Statement on Cole Allen’s Use of the Bible

(Update from May 3, 2026: In the meantime, I have analyzed also the older 4,000+ posts on X: here.)

I. Summary of most important findings

• President Trump has called Cole Allen “anti-Christian,” suggesting a Christian past followed by a turn away from the faith, and characterizing the attempted assassination as committed out of hatred toward Christianity

• Others – such as journalist Ken Klippenstein – have pointed out that biblical references in the manifesto point towards a Christian self-understanding and that supposed references to Trump as the “antichrist” and references to apocalyptic language from the book of Revelation, found on Cole Allen’s alleged Bluesky account, might have foreshadowed violence

• From both the manifesto and the social media posts it is apparent that Allen felt strongly about many of President Trump’s actions – including his unwillingness to support Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the war in Iran, the bombing of Venezuelan ships, and the treatment of immigrants

• Both sources emphasize the need to side with these “oppressed” people and reason that the lack of action would mean “complicity” in what Allen clearly regards as atrocities

• I have not found, however, any direct theological reasoning undergirding these convictions, such as explicit references to the command to love one’s neighbor

• The Bluesky posts document a wide understanding of what is permissible as means of “resistance.” However, this readiness is not theologically legitimated either; rather, the bridge from political diagnosis to ethical legitimation runs through secular registers — most strikingly through a quotation from the Declaration of Independence’s grievances against George III, set within a broader American-Revolutionary frame Allen invokes more than once, and through structural comparisons between Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia. The same civic-republican logic also shapes the manifesto’s central legitimating move, with which it opens programmatically: “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.”

• That being said, it seems beyond doubt based on these sources that Allen understood himself to be a Christian.

• There are many indications of him coming, more specifically, from a Reformed tradition (such as his numbering of the commandments in the decalogue), which coheres well with what is known about his congregational past

• Moreover, he explicitly self-identifies as a “Protestant” as late as less than two weeks before the assassination attempt.

• Notably, he is capable of critically reflecting his own tradition, such as clichés of Catholicism entertained in his denomination in the past; this coheres well with his documented participation in a non-denominational gathering at Caltech

• There is, in fact, a marked asymmetry between the two sources. In the manifesto, Allen takes up biblical phrases (more on this below), but gives no chapter-and-verse references that would explicitly mark them as quotations. On Bluesky, by contrast, biblical material appears not only in allusions but also in numerous direct quotations, some of them quite extensive, with precise chapter-and-verse references and at times even with translation tags (KJV, NIV-style) — ranging from Revelation 13–14 and the Decalogue through James 2:19, Matthew 18, and the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant to the Beatitudes and 1 Corinthians 8–10. There they function primarily as instruments of critique directed against the Trump administration and self-identifying Christians who support it, rather than as positive grounding for his own action. In neither source does Allen seem to refer to the Bible as a reason for what he does.

• What deserves specific scrutiny within the Bluesky archive is Allen’s treatment of the book of Revelation, specifically chapters 13 and 14 (with one striking direct quotation from Rev 15:2). After careful examination I come to the preliminary conclusion that his hermeneutical stance is mainstream Christian and not marked by exaggerated apocalyptic expectations

• Allen does seem to believe that Revelation is not just a historical text speaking about experiences of oppression of Christian communities in the Roman Empire of the first or second century. However, he is careful not to draw outright identifications between, e.g., the apocalyptic figure of the “beast” on the one hand and Donald Trump on the other hand

• There is also no sign of Allen believing that he was a prophesied end-time figure who had to kill Donald Trump out of a predestined divine plan. To the contrary, he seems critical of those who try to accelerate the end times through their actions

• Generally, Allen’s interaction with the Bible shows a high level of critical reflection. While he at times simply quotes scripture without explanation (reflecting the Protestant assumption that Scripture can speak on its own), he also adds a historical clarification at one point (showing awareness of the ancient context), is aware of different Bible versions, at one point explicitly articulates the methodological principle that a modern reader’s moral reaction to a text does not entail the same reaction in its author or original audience, treats some passages as coherent argumentative units rather than as isolated proof-texts, declines to confidently identify Revelation’s apocalyptic figures with specific contemporary actors, and shows reception-history awareness in his ironic reactivation of the Reformation-era identification of the papacy with the antichrist.

• It thus seems most likely to me that Allen’s worldview was not marked by a specifically noteworthy understanding of the Bible but rather by a very intense understanding of Trump’s actions as acts of oppression.

• In the manifesto, Allen turns to objections, after first offering some apologies and explaining his rules of engagement. The first hypothetical objection that he adduces quotes from the Sermon on the Mount (specifically from Matthew 5:38–42, with a synoptic parallel in Luke 6:29): “As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.” It seems most likely to me that the decision to explicitly deal with this objection indicates what kind of intra-Christian interlocutor Allen has in view. Notably, he does not discuss Romans 13 (where, on a surface reading, Christians appear to be encouraged to submit to state authorities), as one would expect if he were imagining conservative Christians as his hypothetical dialogue partners. Rather, the citation of Jesus’s demands to endure injustice and not to respond with violence indicates that he is responding to an implicit pacifist stream of Christianity

• His “rebuttal” does not deny the validity of the command but rather argues that it is not applicable when others suffer from oppression. Today (not in the first three centuries of Christianity) this is the mainstream Christian position – taken also, for example, by the Christian opponents of Adolf Hitler who were in favor of assassinating him.

• The position does not seem to engage with deep theological reflection on this point. For example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought that while tyrannicide might at times be a necessary action for a Christian it was still sinful and could not be argued for in a coherent manner. Allen, by contrast, seems to do just that. Still, the basic argumentative figure of relativizing Jesus’s commands to endure injustice without violence by pointing to the need to side with the oppressed, even if it comes at one’s own expense (and Allen clearly expected to at least be seriously wounded), is, in itself, a recognizably mainline Protestant move, even if the way Allen develops it is theologically thin.

• Moreover, what is striking in his manifesto is not a global lack of empathy — Allen offers five separate apologies, explicitly designates hotel staff, guests, and bystanders as “not targets at all,” chooses buckshot over slugs in order “to minimize casualties” through reduced wall-penetration, and registers in his postscript that the experience itself is “awful.” What is striking, rather, is his willingness to override that empathy where his political-ethical case appears to demand it: he reserves the right to “go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary,” on the grounds that those who chose to attend the dinner “are thus complicit.” I could not find any direct evidence in his writings nor am I aware of any empirical research that would suggest that this disinhibition is specifically traceable to his Calvinistic background (including, perhaps, the assumption that certain people were predestined to damnation).

• The second objection that explicitly goes back to a biblical text is objection no. 5, “Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” This goes back to a saying attributed to Jesus in the New Testament (Mark 12:13–17, with parallels in Matthew 22:15–22 and Luke 20:20–26). It is notable that while this text is classically used to demand subjection of Christians to state authorities, often together with Romans 13 (on which see above), it has also attracted a lot of attention in biblical scholarship interested in identifying politically subversive dimensions – directed against the imperial ideology of Rome – in early Christian texts. In this reading, Jesus says that the coin presented to him belongs to Caesar because it shows his image – while the continuation of the text is taken to say that human beings – as carriers of God’s image (cf. the creation account in Genesis) – belong to God. That Allen does not go down this path, despite the obvious relevance of such an interpretation in light of Trump’s recent public statement that he might annihilate an entire civilization of human beings is telling, though it is an argument from silence. The lack of such an argument seems to demonstrate that Allen is not as deeply embedded in theological discourse of political resistance and tyrannicide as one might think at first sight (cf. Klippenstein: “Allen invok[es] Christian theology to defend the shooting, working through Gospel passages one by one”)

• In agreement with the findings from Allen’s Bluesky posts, we instead get a rebuttal that is entirely constitutional, not theological. The argument unfolds in two steps: first, that “the United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people,” so that the structural premise of the saying does not apply; second, that “in so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered” — i.e., that the obedience-obligation is conditional on the lawfulness of those in office, and lapses where they themselves act unlawfully. The argumentative figure thus belongs less to a flat application-rejection of the saying than to a secular variant of conditional-obedience reasoning whose nearest analogues lie in early modern political theory rather than in any biblical text. The move parallels what we already observed in the Bluesky posts: political diagnosis is bridged to ethical conclusion through secular-republican vocabulary, while Scripture itself is left to do other work.

• In sum, at this point it seems most likely that Allen’s main motivation for the attack was rooted in his understanding of Trump’s actions as atrocities that required resistance. It is this reading of political events, not of the Bible, that stands out. His wish to side with people he viewed as oppressed was probably influenced to some degree by his Christian beliefs but he does not make this connection very explicitly. There are no indications that he acted out of heightened apocalyptic beliefs due to a specific understanding of the Bible. Still, the Bible plays a major role in his critique of his opponents and he carried out his assassination attempt within an ethical framework that he understood to be Christian and that seems to belong to the mainstream of contemporary Protestant Christianity.

• I must emphasize that at this point it seems unclear to what degree psychological factors might have contributed to Allen’s very intense understanding of Trump’s political acts. Both questions — what psychological factors might have contributed and what sources Allen consumed and how they might have shaped his views — remain important to investigate.

• Still, in my view the episode is deeply concerning with respect to societal peace in the US because, as it appears at this moment, the perpetrator was after all a rather ordinary Christian who felt compelled to use violence as a form of resistance

• Calls for “bringing down the temperature” in the discourse are understandable against that backdrop. However, I think it is important not to reduce this to a question of rhetorical style or a preemptive measure to avoid triggering supposed lunatics. Rather, equating Trump to, for example, Hitler could otherwise legitimize violence in the eyes of mainstream Christians who are willing to follow through with their sense that they must side with people they view as oppressed

• Accordingly, it is of vital importance for those who oppose Trump to be very clear about how strongly they actually condemn Trump’s actions so that their language and actions are aligned. Strong rhetoric combined with cynical inactivity creates dangers for societal peace even without religious fanaticism.

