NOTE: This piece was originally published at our Substack newsletter A Public Witness.
Across the country, lawmakers are trying to redraw congressional maps to give their party more representation than what the votes suggest they should receive. Texas started this round after President Donald Trump urged Republicans to help offset expected midterm losses next year that could give Democrats control of the U.S. House. State Democratic lawmakers thwarted the plan so far by leaving the state to prevent a legislative quorum.
The White House is also pushing other red states to redistrict, including Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina. Democratic governors in California, Illinois, and New York quickly threatened to respond in kind with their own new gerrymandering. This redistricting nuclear arms race could add to our national polarization and further undermine the principle of “one person, one vote.”
Of course, many of the states in question already have undemocratic maps that don’t truly represent the voters. The Lone Star State currently sends 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats to D.C. Texas Republicans hope to flip five seats to make that a 30-8 split. Kamala Harris took 42.5% of the vote statewide and the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate captured 44.6%. While the new map would give Democrats just 21.1% of the seats, the current map is already problematic as it gives them just 34.2%.
“It’s cheating,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said as he criticized the idea of a mid-decade redistricting in Texas. “Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives, he cheats at golf, and now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”
Pritzker rightly criticizes both the decision to redistrict now and the idea of gerrymandering. However, his own state is even worse. The congressional delegation from Illinois includes 14 Democrats and three Republicans, with some looking to shift that to 16 Democrats and just one Republican. Trump won 43.5% of the vote statewide in November and a really weak GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2022 still managed to get 42.4%. But the redistricting proposal would give the GOP just 5.9% of the seats while the current map equals only 17.6% for them. Politicians are fighting to take bad maps and make them worse.
A demonstrator holds a sign during a rally against redistricting at the Texas Capitol in Austin on July 24, 2025. (Eric Gay/Associated Press)
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, we’re already seeing people invoke the Bible to justify gerrymandering, like a Republican activist in Texas who cited Esther 4:14 and another who invoked Hosea 5:10. As debates about redistricting continue to heat up, we’ll likely see more efforts to frame partisan seat-stealing as a holy mission. Landing in the midst of this will be my new book, which actually starts with a story about misusing the Bible to support gerrymandering. I really didn’t expect this to be so timely (and I promise I don’t have a crystal ball).
The opening chapter to The Bible According to Christian Nationalists, which officially releases in eight weeks, is titled “Gerrymandering the Bible.” We are sharing an excerpt from that chapter below. I hope you will preorder the book today since such sales are important signals to bookstores to carry a new title. It’s already available to order at Bookshop, Chalice Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and elsewhere.
“My Bible says, ‘Fear not.’ We need to stand.”
In some contexts, such a declaration by a Baptist pastor wouldn’t spark surprise. The Bible does indeed say, “Fear not.” In fact, the phrase occurs sixty-three times in the King James Version. However, as I stood inside the Missouri State Capitol during a rally for the gerrymandering of congressional districts, I found myself questioning the mini-sermon as the pastor and state representative backed a push to redraw the lines in a way that would take one more seat away from the other party.
I checked the various biblical passages with the phrase “fear not.” Republican state Rep. Brian Seitz didn’t say which one he meant, but none of them seemed even close to the topic of congressional redistricting. There’s God telling Abram to “fear not” before establishing a covenant with him. There are a few occasions when pregnant women are told that (though in two cases they died despite the midwives’ attempts to dispel fear). There are multiple declarations to and from Moses and Joshua ahead of wars. There’s Jael saying that to reassure Sisera before she drove a tent peg through his head (apparently, he should’ve feared after all). There’s a psalm where the phrase appears as a criticism of those who “fear not God.” Perhaps most famously, there are multiple characters in the nativity stories who hear the phrase from an angel (since seeing an angel suddenly appear was actually quite frightening — and if you don’t understand why, check out the images when you google “biblically accurate angels”).
As I stood inside the Capitol listening to the rally, the remark by the pastor-politician wasn’t an outlier. Organizers of the February 2022 event had billed it as a prayer rally. Yes, a prayer rally for gerrymandering. As a writer who pays attention to the intersection of religion and politics, I’ve attended a number of unusual prayer gatherings and worship rallies at government buildings and elsewhere (#OccupationalHazard). So I drove over to the Capitol to see how this topic could possibly be a sacred cause. This wasn’t a fringe event. Several state lawmakers spoke, as did the Missouri secretary of state (who oversees elections).
At the time, Missouri sent six Republicans and two Democrats to the House of Representatives. Following the 2020 census, state lawmakers started the constitutionally required process of adjusting the lines to make sure the eight districts in the state had roughly the same number of people living in them. While Republican leaders in the state legislature wanted to keep the basic 6–2 map, some more conservative lawmakers sought a 7–1 split. Republicans wanting to keep a 6–2 scenario warned that 7–1 could be tossed as unconstitutional, thus creating the risk that judges might instead draw a 5–3 map. After all, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020 by 57% to 41%, which is closest to a 5–3 split. Missouri’s districts were already gerrymandered, but Seitz and others decided it was a biblical quest to gerrymander them even more. Ironically, to create a 7–1 map, they needed to target the seat of Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a United Methodist minister. All in the name of God.
