.
I will develop those content areas a little more later on, but I just wanted to give y’all a sneak peek for now!
A note on content rhythm...
After the thesis launches, my goal is a dependable weekly rhythm. I will be aiming for reliability, but I want to be upfront about why the timing may sometimes slip.
I live with one of the most painful conditions in the world. That is not exaggeration. The same condition that makes this work possible can also disrupt my schedule when severe nerve flares hit. If something I announce arrives later than planned, that’s why.
You may have questions about my condition. That’s fair - I would too. I’m working on introductory material that walks through it. I do not have to share that part of my life, but a real measure of openness matters here, because the work I’ll be doing depends on trust. I’ll share what makes sense to share, so anyone who wants to know me a little better, can.
I want to leave you with one line from Jesus that has carried me through the worst of my nerve pain, every single day. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Believer or not, the wisdom in that line is real. Tomorrow’s weight is not yours to carry today. You only have to get through this day - and you can, I promise. One day at a time, with what you actually have. That’s all any of us can do!
Much love Resister,
— Jenny
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Copyright Jenny Carter - Authorized Use by Contributor
Find Jenny at Substack
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In the story Jesus told about the end of the world, everyone calls him "Lord." Even the ones he sends away.
Calling him Lord didn't save them. They missed him anyway, because he was somewhere they never thought to look. That's what happens in a faith that fears the outsider. People keep the name and lose the man. You don't have to take my word for it. It's in the text.
Here's the story, from Matthew 25. Every nation is gathered, and he sorts them into two groups. To the first he says, "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me." The stranger, the foreigner with nowhere to sleep, comes up four times in that one scene.
They're stunned. "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?"
His answer is the line to stop on: "as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me."
Not like me. Me.
The second group asks the same question, "Lord" and all, and gets the same answer in reverse: "as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me."
Notice what the first group isn't doing. They aren't earning anything. They don't even remember doing it. Their kindness wasn't a strategy to get in. It was just who they'd become.
That's the pattern all through scripture. Actions don't buy belief. They expose it. "You will recognize them by their fruits," Jesus says in Matthew 7. And Luke records him asking the question this whole story turns on: "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and not do what I tell you?"
So this isn't a scorecard. Both groups called him Lord. What they did with the stranger showed which of them meant it. The ones sent away had the right title. They just never opened the door.
Some scholars read "the least of these my brothers" narrowly, as Jesus's own followers. That's a real debate. But the argument doesn't hang on one verse. It runs through everything he was raised on and everything he did.
The Talmud counts thirty-six places where the Torah warns against wronging the foreigner, and some count forty-six. It gives the reason plainly: "Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 10:19). You know what it is to be the outsider, so don't make anyone else one. That puts care for the foreigner among the most repeated commands in the tradition Jesus came from, not on its edges.
Then he lived it. In the first sermon Luke records, he reads from Isaiah and says he's come "to proclaim liberty to the captives." He made a Samaritan, the outsider his audience was raised to despise, the hero of his best-known story. He said a Roman centurion, an officer of the occupying army, had more faith than anyone in Israel. He ate with people the religious crowd called untouchable, and when they complained, he kept doing it. He told people to love their enemies.
His life runs one direction the whole way: toward the people everyone else feared. A faith built on keeping them out isn't a stricter version of his. It's his, turned around.
So put names to it.
Every Muslim the Right demonizes.
Every gay person.
Every trans person.
Every tired, beautiful Black and Brown American.
Every migrant in a concentration camp.
By his own words, that's where you'd find J E S U S.
So how does a faith get turned around like that?
The brain sorts faces into us and them in a blink, often before a conscious thought shows up. Seeing a stranger as a person takes the slower part of the mind, the part that has to choose. A faith that runs on fear of the outsider isn't running on God. It's running on an alarm and calling it God.
Strongmen know this. Give a frightened crowd an enemy, and the foreigner is always the one handed over.
Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany and lived for years as a stateless refugee, traced how it starts: a whole group of people loses any place in the world where they belong. Whatever a movement does to the foreigner tells you what it is.
The Bible has a name for that force. The word translated "devil" means the slanderer, the one who sets people against each other. "Satan" means the accuser, the one who points and says that one doesn't belong.
And when Paul lists "the works of the flesh" in Galatians 5, about half of it isn't appetite at all: "enmity, strife," "rivalries, dissension, divisions."
Put those side by side. A brain that sorts by fear. Strongmen who weaponize the sorting. An ancient scripture whose name for evil is the divider.
Brain scientists, a refugee philosopher and first-century writers weren't comparing notes, yet they describe the same machine. Fear in the body becomes division in the street, and the Bible calls that division the devil's work.
Scripture's answer fits in one line: "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). In the original language, "casts out" comes from the same verb for throwing that sits inside the word "devil." The divider throws people out. Love throws the fear out. Same motion, opposite direction.
So if you walked away from a faith that fears the stranger, you didn't walk away from Jesus. In his own story, he was the one they left standing outside.
You were walking towards him.
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