• This also includes in particular making sure that every nonviolent means of opposition available within the democratic system is used if the rhetoric used implies that it is called for

II. Full Analysis

In the wake of the attempted assassination of the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past Saturday, the manifesto authored by Cole Allen — who was detained at the scene — has drawn considerable attention over the past few days.

Christian or Anti-Christian?

Speaking to Fox News, Trump characterized Allen as a “sick guy” whose manifesto, on his reading, betrays a settled hatred of Christians; in remarks reported by Reuters, he went further and labeled the manifesto itself “anti-Christian.”

Beyond the President’s own statements, this framing was extended in early reporting to Allen’s online presence: unnamed senior officials told CBS News and other outlets that authorities had found “anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric” on Allen’s social-media accounts.

The independent journalist Ken Klippenstein has pushed back against that framing. In a piece published on his Substack, Klippenstein objects: “that’s not what the manifesto says.” On the contrary, he writes, the document shows Allen “invoking Christian theology to defend the shooting, working through Gospel passages one by one” — the work, on his reading, of someone with sustained, first-hand familiarity with the Bible. Klippenstein also cites several posts from the Bluesky account attributed to Allen, in which Allen identifies as a “Protestant” and likens Donald Trump to the “Antichrist.”

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, however, Trump introduced what amounts to a diachronic framework — one that, on its surface, accommodates the Christian elements in Allen’s biography while still positioning the manifesto itself as a turn against Christianity. “He was a Christian believer, and then he became an anti-Christian,” Trump said, citing a process of radicalization to which family members had reportedly tried to alert the police. On this construction, room can be made within the narrative for Allen’s Christian past — for the biographical evidence of a churchgoing life that Klippenstein and others have foregrounded — without disturbing the basic framing of the manifesto itself as a document directed against Christianity.

Approach

Against the backdrop of these wildly differing assessments, I decided to check the evidence for myself. I do so as a scholar working at the intersection of Bible and politics. I have written several books on traces of resistance to the ideology of the Roman Empire in the New Testament, and my own research has been foundational to a new paradigm that aims to rediscover the political dimension of texts long read as merely spiritual, detached from the public life of their time. Readers who would like to dig deeper might begin with my most recent monograph on the subject, The Apostle and the Empire (Eerdmans, 2022); my foundational methodological study, Hidden Criticism?, is freely available online; and in 2025 a collected volume of essays by experts working from a range of approaches appeared in open access, developing this paradigm of “empire criticism” further. I wrote about that project on my blog here.

The primary focus of my research is to understand these early Christian texts within their historical environment. But I have always tried to draw out implications for contemporary political ethics as well, and this dimension of my work was recognized with the Mercator Award for the Humanities and Social Sciences for its societal relevance.

Accordingly, the use of biblical quotations in Cole Allen’s manifesto falls squarely within my area of core expertise. It is from this perspective that I will try to pin down how Allen’s statements relate to Christian readings of the Bible. Before doing so, I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that I condemn political violence in democratic societies. My focus here is solely on shedding more light on the contested question of what inferences Allen’s quotations from the Bible allow concerning his hermeneutical stance toward the Bible and his worldview. It must of course be acknowledged that all of these comments rest on a very thin evidentiary base. I do not have any insight into Allen’s mental state and am in no position to issue any diagnosis — neither of illness nor of sanity. What I can do is judge whether his references to the Bible fall within a recognizable area of biblical interpretation, or not.

It should also go without saying that all of these comments are preliminary, and that new evidence might substantially change the picture. To gain some additional background, I also analyzed the posts on the Bluesky account attributed to Cole Allen. I will explain the methodology underlying that analysis in the relevant section below.

Manifesto

The manifesto was first published by the New York Post (full text here). An excerpt is also reproduced in the official court filing — though without the “objections and rebuttals” at the end of the document, which is where Allen’s biblical references appear.

After apologies and a sketch of his “rules of engagement,” Allen turns rather abruptly to “[r]ebuttals to objections,” without, apparently, specifying from whom he expects these objections. Identifying his implicit opponents and the pragmatics of each section therefore requires some mirror-reading, which is naturally prone to overinterpretation. I will stick to what can be said with the most certainty.

Objection 1: “Turn the Other Cheek”

The first objection is: “As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.” Allen’s rebuttal reads:

Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

First, we can note that the hypothetical interlocutor presupposes that Allen is, in fact, a Christian. In his response, Allen does nothing to object to that. It must be admitted, however, that read in isolation this section is not conclusive: the “you” could be quite generic — used as a colloquial substitute for “one” (see Merriam-Webster, you). Allen could be responding on a similarly generic level, explaining why he thinks that Christians, despite adhering to that principle, should actually condone his action. However, I take it for granted, on the basis of evidence we will discuss below, that Allen indeed self-identifies as a Christian. His words here must thus probably be read as his own view of how he justifies his actions to his own conscience, even while continuing to treat these biblical words as authoritative for his conduct.

The phrase “to turn the other cheek” has become proverbial: Merriam-Webster defines it as “to respond to injury or unkindness with patience” — in other words, to forgo retaliation. The expression goes back to a statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, where it is integrated into the Sermon on the Mount — arguably the most significant section of the New Testament for the development of Christian ethics throughout church history.

It occurs in chapter 5, verse 39, as a so-called “antithesis” to a maxim from the Hebrew Bible that — like other legal corpora of the time — stresses proportionality rather than escalation: “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth” (Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20; Deuteronomy 19:21), quoted by Jesus in the preceding verse.

In verse 39, Jesus says:

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

(Unless stated otherwise, all biblical citations are from the NIV.) Verses 40 and 41 then extend the principle to two further concrete situations — being sued for one’s tunic and being conscripted to carry a Roman soldier’s pack. In each case, Jesus exhorts his hearers to take the counter-intuitive path — the path that compounds, rather than relieves, the burden of the person already wronged.

Throughout church history, these commands have prompted intense debate. In the early church, that debate centered in particular on the question of whether Christians could serve in the Roman army at all, given this apparent command to renounce violence. After Constantine, the issue became even more pressing, because for the first time Christians were no longer simply among the ruled but had the opportunity to exert political power — including acts of governmental violence — themselves.

Among pacifist streams of Christianity, this passage has been taken in a quite literal sense, condemning any acts of physical violence — and hence both military service and tyrannicide.

This reading has, however, been the minority position. For our purposes, it is particularly important to understand how the interpretive tracks were laid during the Reformation.

The dominant tradition reaches back to Augustine, who — responding to the charge that Jesus’s ethics are irreconcilable with the duties of the state — argued that the relevant precepts pertain to the inner orientation of the heart and not to public action. The Christian living in a Christian polity is, on this view, analogous to a father who must sometimes punish his son: even just wars and judicial executions, undertaken without hatred, can be reconciled with Jesus’s teaching once the decisive criterion becomes the disposition of the heart rather than the external deed.

Luther sharpened the distinction in his treatise Von weltlicher Obrigkeit. The commands apply to all Christians, he insisted, and not merely to a monastic elite — but the Christian must be considered in relatione, in his concrete social roles as ruler, judge, spouse, parent, or neighbor. In those capacities the Christian acts not for himself but for the neighbor; and out of love for the neighbor, the Christian must be willing to set aside the personal practice of non-resistance. Calvin, drawing more strongly on the Old Testament, went still further. Broadly codified in the mainstream Reformation churches, the result was an interpretive framework that effectively legitimizes Christian participation in state violence — wars adjudged just, judicial executions, the use of force by the magistrate — as an act of love undertaken for the neighbor.

This line of thought became particularly important in the 20th century in resistance to Hitler. The British lay theologian C. S. Lewis, in his 1940 wartime essay Why I Am Not a Pacifist, argued that Matthew 5:39 concerns the renunciation of personal vengeance, not the duty to protect a third party from a murderer. That such violence can — and sometimes must — include tyrannicide by citizens themselves is part of a certain trajectory within this tradition, one that took on particular urgency, for example, during the Third Reich. Eugen Gerstenmaier, an evangelical theologian and Kreisau Circle member who took part in the July 20 conspiracy against Hitler, was among the earliest and most unwavering advocates of assassination within his group, on the conviction that Hitler’s killing had become a necessary precondition for preventing further crimes against the regime’s victims — the very logic that the Lutheran tradition just sketched had long articulated under the heading of love of neighbor.

Read against this backdrop, Allen’s general line of interpretation seems to be deeply embedded in classical Protestant readings of this passage: love for other people may at times require Christians to commit violence — including against one’s own political leaders.

The sharpest contrast with Allen’s reasoning, however, probably emerges when one compares him not to those who endorsed killing Hitler in straightforwardly Christian terms but to Bonhoeffer. On the surface the two positions can look similar: Bonhoeffer knew of and supported the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. For Bonhoeffer, however, the act of taking part in such a conspiracy remains an instance of guilt that the responsible Christian must bear before God — not an act that has been theologically purified or rendered righteous. His Ethics speaks of a readiness to assume guilt (Bereitschaft zur Schuldübernahme): the one who acts in such a situation may be justified before others by necessity and before himself by conscience, but before God he hopes only on grace. Bonhoeffer does not, in other words, argue that the command to turn the other cheek no longer applies when Hitler is in front of you; he argues that the Sermon on the Mount remains true and that, in a murderous historical situation, responsible love may nevertheless lead one into guilt that one does not justify but bears. Allen, by contrast, attempts precisely the move Bonhoeffer refused — a clean theological justification under which the act incurs no guilt to begin with.

What makes Allen stand out, then, is not the general acceptance that killing a political leader may — under certain conditions — be reconciled with Christian ethics. It is the disinhibition that runs through the text. His attempt is presented not as a last resort taken up in the readiness to bear guilt, but as an almost inevitable step. Pointing in the same direction is the nonchalance with which the potential deaths of bystanders are taken into account.

The dark humor that pervades the manifesto has been read as reflecting a cynicism also found in the messages of Tyler Robinson. The explanations on offer range from gaming culture to postmodernism more broadly to specific psychopathic diagnoses. I will not attempt any of that here; my focus remains on what is notable about Allen’s use of the Bible.

It is conceivable — but at this point nothing more than speculation — that Allen’s general theology shaped his specific position on tyrannicide, and in particular his position on whether the accidental killing of bystanders is acceptable. His Calvinist background (on which more below) might offer at least an intuitive explanation for why he appears to feel little empathy for these potential victims: in his view, they may already be damned — perhaps even, on a strict predestinarian reading, predestined to damnation. I should stress, however, that I am aware of no empirical evidence that Calvinist convictions about predestination have trickle-down effects of this kind on how violence against people taken to be predestined for hell is morally evaluated.

This peculiarity may or may not be psychologically relevant. In any case, the general figure of argumentation that Allen presents is neither new nor in itself “anti-Christian” — it is deeply embedded in theological reasoning about the use of violence under oppressive regimes. To be absolutely clear: this judgment is entirely separate from the question of whether the action itself was ethically legitimate from within a Christian perspective that shares this (arguably majority-Christian) ethical framework. One can perfectly well hold that the assassination attempts on Hitler were justified within this framework while the attack on Trump was not. That is not a question the biblical text alone, or ethical reflection on it alone, can resolve; it requires attending to the concrete circumstances of, say, Hitler on the one hand and Trump on the other. Making such comparisons is not my business here.

For reasons of transparency, however, I should note that comparisons between Trump and Hitler have in fact been made with some frequency in public discourse — including by figures across the political spectrum. To take only three examples: J. D. Vance, Trump’s current Vice President, in private correspondence in 2016 described Trump as possibly “America’s Hitler”; Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s stepsister and a Holocaust survivor, told ABC News in 2016 that Trump was “acting like another Hitler” by inciting racism; and then-President Joe Biden, in 2023, said that Trump’s “vermin” rhetoric “echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the 30s.”

Accordingly, it is not surprising that Trump supporters have blamed anti-Trump rhetoric for the assassination attempt. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed in particular to rhetoric calling Trump a “fascist,” a “threat to democracy,” or comparing him to Hitler — what she called the “systemic demonization” of the President by Democrats and the media — as having “fueled” the violence. Trump himself, in his 60 Minutes interview, described Democratic “hate speech” as “very dangerous” and linked the alleged attacker’s worldview to “No Kings” rhetoric. RNC chair Joe Gruters called the attack “the inevitable result of a radicalized left that has normalized political violence.”

I mention all of this because I think it is crucial to recognize what is and is not at stake. This is not, in the first instance, a question of style — of “poisoning the discourse,” as it were. Nor is it primarily a question of providing triggers to potentially mentally ill people. The deeper point is that the ethical framework sketched above does, in fact, motivate certain streams of Christians to use violence against political figures under specific circumstances — even when, within their own tradition, they regard such acts as sinful. Implying, by means of comparisons of the kind cited above, that those circumstances are met — that Trump constitutes a threat to humanity comparable to Hitler — does provide perfectly reasonable justification for what is, within that framework, regarded as ethically legitimate tyrannicide.

A genuine ethical analysis of Allen’s action — which I do not want to offer in detail here — would of course have to take into account the crucial differences between Hitler’s regime and Trump’s government. The United States is still a functioning democracy with an opposition that retains substantial power to constrain the kinds of military actions Allen apparently regarded as atrocities. I do believe that opponents of Trump have an obligation to take every possible form of violence-free opposition the democratic system makes available — if, that is, they truly believe that Trump’s actions, on Gaza, Ukraine, or Iran, are as wrong as their rhetoric suggests. To call Trump out without meeting him with forceful opposition — either because one secretly agrees with the substance of his moves, or because one is content to benefit politically from his taking unpopular actions one would not take oneself — is not merely cynical. It also helps to establish an environment in which some may come to the conclusion that they now find themselves in a situation similar to those who resisted Hitler, and that all non-violent means of opposition have been exhausted.

In other words, taking Allen’s manifesto seriously as the expression of a Christian worldview is itself what brings into view the alignment that matters here: between political actions, the lack of opposition to them, and the rhetorical framing of their danger. This is not about style. It is about giving a major line of Christian ethical thinking a green light for assassination attempts. What is striking about the general theological justification in Allen’s manifesto is therefore not the ethical position itself but his evaluation of the current political environment — an evaluation he may or may not have formed under the influence of statements such as those quoted above.

Objection 5: “Yield unto Caesar”

Against this backdrop, I now want to turn to the second objection that explicitly quotes from the Bible — namely, objection 5: “Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

I think the order of Allen’s objections may indeed be telling — as are the omissions. Notably, Allen does not begin his justification by setting out his reading of another very prominent New Testament passage, Romans 13, where — at least on the surface of the text — the apostle Paul seems to demand that Christians subject themselves to the state authorities, pay taxes, and accept capital punishment as divinely ordered. This passage is often adduced by Republican politicians; Jeff Sessions, for example, cited it in defense of the immigration policy of the first Trump administration. That Allen does not go down this route, and quotes from the Sermon on the Mount instead, suggests that the primary front he has in view with the first objection is indeed inner-Christian — though not the conservative front with its high view of government, but rather the more pacifist streams who would object to violence as such.

Against that backdrop, this fifth objection becomes interesting precisely because here we do encounter a classical trope adduced by those who want to emphasize the obligations of Christians toward the state, in much the same way as Romans 13 seems to do.

The maxim “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” originates in a famous episode reported in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark 12:13–17; Matthew 22:15–22; Luke 20:20–26). Pharisees and Herodians approach Jesus with what is, by design, a trap: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor? An affirmative answer will alienate the audience that resents Roman occupation and the idolatrous coinage that funds it; a negative answer will furnish grounds to denounce him to the Roman authorities as an agitator. Jesus asks to be shown a denarius, looks at it, and asks whose image (Greek eikon) and inscription it bears. “Caesar’s,” they reply. His answer: “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

What is decisive here is the second half of the saying — and the implicit logic that holds the two halves together. The denarius bears Caesar’s image; on the structure Jesus’s question makes available, that is what marks it as belonging to Caesar. But Jesus is a Jew, steeped in the Hebrew scriptures, and his hearers know the opening chapter of Genesis as well as he does: human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27; in the Septuagint, the same word — eikon). The unspoken second half of the analogy thus does considerable work. If Caesar’s image on the coin is what places the coin under Caesar’s claim, then God’s image on the human person is what places the human person under God’s claim. Caesar’s domain, in other words, is bounded; he is not lord of everything and everyone. There is a sphere — and on the strongest reading, the sphere of human life as such — over which his authority does not run.

It is telling that Allen does not go down this route. The reading just sketched is not a scholarly novelty; it has a long history in Christian exegesis and has been further developed in modern scholarship that attends to the political dimension of Jesus’s teaching. It would also have been close at hand for an argument like Allen’s, since it offers exactly the kind of biblical resource one would want for limiting state authority and licensing Christian non-cooperation with rulers who exceed it. That Allen does not press the imago Dei move that the passage’s own logic invites — even though it would have served his purpose well — is, on its face, a striking exegetical choice.

It is remarkable, in this connection, that Allen does not even use this passage to construct the obvious positive theological justification for his act. He could readily have argued that Trump — by threatening, for instance, to destroy an entire civilization — is precisely the kind of ruler who treats human beings not as bearers of God’s image but as expendable, and that his own intervention is therefore a defense of that image. He does not.

This shows that, while Allen has clearly thought about the extent to which pacifism follows from Christian ethics — that being the front he opens up in the first objection — he likely has not engaged in any depth with the scholarship on the empire-critical dimensions of early Christian texts. Or, more cautiously, that may simply not be the emphasis he wants to make here. For what is most striking about his rebuttal to this objection is not that it fails to take one or another particular interpretive route, but that it is not theological at all:

The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

Allen, in other words, treats “Caesar” here as a monarchical figure — and dismisses the saying’s applicability on the grounds that the United States is a constitutional republic, not a monarchy. The argument is decisively constitutional, not theological.

This is also visible in what is not present in his rebuttal. When the Caesar passage is invoked in Christian resistance traditions, it is typically paired with Acts 5:29 — Peter’s declaration before the Sanhedrin that “we must obey God rather than men” — which asserts the priority of obedience to God over obedience to human authorities. Allen does not go down this route either. He offers a constitutional argument instead.

Bluesky Posts

Method note: where the Bluesky data comes from

The Bluesky account attributed to Cole Allen, @coldforce.bsky.social, was suspended by Bluesky some time before this incident. The visible routes to the account are now closed: the live bsky.app URLs still return HTTP 200 but have been stripped down to a “Post not found” page; Bluesky’s appview API responds with AccountTakedown to a profile lookup and NotFound on individual post requests; the user’s own AT-Protocol Personal Data Server returns RepoTakendown. The public reverse-index Constellation only retains a ten-day window, so its mapping of who-replied-to-coldforce has lapsed (private firehose archives may still exist; I did not have access to one).

What survived is Internet Archive captures of the individual bsky.app/profile/coldforce.bsky.social/post/<rkey> pages, made before the takedown propagated. Bluesky’s web server inserts the body of each post into the HTML response as Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags — for SEO and for the link previews other platforms generate — together with the author handle, the timestamp, like and repost counts, and (where the post had attached media) the image URL. The Wayback Machine preserved that HTML for 734 of 752 archived posts; the post text I cite below is harvested from those meta tags.

When you open one of the archived bsky.app URLs in a browser, the visible page will, in most cases, simply read “Post not found.” This is not because the data is gone but because Bluesky is a single-page application: it loads a near-empty HTML shell and then issues background requests for the post via its own API. Wayback rewrites those requests at playback to point at archived API responses, but for many snapshots the relevant API responses were not captured or already carried the takedown error, so the rendered page comes up empty. The original post text — the same text I quote in the analysis — is, however, still in the page’s HTML source: right-click → “View Page Source” on the Wayback URL (not the live bsky.app URL) and search for og:description to read it.

For a portion of the corpus — 126 of the 498 religiously, politically, or resistance-substantive posts (≈26%) — the Internet Archive also captured the underlying API responses as subresources at crawl time, before the takedown propagated. Replaying those snapshots in a real browser still works: the JavaScript pulls from Wayback’s archived API responses and the page renders the original thread in full, including any post Allen was replying to and any embedded media. Where this thread context exists I rely on it; where only the meta-tag text is recoverable I say so explicitly.

To navigate the corpus systematically, I built a multi-stage analytic pipeline (using the Anthropic API, Claude Opus 4.7 with adaptive thinking) that codes every post on a multi-dimensional schema of religious, biblical, political, and resistance content; performs a deeper hermeneutical extraction on every flagged post; and — where the rendered Wayback thread or web-searchable public events permit — anchors each substantive claim to verifiable evidence. Where no such anchor is available, the analysis hedges accordingly. Confidence markers in the text below ([Stage 4 confidence 0.82], [Stage 6 thread confirmed], etc.) reflect this calibration; in every case the underlying primary source is the post text as preserved by the Internet Archive.

Christian identity

Before turning to the corpus itself, it is worth establishing what the public biographical record — independent of any Bluesky activity — already shows about Allen’s religious affiliation. Even setting the social-media account entirely aside, the contours of his religious profile are reasonably well attested.

The fullest and most direct testimony comes from Movses Janbazian, pastor of Pasadena United Reformed Church, who told NPR that Allen attended his congregation weekly during his Caltech years and was, in the pastor’s phrase, “faithful in his attendance” — though apparently not involved in the life of the church beyond Sunday worship. Pasadena URC is a member of the United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA) and confesses the Three Forms of Unity, the classical confessional standard of continental Reformed Protestantism. This places Allen’s regular church attendance, during the period for which there is concrete eyewitness testimony, squarely within confessional Reformed Christianity — not within the broader and looser category of American non-denominational evangelicalism.

A second strand reinforces the same picture from the family side. The Associated Press reports that Allen’s father, Thomas Allen, was listed as an elder of Grace United Reformed Church in Torrance — also a URCNA congregation, also confessing the Three Forms of Unity. That, by itself, does not establish that Cole Allen was a member or a regular attender at Grace URC; but it does establish a specifically URCNA-coded family setting.

Alongside these congregational data points sits a third, more loosely affiliated one: Allen’s reported involvement with the Caltech Christian Fellowship, an undergraduate campus ministry that Religion News Service describes as non-denominational. Campus fellowships of this kind are typically broadly evangelical in feel and do not, by themselves, constitute a form of confessional commitment; they tell us something about Allen’s religious sociality rather than about his theological location as such.

Two important caveats. First, no public source has, to my knowledge, established Allen’s formal membership in any specific congregation: the available evidence is for attendance and family affiliation, not for a documented act of joining. Second, Christianity Today notes that it is unclear whether Allen was still attending Grace URC at the time of the manifesto, in which he thanks his “personal and church family” without naming the congregation.

The most cautious summary is therefore as follows. Allen is publicly identifiable as a Protestant who, during the period for which direct testimony is available, attended a confessional Reformed (URCNA) congregation weekly, and whose immediate family is rooted in the same denomination. Both of the concrete congregations the public record links him or his household to are URCNA; the only datum pointing to a different milieu is the non-denominational campus fellowship at Caltech. Even before we approach the Bluesky corpus, then, the biographical evidence already sets a direction of expectation: if Allen’s online theological self-presentation tracks the church culture in which he was actually formed, we should expect specifically Reformed-confessional — rather than generically evangelical — patterns to surface there.

The Bluesky posts cohere very well with this picture. The corpus does not contain a single post in which Allen says, in so many words, “I am a Christian”; what it contains is something more telling — a sustained pattern of speaking from within Christianity rather than about it. He places himself inside the “we” of fellow believers, polices the boundary of who counts as a real Christian, and applies internal-Christian disciplinary categories to political actors he opposes — moves available only to someone speaking as a participant.

The most direct piece of confessional self-identification is also the most explicit. On Easter Sunday 2026 Allen quote-posted a piece of religious imagery he evidently found objectionable and wrote:

as a Protestant, what in the 2nd / 3rd commandment violation is this iconography

 (Wayback snapshot, 5 April 2026). The post is short but unusually compact in what it discloses about its writer. It opens with confessional self-identification — “as a Protestant” — and uses that self-identification as the warrant for treating the embedded image as idolatrous, indexed by commandment number.

That numbering is itself a confessional fingerprint. The Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions merge the prohibitions of other gods and graven images into a single first commandment, and so render the prohibition of taking the divine name in vain as the second. The Reformed (Calvinist) tradition keeps the prohibition of graven images as a separate second commandment and the prohibition on misusing the divine name as the third. To denounce a contemporary image as a “2nd / 3rd commandment violation” is therefore not a generically Protestant move but a specifically Reformed one — it presupposes the very enumeration that distinguishes Reformed practice from Lutheran and Catholic practice on precisely the question of religious imagery. That an Easter polemic against politically charged iconography reaches for this grammar — rather than, say, Pauline language about idolatry, or the more diffuse evangelical vocabulary of “honoring God” — is the single strongest internal indication that Allen’s confessional formation is in fact Reformed.

A second thread reinforces the picture from a different angle: church polity. In April 2026, after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a doctrinal statement on just war that was widely read as an unnamed rebuke of Vice President J.D. Vance — who had publicly told Pope Leo XIV to “be careful” in commenting on theology — Allen mapped the bishops’ move onto a graduated procedure of ecclesial correction:

well the process (can) look like a) warned privately by officers of the church b) general warning given to church but offender not specified c) warned publically d) excommunicated so on that timeline he’s 3/4ths of the way there

 (Wayback snapshot, 15 April 2026). One minute later he corrected himself, noting that because the bishops’ statement does not name Vance specifically he should be located only halfway along the procedure rather than three-quarters of the way (Wayback snapshot, 15 April 2026). The four-step ladder is a structured recasting of Matthew 18:15–17 — go to him privately, then with witnesses, then tell it to the church, then treat him as an outsider — but the specific intermediate step Allen names (“general warning given to church but offender not specified”) and the vocabulary of “officers of the church” track the disciplinary procedures laid out in Reformed and Presbyterian church orders, not the canonical-legal idiom in which the bishops themselves had been operating. The same-day post that opens the thread — “telling off the pope is a Protestant tradition / but Vance isn’t Protestant / so we’re very confused by his impertinence” (Wayback snapshot, 15 April 2026) — places Allen explicitly inside the “we” of that Protestant tradition.

What is more, the same cluster shows Allen exhibiting an unusual degree of self-awareness about the historically polemical inheritance of his own tradition. When Trump, in late April 2025, mused publicly about wanting to be Pope, Allen wrote:

of course the fucking beast would like to be the Pope let’s just reallly make the old protestant accusation official and put the certified antichrist as the head of the Catholic church

 (Wayback snapshot, 29 April 2025). What matters here is the framing “the old protestant accusation.” The identification of the papacy with the antichrist has a long pedigree in Protestant polemic — codified, for example, in the original Westminster Confession of Faith (25.6) — and remains live in some confessional Reformed circles. Allen knows the trope and reaches for it; but he names it explicitly as old, as an inherited piece of rhetoric redeployed with irony rather than asserted as a current confessional commitment. The accusation is “made official” only in the counterfactual — if Trump were Pope, then the old slur would finally fit. The move presupposes that Allen does not himself currently regard the Pope as antichrist, while still letting the apocalyptic vocabulary do its polemical work against Trump.

A second post in the same cluster makes a complementary point from the opposite direction. Reacting in the early hours of 15 April 2026 to Vance’s lecturing of Pope Leo XIV, Allen posted: “why tf did this moron convert to Catholicism if he wanted to protest this much” (Wayback snapshot, 15 April 2026). The framing is sharp but instructive. The complaint is not the Reformed-polemical complaint that Vance ought not to have converted at all, but the internal-coherence complaint that someone who wants to lecture the Pope from the Catholic side is in the wrong tradition for that move. The implied criterion is what Catholicism asks of its own converts, not what Protestant polemic says about Catholicism — and Allen, evaluating a Catholic figure by Catholic standards, comes off as more interested in calling out hypocrisy than in scoring confessional points.

An earlier post adds a small but technical confirmation. Lamenting that he could not subject the Speaker of the House to the same sanction, Allen wrote that one cannot “excommunicate someone outside one’s own denomination/federation/branch/sect” (Wayback snapshot, 9 April 2025). The four-term enumeration is technically literate; federation in particular is a piece of vocabulary at home in continental Reformed and Presbyterian polity, where a “federation” of churches with shared confessions and shared discipline is the standard self-designation — used, for instance, by the URCNA itself. The lament is half a joke; the lexicon is not.

A final passage shows Allen explicitly policing the boundary of who counts as authentically Christian. Confronted with conservative Christians complaining of online “persecution,” he writes:

if they were actual Christians they would a) be proud to be persecuted and b) recognize that that’s not persecution LOL

 (Wayback snapshot, 15 April 2025). The move is a no-true-Scotsman test — but, crucially, it is run from the inside. The implicit yardstick is the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:10–12), and the speaker is someone who treats that yardstick as binding on himself and on those whose Christian credentials he is willing to question. Internal authenticity-policing of this kind is something only a participant can do.

Taken together — the explicit Protestant self-identification, the Reformed enumeration of the Decalogue, the use of Reformed/Presbyterian church-discipline procedure as a frame for evaluating public conduct, and the in-group policing of “actual” Christians — these threads make the cumulative case that Allen self-identifies not merely as a generic Christian but as a confessional Reformed Protestant. The Bluesky corpus sharpens what the biographical record had already pointed to, and does so in confessional detail that goes well beyond the bare label.

Scripture

Politically, Allen is hawkishly pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia, anti-MAGA, and increasingly impatient with what he regards as Democratic establishment passivity. It is important to stress that not all of his political commentary is explicitly rooted in theological reasoning, and a fuller account of his thinking would have to extend the analysis well beyond the angle I am taking here — tracing the secular-realist, civic-republican, and historical-strategic strands that run through the corpus alongside the theological ones.

What is notable on the side I am examining, however, is the range of biblical writings Allen draws on. Across the corpus he engages, with varying degrees of explicitness, the Decalogue (Exodus 20 / Deuteronomy 5); Matthew 5:10–12 (the Beatitudes’ blessings on the persecuted); Matthew 18:15–17 (the church-discipline procedure already discussed above); Matthew 18:23–35 (the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant), which he reproduces in full across a six-post thread with a numismatic gloss appended at the end; Luke 10:25–37 (the Good Samaritan); Paul on food sacrificed to idols (1 Corinthians 8–10); James 2:19 on the relation of profession to action; 1 John 2:18 on the figure of the antichrist; and — most extensively — Revelation 13 and 14 (with a single striking quotation from Rev 15:2), which together form the apocalyptic center of gravity of his biblical engagement.

Almost all of these quotations come from the New International Version (NIV) — variously the 1984 edition (his Matthew 18 thread follows its “ten thousand talents,” not the 2011 revision’s “ten thousand bags of gold”) and the 2011 revision (one of his Revelation 13 citations carries its gender-neutralized “It also forced all people”). The NIV is a solid contemporary translation, well within the range one would expect from a Reformed-evangelical reader of Allen’s generation. The single notable exception is his James 2:19 citation — “the devils also believe, and tremble” — which he flags explicitly as KJV; the pairing of NIV for sustained quotation and KJV for the polemical one-liner is in fact characteristic of evangelical and Reformed lay reading practice today.

One small detail of his translation choice may nonetheless be worth flagging. Within Allen’s specifically confessional milieu, the English Standard Version (ESV) — produced with significant confessional Reformed input and widely adopted as the pulpit Bible in URCNA and adjacent Reformed congregations — would arguably be the more confessionally distinctive choice. That Allen reaches instead for the NIV, which is a less self-consciously “literal” rendering than the ESV’s “essentially literal” approach, is a small but suggestive data point: it may reflect a slight openness to more communicative approaches to translation, against the rigorist preference for “literal” rendering that has become a marker of confessional Reformed Bible practice in recent decades.

It would be worthwhile to go through all of Allen’s biblical quotations in turn and to analyze his exegetical methods systematically. As the methodological note above indicates, the limited data situation means that it is not always possible to determine with certainty what he is reacting to in a given post. There is, however, sufficient evidence to establish that Allen approaches biblical texts as authoritative — particularly on ethical matters — and that he displays rather sophisticated exegetical strategies, especially in connecting the underlying deep structures of texts from very different ancient contexts to contemporary situations.

A clear example, and one for which the triggering event is well anchored in the public record, is Allen’s deployment of Matthew 18:15–17 against Vice President J.D. Vance on 15 April 2026. The procedural ladder Allen builds out of that passage has already been cited above in connection with his confessional placement, and need not be reproduced here. What I want to draw attention to in this section is the exegetical operation as such.

Matthew 18:15–17, in its dominical context, is a piece of small-scale interpersonal conflict resolution: a believer wronged by another believer is to address the wrongdoer first privately, then with witnesses, then before the church, and finally — if there is no repentance — to “treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” The text foresees a straightforward ascending sequence (private → semi-public with witnesses → public ecclesial → exclusion), addressed in the first instance to interpersonal injury between believers.

What Allen does with this text is to read it as a procedural template for ecclesial discipline rather than as instruction in personal ethics. He identifies four distinguishable steps in the publicity-curve of the procedure (private warning, general public warning with the offender unnamed, public warning with the offender named, exclusion), and applies them to a senior public Catholic figure who is being criticized, in effect publicly but without personal naming, by his own church’s doctrinal authority. The third of his four steps is the diagnostic one. It is not present in Matthew 18 in those words; the dominical text moves directly from “two or three witnesses” to “tell it to the church,” without distinguishing between an unnamed and a named church-level warning. Allen interpolates that distinction — and his live self-correction, in which he downgrades Vance from “3/4ths of the way there” to “halfway” precisely because the bishops’ statement has not named Vance, shows that the interpolated step is doing real procedural work. He is not merely citing the chapter; he is operating with a precise reading of where the bishops’ move falls on the scriptural curve, and adjusting accordingly when he notices he was a step too far along.

The interpolated step is, of course, not Allen’s invention. It tracks the kind of graduated procedure standard in Reformed and Presbyterian church orders, where unnamed and named public warnings are distinguished as procedurally distinct stages. (This is the same body of ecclesiastical-procedural vocabulary that, as discussed in connection with Allen’s confessional placement, also gives him his “officers of the church” framing.) The relevant point here is the hermeneutical move that precedes the application: a piece of dominical interpersonal-ethics teaching is read forward into a juridical procedure, the gap in that procedure is filled in from the reader’s own confessional tradition, and the resulting hybrid template is then applied to a contemporary ecclesial event with sufficient precision that the position of that event on the procedural curve becomes the object of analytic attention. That is more than proof-texting; it is a sustained piece of structural reading, in which the deep procedural shape of an ancient interpersonal-ethics text is rendered legible — through the mediation of a confessional tradition — for a contemporary occasion.

A second potentially relevant example, less well anchored as to its political target but unambiguous as to the exegetical informedness it betrays, is Allen’s six-post thread of Matthew 18:23–35 — the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant — on Sunday 25 January 2026. After reproducing the parable in full, Allen appends a closing post:

For context: Talent: about 20 years’ wages Denarius: a day’s wage

 (Wayback snapshot, 25 January 2026). This is a grammatical-historical gloss in textbook form, evidently taken from the editorial footnote of a study Bible. What is significant is not the originality of the gloss but the instinct of supplying it: Allen recognizes that the parable’s argumentative engine is the asymmetry between the unpayable debt forgiven by the king (10,000 talents) and the trivial debt the forgiven servant then refuses to forgive (100 denarii), and supplies the gloss precisely so that the modern reader does not miss the disproportion. That habit of reading — making a text’s argumentative structure visible to the reader unprompted — is the move of someone aiming at communication, not just at self-expression. What specific contemporary occasion Allen has in view in this thread cannot be established with the same confidence: the most plausible candidate, given the date, is the late-January 2026 wave of presidential pardons then under intense criticism for wiping out between one and two billion dollars in restitution and federal recovery — a context onto which the parable’s debt-and-mercy logic would map with unusual structural fit — but the embedded quote-post that would confirm the link has not been preserved.

Revelation 13–14

For the purposes of this analysis I want to focus on Allen’s engagement with the book of Revelation, and specifically with chapters 13 and 14, because Ken Klippenstein’s Substack piece — already cited above — has likewise singled this material out. Klippenstein draws attention to what he describes as “repeated comparisons of Trump to the Antichrist” in Allen’s Bluesky activity. As one specific example, he points to Allen’s reply on 13 April 2026 to a Trump-as-Jesus image circulated by the President himself, in which Allen quoted a verse from Revelation that, as Klippenstein puts it, “now reads like a foreshadowing”:

There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.

 (Wayback snapshot, 13 April 2026).

Allen’s engagement with Revelation 13–14 deserves closer examination than Klippenstein’s brief flag, both to give a sense of what is and is not surprising about his deployment of these texts, and to head off the inference — easy to make but historically poorly supported — that a reader who identifies Trump with the antichrist must therefore hold a theology that licenses violent action.

That risk is not abstract. Lack of familiarity with the reception of biblical texts in Christian traditions can lead to wrong or incomplete conclusions in cases of this kind. A cautionary instance is the shooting at a Hamburg Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses on 9 March 2023, carried out by Philipp F., who had previously self-published a 306-page volume, The Truth About God, Jesus Christ and Satan: A New Reflected View of Epochal Dimensions (Google Books; bookseller metadata). Contemporary reporting noted apocalyptic motifs in the text, including the “thousand-year reign” of Revelation 20 (WELT). According to press reports quoting the expert report, Peter R. Neumann described Philipp F. as a “religious fanatic” and identified hostility towards certain churches and religious communities — which he believed withheld “the truth” from believers — as the most plausible motive (evangelisch.de / epd; Focus summary of Spiegel interview). In my judgement, that assessment is rather less well supported by the actual textual evidence — particularly by the way biblical source texts are used in the document — than the public framing would suggest; the case illustrates how an insufficiently contextualized reading of biblical and apocalyptic motifs can turn an idiosyncratic, psychologically charged text into apparent evidence of a coherent “religious-fanatical” motive. I am already seeing rather absurd headlines along these lines in coverage of the present case — for instance, an Odaily piece headlined “Trump’s AI Jesus portrait may be the main cause of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner attack; the suspect quoted scripture calling it an ‘Antichrist.’” Hence the contextualization that follows.

Revelation is an early Christian apocalypse: a visionary prophetic text addressed to churches in Roman Asia Minor. The dominant historical-critical reading, perhaps most influentially developed in the work of Steven Friesen, places its symbolic world squarely against Roman imperial power and especially against the imperial cult. The two beasts of Revelation 13 — the first from the sea, given authority by the dragon to make war on the saints; the second from the earth, the “false prophet,” who induces worship of the first beast and enforces the famous “mark” without which buying and selling become impossible — function in this reading as the demystification of imperial-cult mythology turned back against Rome. “Babylon” in the wider book is similarly a code-name for Rome. Revelation 14 then announces, through three angels, the fall of Babylon and the wrath of God against those who worship the beast and accept its mark; the line Allen quotes is from the third angel’s announcement. What deserves emphasis for present purposes is the function of this material for its Christian addressees: on the mainstream scholarly reading it is, in the first instance, a call to patient endurance and faithful witness, not to armed resistance. The faithful in Revelation conquer “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony”; the violent vindication is reserved, in the book’s own symbolic logic, to God. Revelation 13:10 and 14:12 thematize this explicitly, with their twin calls for “patient endurance” on the part of God’s people.

It is also against this scholarly backdrop that one should read the long Christian engagement with these chapters. Christians across the centuries have rarely read Revelation as a merely first-century document about a then-current Roman situation. Typological readings — in which contemporary authorities are mapped onto the beast or onto Babylon — and outright prophetic readings — in which the text bears predictively on the reader’s own day — have been ordinary features of Christian biblical practice in nearly every period, and continue to be. Peter Thiel’s four-part lecture series on the Antichrist at the Commonwealth Club in autumn 2025, in which the silicon-valley investor used the Antichrist tradition to interpret contemporary debates over AI regulation, surveillance, and global governance, is a reminder that typological-prophetic readings of this material are alive and prominent in present-day public discourse — and are not, in themselves, indicators of any propensity to violent action. Thiel’s own argumentative payoff, in fact, is political and cultural rather than militant.

The same pattern holds for the long historical record. The dominant outcomes of intense Christian apocalyptic engagement have been withdrawal, separatist community-building, urgent preaching, anti-imperial critique, and martyrdom — not armed insurrection. There are real exceptions — Thomas Müntzer’s preaching to the peasant armies at Frankenhausen in 1525, the Anabaptist takeover of Münster in 1534–35, the Fifth Monarchist rising under Thomas Venner in 1661 — but they have been studied precisely because of how anomalous they are. Citing Revelation against contemporary political figures is not, on its own, what produces them. What produces them, where they have occurred, is an additional move: from apocalyptic identification (this contemporary figure is the beast) to apocalyptic participation (the saints’ role is no longer to wait). Whether Allen’s posts make that further move, come close to it, or hold back from it, is the question to which I now turn.

Against this backdrop I want to come back to the passage Klippenstein adduces. The verse he highlights is part of a fuller quotation: Allen is not posting a single line as a stand-alone proof text but reproducing the third angel’s announcement of Revelation 14:9–11 in its entirety, across two posts, in direct reply to a self-described atheist user (@golikehellmachine.com) who had argued — in two posts the same day — that anyone working in the Trump administration who claims to be “any flavor of genuine christian believer” must, “at some level, deep down,” recognize themselves as “fucking damned,” and that for the Catholics in the cabinet who “actually do hold true to [their] faith,” the same conclusion follows: “working in this administration is almost certainly assuring your damnation.” Allen’s reply opens with a flat affirmation — “I mean, yeah” — and then runs the quotation in full:

I mean, yeah. Rev 14: 9-11: “A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: ‘If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.’ 1/2

 (Wayback snapshot, 13 April 2026), and then:

They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.” 2/2

 (Wayback snapshot, 13 April 2026).

Several things deserve notice. First, Allen does not, in this post, directly call Trump “the antichrist” — and indeed the English term “antichrist” itself goes back not to Revelation but to the Johannine epistles (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7), where it designates a figure or figures within the Christian community who deny that Jesus is the Christ; the term does not appear as such in Revelation at all. The figure Allen invokes via Revelation 14:9–11 is the “beast” of Revelation 13, and on the dominant historical-critical reading the first beast is most plausibly aligned with the Emperor Nero — the 666 of Revelation 13:18 yields Neron Caesar by gematria, and the “wound that had been healed” of Revelation 13:3 picks up the well-attested Nero redivivus legend. The historical situation envisaged by the text — even though its precise contours are difficult to reconstruct — is plainly one in which Christians (alongside other religious minorities) faced local social and economic pressure to express allegiance to Roman imperial ideology, in particular through participation in imperial-cult observance. What the writer of Revelation does in 14:9–11 is to warn Christians not to surrender that allegiance to Christ under the weight of such pressure.

Second, what is being threatened by the colorful third-angel imagery — torment with burning sulfur, the smoke of torment rising forever, no rest day or night — is itself a debated question, with answers in the history of Christian theology ranging from literal eternal conscious torment, through annihilationist readings, to interpretations that take the imagery as poetic intensification of a this-worldly judgment on Rome. For present purposes the relevant question is not which of these readings is correct but which Allen is operating with. Given his confessional background, the most plausible reading is that he picks up the colloquial register of being “fucking damned” in which the parent post had been operating, and translates it into the substantive theological category of damnation in the strict eschatological sense — the state of those condemned at the final judgment.

If this reading is right, Klippenstein’s gloss of the verse as “now read[ing] like a foreshadowing” misses what Allen is actually doing with the text. Allen is not predicting violence to come, in either direction. He is making a theological claim about the religious status of Christians who venerate Trump as a Christ-figure. The polemic is internally Christian and eschatological, not militant. The argument runs roughly as follows: given their own claimed familiarity with Revelation, and given the (for Allen unmistakable) parallels between the beast of Revelation 13 and the figure of Trump as iconographically presented within MAGA-Christianity, these self-identifying Christians ought, by their own scripture, to recognize that what they are doing is damnable — and so, to grant the parent post’s blunt formulation, that they are “fucking damned.” That is a sharp polemical move, but it is a polemic conducted entirely within the eschatological vocabulary of the tradition. It does not authorize political violence; it forecloses an avenue of theological self-defense available to MAGA-Christians who claim Revelation as their own scripture.

At other places too, Allen appears to be in the company of mainstream popular readings of Revelation, often with an edge of care not to overinterpret the text.

A first instance falls on the very day of Trump and Musk’s joint Oval Office appearance on 11 February 2025, at which Musk, wearing a black “Make America Great Again” hat, defended his DOGE operation while Trump signed the executive order empowering it. Within hours, Allen wrote that Musk “kinda does check every box for the second beast of Revelation / the one that makes people wear his symbol to do anything and supports the first first beast in its lies and murder” (Wayback snapshot, 11 February 2025). The two-beasts schema is being mapped with structural precision: Trump occupies the role of the first beast of Revelation 13:1–10 (the imperial-political sovereign whose deeds the text catalogues as “lies and murder”), Musk the role of the second beast of 13:11–18 (the lamb-with-two-horns figure who exercises the first beast’s authority, performs deceptive signs, and enforces the mark). What is hermeneutically careful, though, is Allen’s hedging vocabulary: Musk “kinda does check every box” — not is the second beast simpliciter. The formula is exemplary, not predictive. Three and a half months later he extends the schema by quoting Revelation 13:16–17 verbatim — the verses about the mark on the right hand and forehead, without which one cannot buy or sell (Wayback snapshot, 27 May 2025). The post itself names no contemporary target; given Allen’s earlier identification of the MAGA-hat as Musk’s “symbol,” however, the implicit target is plausibly fellow Christians who wear it.

The hermeneutical care becomes most explicit when Allen is, in effect, asked the apocalyptic question directly. On 22 August 2025, in reply to what was apparently a question about the identity of the Beast, Allen wrote:

indeterminate (revelation 13 leaves that part unclear, so the idiots trying to actively accelerate judgement day are well into “here be dragons” territory) (and also, incomprehensibly, have not read revelation 14:9-12...or are so arrogant they think it doesn’t describe them)

 (Wayback snapshot, 22 August 2025). Two things are noteworthy here. The first is the explicit refusal of the singular-fulfilment move: Revelation 13, on Allen’s reading, “leaves that part unclear” — the text itself, in his view, does not authorize confident closure on which contemporary figure is the Beast. The second is that he turns the immediately following passage, Revelation 14:9–12 (the wrath against beast-worshippers, ending in the call to “patient endurance” already noted above), back against fellow Christians who, on his diagnosis, are “trying to actively accelerate judgement day” — a sharp polemical strike against the dispensationalist (a late-19th-century-onwards Protestant interpretive tradition associated with John Nelson Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible) or even end-times-activist hermeneutic that would read Revelation as a prophetic checklist whose fulfilment is to be hastened.

The pattern that emerges from these posts — taken alongside the 13 April reply already discussed and the “old protestant accusation” remark from April 2025 — is consistent and worth naming. Allen makes confident typological mappings (this contemporary figure, in his reading, fits this scriptural role) while at the same time explicitly refusing singular prophetic identifications (this contemporary figure simply is the figure named in scripture, the prophecy being fulfilled at this moment). This is a figural or typological reading rather than a singular-prophetic one: contemporary actors occupy roles described by the text, the descriptive grid is treated as real, but the identification is exemplary rather than predictive of fulfilment. It is exactly what the dispensationalist mode would not permit. And the fact that Allen positions himself explicitly against dispensationalist accelerationism is itself confessionally telling, since dispensationalism is the apocalyptic register most foreign to the confessional Reformed Protestantism in which his biographical record places him; the historic Reformed traditions have been amillennial or postmillennial in their eschatology rather than dispensational-premillennial. (Briefly: amillennialism takes the “thousand-year reign” of Revelation 20 figuratively, as the present age of the church; postmillennialism expects a future age of progressive Christianization before Christ’s return; dispensational-premillennialism expects Christ’s return before a literal future millennium, after a rapture and tribulation.)

The statement that comes closest to Allen actually reflecting on whether — and how — human action can contribute to bringing on the end-times is the August 2025 post just discussed. It rewards a closer look.

The most plausible background is the dominionist and Christian-Zionist accelerationist climate of mid-August 2025: a week in which biblical-mandate rhetoric for Israel’s expanded Gaza offensive (notably from US Ambassador Mike Huckabee) and “red heifer / Third Temple” speculation in Christian-Zionist circles were both unusually prominent in public discourse. The specific parent post Allen is replying to is not recoverable, so the precise rhetorical occasion cannot be pinned down; but a Reformed-coded user would have natural reasons to push back against precisely that climate.

Two things about the post’s hermeneutical structure deserve notice. The first is what it presupposes. Allen uses the term “judgement day” without scare quotes and without any distancing register; and the threat of acceleration only makes sense at all on the assumption that human action can in some measure affect the apocalyptic timeline. If the unfolding of the eschaton were taken to be purely divinely sovereign and impervious to human influence, the accelerationist charge would be empty — there would be nothing to accuse anyone of trying to do. The post therefore implicitly commits Allen to two positions he does not unfold at length elsewhere: a real expectation of apocalyptic temporality, and a real possibility of human agency operating within it.

The second, and more important, is what the post firmly rejects. Active acceleration is condemned three times at once. Lexically: would-be accelerationists are “idiots” — disqualified intellectually and morally. Pictorially: they are operating in territory marked “here be dragons,” the medieval-cartographic warning against uncharted regions one is well advised not to enter. Hermeneutically — and this is the sharpest move — Allen turns the very passage that follows the beast-mark warning, Revelation 14:9–12, back against the would-be accelerationists themselves. By the logic of the third angel’s announcement, those who try to bring about the end-judgment are not its agents but its targets — either because the political-religious projects through which they would accelerate are themselves complicit with the beast-system, or because they arrogate to themselves a divine prerogative the text does not assign to them.

What this means for the question that has hung over much of the early commentary — whether Allen’s apocalyptic register suggests a reader inclined to enact the end-times drama by his own hand — is, on the face of this post, that he is running in the opposite direction. A logic of the form “I bring down the beast in order to force the apocalypse” is precisely what Allen condemns here, and within his own hermeneutic it would be theologically self-undermining. Two qualifications are nonetheless due. First, the argument is specifically against eschatological acceleration — against the project of trying to force the apocalyptic endpoint. It does not speak to all politically motivated violence; a secular-revolutionary or civic-republican defensive case for force would be a different category, neither addressed nor excluded in this post. Second, the other Revelation posts in which Allen reads Trump as the first beast and Musk as the second contain no calls to action against either; the one passage he quotes about a defeat of the beast (Revelation 15:2) describes that defeat as something accomplished in the divine plan, not as a task assigned to readers. Taken together, the apocalyptic thrust of his Revelation engagement is diagnostic (who is who?) and parenetic (you Christians who back the beast — what are you doing?), not activist (what should we do against the beast?).

In sum: the post is a piece of remarkable hermeneutical self-control. Allen reads apocalyptically — but he takes an explicit, and unusually sharp, position against apocalyptic activism: against precisely the form of religiously motivated violence that would try humanly to enforce the end-times drama. Whether this self-limitation is consistent with other components of his political-ethical thinking — the civic-republican defensive-violence strand that runs through parts of the corpus, for instance — is a separate question I do not try to settle here. But within the apocalyptic register that Klippenstein and others have weighted in the early manifesto coverage, the position the post takes is unambiguous.

More generally, it is hard to identify aspects of how Allen reads Revelation that stand out as “sectarian” in any clear sense. There is, however, one place where his treatment might suggest a rather naïve and literalist mode of interpretation — one that does not fully take into account the genre of the book and its first-century setting. Even there, two caveats are due, as I will note below.

In a Sunday-morning post on 16 March 2025, Allen quotes Revelation 15:2 verbatim and adds a brief gloss:

“And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire and, standing beside the sea, those who had been victorious over the beast and the number of his name.” Good news is he loses! bad news is uhhhhhhhhh that’s a kinda specific image, like, I can really only think of one way glass and fire mix

 (Wayback snapshot, 16 March 2025). The “one way glass and fire mix” that the post leaves the reader to infer is vitrification — the conversion of silica into glass under sufficient heat, of the kind first produced at the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 and named, on the desert floor, trinitite. Allen, in other words, lets himself read the apocalyptic image as plausibly suggesting nuclear detonation: the eschatological victory over the beast is real, but the means by which the world might arrive at the standing-on-glass scene is, on this reading, materially specific and grim. This is a more literalist mode than the typological-identification mode discussed above. Allen is not committed to a date, an actor, or a sequence — the post does not say “there will be a nuclear war in year X” — but he is committed to the move that the image might carry something physically recognisable, that “sea of glass mixed with fire” is not merely a stock element of apocalyptic visionary imagery but a description with a possible material referent.

The two caveats. The first is that, even if this were Allen’s settled hermeneutic, he would be in the company of the majority of contemporary Christian readers, not on the fringe. The strictly historical-critical reading — in which apocalyptic imagery is decoded only through its first-century setting and stays sealed within its literary genre — is the academic norm in scholarship, but not the dominant practice among lay Christian readers, who routinely treat Revelation’s images as carrying possible referents that bear on the present and future. The second is that the hedging within the post itself is unusually conspicuous. The “uhhhhhhhhh” registers a real discomfort at being pulled toward the conclusion; “kinda specific” pulls back from certainty; “like, I can really only think of one way” shades the move from assertion into informal speculation. Allen pursues the literalist reading, but he is visibly aware that he is pursuing it, and brackets it in a register closer to wondering aloud than to confident identification. Even at the limit case, his reading does not collapse into the prophetic-checklist mode he so sharply attacks in the August 2025 post.

Against this backdrop, a second instance might at first glance look like a hasty mapping of opponents onto Revelation’s scenery — the kind of move that could underwrite confidence in religiously necessary violence. Read more carefully, however, it turns out to display the same multi-layered and cautious hermeneutic.

The case in point is a post of 3 May 2025. It reads, in full:

the fact that “MAGA” turns into triple sixes via like the second most basic algorithm possible (convert from alphabetical to numeric with A being a 1, start from zero, add then subtract then add then subtract) and is showing up on a lot of people’s foreheads via hats is certainly...something

 (Wayback snapshot, 3 May 2025). The calculation Allen describes is reproducible: with the alphabet numerated A = 1, B = 2, … and the alternating-sign sum he specifies, M (13) − A (1) + G (7) − A (1) yields 18, which is the digit sum of 666 (6 + 6 + 6). The route is simple — that is part of the joke — but it is the route of gematria, the numerological operation that Revelation 13:18 itself invites: “This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.” The post performs the calculation on an English-language target, and pairs the numerical result with a second criterion drawn directly from Revelation 13:16 — the mark “on their right hands or on their foreheads” — by observing that the symbol in question is, as a matter of empirical fact, “showing up on a lot of people’s foreheads via hats.” Two of the three diagnostic features of Revelation 13:16–18 are thereby deployed in a single sentence: the number, and the forehead-mark — with the third, commerce-control, hovering implicit in the cap-as-purchasable-merchandise.

The tonal frame is unmistakably ironic. “The second most basic algorithm possible” is self-deprecating about the calculation’s triviality; “is certainly…something” is the classic deflationary trailing-off. If one read tone alone, the verdict would be simply: this is a joke. That, I think, would be the wrong verdict, because the irony is doing work as the medium rather than as the message. The hermeneutical operation underneath the meme idiom is, in fact, the same operation that ancient Christian readers performed when they decoded the gematria of Neron Caesar — נרון קסר in its Hebrew transliteration, summing by the standard letter values to 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 = 666. The structural template is identical: take the contemporary figure who fits the imperial-typological grid, apply the gematria of Revelation 13:18, and treat the convergence as a confirming sign rather than as a coincidence. Allen is doing the operation. He is just performing it in a register that signals that he knows the algorithm is silly-easy and therefore not load-bearing on its own.

What this dual register tells us about Allen’s hermeneutic is, I think, this: the joke and the seriousness are doing two different jobs at once. The seriousness is in the diagnostic claim — Trump as the MAGA-figure satisfies multiple Revelation 13 markers simultaneously, and the calculation adds one more piece of evidence to a typological pile that Allen has already been assembling in prior posts: the Trump-as-first-beast / Musk-as-second-beast configuration of February 2025 (Wayback snapshot, 11 February 2025), and a Musk-as-second-beast reprise of April 2025 (Wayback snapshot, April 2025). The irony is what protects him from the kind of seriousness he opposes elsewhere — the dispensationalist hand-rubbing, the date-setting, the “this is THE Beast at last” finality. By performing the calculation in meme form, he commits himself to the typological identification while refusing the apocalyptic-accelerationist commitment that would normally accompany it. The posture is at once confident in its application and humble about its predictive reach — which is, recognisably, the early-modern Protestant figural mode in which the Reformers identified the papacy with the Beast as a figural pattern, not as the singular and final fulfilment of prophecy within their own lifetime.

The meme register, in other words, is what makes the apocalyptic claim possible as a sober claim. Without the irony, the very same observation (MAGA → 666 → mark on foreheads) would tip into precisely the literalism that Allen attacks in the August 2025 post. With the irony, the typological recognition can stand on its own, without committing him to anything more than the recognition itself.

One further observation, which the foregoing has not yet brought out, may be added at this point with appropriate caution. The chapters of Revelation that Allen most engages with — chapters 13 and 14 — also contain two short verses, Revelation 13:10 and 14:12, that read in the NIV: “This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people,” and “This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.” These verses do not appear in Allen’s publicly archived corpus. He cites Revelation 13:1–18 (the beasts), 13:16–18 (the mark and the gematria), 14:9–11 (the wrath against beast-worshippers), and 15:2 (the sea-of-glass standing-scene); he names the verse range 14:9–12 once, in the August 2025 post, but in that post the range is used polemically — to charge fellow Christians with accelerationism — and not by way of dwelling on the formula at its close. What this absence in the publicly archived corpus signifies — if anything — for Allen’s broader engagement with Revelation is not something I can settle from the corpus alone. But it is worth recording that the two verses in these chapters that direct readers to “patient endurance and faithfulness” are not verses Allen can be observed taking up in the material that has been preserved.

The arc of resistance

Stepping back from the individual posts: what the corpus shows is not a worldview that deduces politics from scripture but one in which the political and the biblical run on parallel tracks — the biblical providing diagnostic and parenetic vocabulary, and the political escalation tracking concrete events more than it tracks any deepening of the apocalyptic reading. The most charged biblical posts — the Revelation 13 and 14 deployments — cluster around dated triggers (the Trump–Musk DOGE executive order of 11 February 2025 and Trump’s Easter AI-Jesus image of 12 April 2026), and the apocalyptic register, even at its sharpest, is oriented diagnostically (who is who?) and parenetically (you fellow Christians who back the beast — what are you doing?), never activistically (what should we do against the beast?).

The escalation that does take place runs, in parallel to all of this, in a secular-republican vocabulary. Already in mid-December 2024 — well before Allen has begun to deploy Revelation against the new administration — he is defending the place of political violence in the American founding myth, observing tartly that “at least one american politician remembers how the country was created in the first place” (Wayback snapshot, 11 December 2024) and, the next day, correcting an interlocutor with the reminder that “the army didn’t get formed til 1775, and there was quite a lot of political violence before then, like, say, Boston Tea Party” (Wayback snapshot, 12 December 2024). The 6 January 2025 congressional certification of the election then concentrates the move into a single day: Allen complains that the operation amounts to “rubberstamping the election of a traitor” (Wayback snapshot, 6 January 2025) and concludes, in another post the same day, that the country “might need an entirely new party tbh” (Wayback snapshot, 6 January 2025). The trigger is plainly the certification itself, and the response is constitutional-republican rather than theological.

Six weeks later, on 18 February 2025, comes the corpus’s most direct fusion of revolutionary text and contemporary armed-citizenry rhetoric. Allen quotes verbatim from the Declaration of Independence’s catalog of grievances against George III — “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation” (Wayback snapshot, 18 February 2025) — and immediately follows it with the gloss: “Given the applicability of that particular quote, I don’t think people should be quite as focused on the midterms or congress getting its act together as they should be on understanding 2nd amendment-related actions. Because ngl it doesn’t look like we’re getting to the midterms (or even july)” (Wayback snapshot, 18 February 2025). The framework is entirely founding-era American: the Declaration’s grievances mapped onto the present, and a Second-Amendment construal that locates the right to arms in resistance to a tyrannical executive. Notably, this pair of posts is not anchored to any single news event; it is Allen’s own analytical move, the moment at which the founding-era register becomes the explicit warrant for an armed-citizenry posture.

The vocabulary widens through the rest of the year. In mid-September 2025 Allen calls for retributive justice on a post-war international model: “either we make nuremburg look like highschool mock trials / or other countries are going to have to do it to us” (Wayback snapshot, 14 September 2025). Two months later he generalizes the duty to resist into a moral obligation against silence: “if you permit lynchings/genocide/extrajudicial murder and abduction in your societies and say you can’t do anything about it, you have become complicit in it through lack of resistance” (Wayback snapshot, 17 November 2025). The criterion is what one permits by inaction; the vocabulary is civil-rights and anti-fascist, not biblical. It is also — strikingly — the same structural move that anchors the manifesto’s rebuttal to the first “objection”: that “turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed” is not Christian forbearance but “complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.” The complicity-through-inaction logic on which the manifesto opens its defense is, on this evidence, already in place — in essentially identical form — by November 2025, some five months before the Correspondents’ Dinner attack. By 31 January 2026 Allen has formulated what amounts to a floor and a ceiling for “real” resistance. The floor: “being willing/prepared to be arrested is the absolute bare minimum necessary if you actually want to ‘resist’ in any meaningful way. Like, in a confrontation with the full force of the US federal gov, risking being arrested is, like, the ante” (Wayback snapshot, 31 January 2026). The ceiling: a four-option taxonomy — “a) leave / b) die / c) revolt / d) capitulate” (Wayback snapshot, 31 January 2026) — in which revolt is named neutrally as one live option among the others. As with the February 2025 cluster, neither post is occasioned by a specific external event; both are Allen’s own systematization of where, in his analysis, the situation has by then arrived. The final station of this arc falls exactly eighteen days before the Correspondents’ Dinner attack. On 7 April 2026 Allen articulates what amounts to a universal duty of resistance, framed by a comparative civic argument: “we are not more disenfranchised than fucking russia / and if we can call for russians to oppose putin, we can and must oppose trump no less / so there are no excuses / not for the politicians / not for the military / not for the voters / not for the nonvoters” (Wayback snapshot, 7 April 2026). The moral grammar is, again, civic-comparative — Russians-under-Putin, not Christians-under-the-beast. The resistance vocabulary at its most expansive is, on Allen’s own choice of warrants, secular.

Where biblical language does enter the resistance discussion at all — the August 2025 anti-accelerationism post is the pure case (Wayback snapshot, 22 August 2025) — it works against the religious-violent reading rather than for it. The biblical hermeneutic, in other words, illuminates the political ethics it does not generate.

Much more could of course be said on this. But even this cursory examination of how Allen adduces and interacts with the text of Revelation makes it appear unlikely that he was driven by anything that could fairly be described as exaggerated apocalyptic fervor. I must add the caveat that I am not an expert in psychology, and so cannot exclude the possibility that what looks unalarming on the exegetical surface is in fact undergirded by some form of delusional conviction that I am failing to see because of my own blindspots. What I can say with considerable confidence, however, is that Allen’s reading of Revelation falls within the mainstream of popular Christian reception of the book and indeed shows — at least at the level of its surface — remarkable humility and sophistication.

Christian or Anti-Christian, revisited

The question with which this statement opened — whether Allen’s act and his account of it can be located within Christian self-understanding or whether they push outside its boundaries — admits, on the available textual evidence, a more textured answer than the public framings on either side allow.

What the analysis of the manifesto has shown is that Allen’s rebuttal to the first objection does sit rather squarely within one strand of the long-running Christian discussion of pacifism, restraint from violence, and the limits of nonresistance — and the move on which it turns, that turning the other cheek “when someone else is oppressed” amounts to “complicity in the oppressor’s crimes,” has serious defenders within that strand. What sharpens the picture is the contrast with Bonhoeffer’s account of the Christian who acts in extremity but does not theologically purify the act — the contemporary model perhaps most directly relevant to the assassination question, and one Allen does not take up: his rebuttal attempts precisely the kind of clean theological justification that Bonhoeffer refused.

I also sense a certain kind of disinhibition, most notable in the nonchalant comments on potential other victims, that stands at odds with how Christian opponents of Hitler reasoned about a potential assassination. Allen’s rebuttal to the pacifist position is thus clearly underdeveloped theologically, and there might be additional theological or psychological assumptions at play that are not visible to me. In its broad contours, however, it is very much mainline Protestant.

The rebuttal to the fifth objection turns out, on closer reading, not to rest on a theological argument at all but on a constitutional one: that the sayings about Caesar do not bind because the United States is a republic and not a monarchy. The richer biblical resource the same passage opens up — the imago Dei logic that locates a sphere of human life beyond Caesar’s claim — would have served Allen’s argument well, and is not reached for.

What the analysis of the Bluesky posts has shown is, in some ways, the converse picture. Allen’s biblical reading there, traced across some 750 archived posts, turns out to be sober — figural and typological in a recognisably Reformed-confessional manner, anti-dispensationalist in eschatology, and perhaps even explicitly hostile to apocalyptic acceleration. The figure most vivid in the corpus is not an apocalyptically feverish prophet of last days. His political-ethical escalation, by contrast, runs in a parallel, secular-republican vocabulary that develops largely independently of the biblical reading: Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence’s grievances against George III, the Second Amendment, the Russia-comparison, the four-option taxonomy of “leave / die / revolt / capitulate.” The complicity-through-inaction logic on which the manifesto’s first-objection rebuttal in fact turns was already in place there by November 2025, some five months before the Correspondents’ Dinner attack — and there entirely without biblical framing.

Putting the two sides together: to call Allen’s manifesto, or Allen himself, “anti-Christian” — as the President and some of the early reporting have done — ignores how much of his theological ethics falls within the mainstream of contemporary Christianity, as does the substance of his biblical hermeneutic. At the same time, I would be cautious about overemphasizing the role of religion in his motivation, and especially cautious about reading it as apocalyptic fanaticism: the biblical hermeneutic visible in the corpus is rather sober, and the political-ethical analysis on which the act ultimately rests develops in a separate, secular-republican register that the biblical reading sometimes interprets but does not underwrite. That analysis ended, in Allen’s case, in the conclusion that political violence had become permissible.

The basis of this assessment seems to have been primarily his reading of current political events, and only secondarily his reading of Scripture. Whether or not his deduction that tyrannicide was called for was a reasonable deduction from the kinds of sources that he consumed is a question that will have to be answered by others. Similarly, I cannot comment on whether or not psychological factors might have contributed to him interpreting rhetorical framings of Trump in fascist terms as more substantive than they were meant to be. What I can say, however, is that from all I have read, Allen’s biblical hermeneutics are careful and that his ethical framework is far from fringe. The fact that a normal Christian like that can apparently feel motivated — whether under additional psychological factors or not — to commit an assassination attempt on the US president is what makes this event so dire for societal peace in the United States.