“This is ‘such a time as this.’ I believe God called us here to serve with your blessing,” Republican state Rep. Sarah Walsh declared during the prayer rally.
Her comment borrowed a popular line from the Book of Esther, where Mordecai told Queen Esther she needed to confront the king to prevent an effort to kill all of the Jews in the land. As Mordecai urged her to save her people, he said it was possible she might have been put in that place “for such a time as this.” While Mordecai hedged on whether Esther was in that position for that time, Walsh declared definitely that they were in that place for that time. She believed God wanted them to win this gerrymandering fight — even though God is never actually mentioned in the Book of Esther (nor is gerrymandering). Undeterred, Walsh argued a 7-1 map would pass “by the grace of God and the overwhelming support of Trump-supporting Missouri.” This would, she added, help them win the fight against “radical, America-hating, God-hating socialists in Washington, D.C.,” who “want to make government our god.” Spoiler alert: the 7-1 map failed, which is why America is a godless, socialist nation now.
Walsh also praised the event organizers for starting the political rally with prayer “just like we start session in prayer every day.” Looking at the crowd of one hundred or so conservative activists (and me) standing in a Capitol hallway, she added, “God can do great things even with small numbers. He did that all throughout the Bible.”
That opening prayer Walsh praised came from the activist emceeing the event. Jodi Widhalm, who runs her own nonprofit ministry that focuses on conservative advocacy in the Capitol, joined the lawmakers in casting the redistricting effort as a divine mission. She declared about the state Capitol building: “We’re going to claim this territory back for the Lord.” In her prayer, she thanked God for giving “our founding fathers the wisdom and the direction to create this system for us.” She said while talking to God that this push for a 7–1 map “is all in an effort for you, that we would live in a godly nation that glorifies you, that we can raise you up so that people ultimately would be saved.”
“Holy Spirit, just fill us with a new anointing and a new passion and a new energy that the words we speak in these [Senate] offices would be your words and not ours, that they would carry a divine power,” she added in her prayer. “We know that with you all things are possible. All things are possible. We know that with you Peter walked on water. We know that with you Esther saved her people. We know that because of you lions’ mouths can be shut, that we can walk through fire and survive and thrive even in the midst of what seems to be great turning away. So, Father, we just pray that you would come into this building today.”
While I missed the hermeneutical tie between Peter walking on water and gerrymandering, that wasn’t even her most egregious comment. Widhalm started the event by reading Psalm 7:1. Get it? 7:1, 7–1. The seventh chapter and first verse for a map with seven Republicans and one Democrat. In the verse she read, David claimed God would save him from his pursuers (who may or may not have wanted to redistrict Jerusalem). That’s it. Nothing actually related to the topic, just claiming God would save them in their political mission because the chapter and verse numbers align with their gerrymandered map’s digits. This kind of textual gerrymandering is dangerous because one could easily respond to the proposed map with Judges 7:1, where “the Israelites were unfaithful in regard to the devoted things” and “so the Lord’s anger burned against Israel.” See, as the Bible clearly says, a 7–1 map makes God angry. Similarly, we could stick with the Book of Psalms to read 6:2 or 5:3 to push for those maps. Such an approach to the Bible makes it malleable enough to justify anything. Even a partisan redistricting map.
In the middle of the event, the group took a half-hour pause for attendees to walk around the Senate office area in the Capitol. Some prayed as they strolled the hallways; others stepped into offices to evangelize for the 7–1 map. Hours later, as the Senate session started, some from the group loudly prayed outside the chamber. But God did not answer their plea, and the less gerrymandered map eventually won out. Apparently, it wasn’t “such a time as this” after all.
Protestors carry signs as they wait for the start of a protest against redistricting at the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis on Aug. 7, 2025. (Michael Conroy/Associated Press)
Christian Nationalism distorts scripture, twisting and molding and gerrymandering the sacred texts to fit a preferred political ideology. To some degree, we all carve up scripture, focusing on what we prefer and ignoring those parts we find inconvenient, outdated, or just weird. Thomas Jefferson even famously cut up the New Testament to remove all of the miracles of Jesus since he thought Jesus was a wise teacher but doubted the supernatural parts. Jefferson, however, kept his project a secret. The gerrymandering of scripture today by those pushing Christian Nationalism is a public project attempting to redefine the Bible for everyone.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann warned about gerrymandering the biblical texts, something he complained that conservative and liberal congregations sometimes do by skipping over verses when going through a passage during a service. He noted we engage in such “gerrymandering of the text is in order to leave out the hard parts” that don’t fit with our vision of God or how people should act. But, he added, “a church that often gerrymanders the text will have among its company many who are ‘lukewarm’ (Revelation 3:16).”
“A welcome alternative to gerrymandering the text is the good hard work of teaching,” Brueggemann suggested. “We are, in the United States, in for tough days in the church. We might better prepare the church for those hard days to come by articulating the gospel in its fully generous and demanding scope.”
That is the struggle this book joins. Each of the seven primary chapters will explore a different problematic approach to using scripture, including viewing it as a prop, numerology, selectively literal, triumphal, pro-America, warfare, and rewritable. The final chapter will counter with better ways of approaching the Bible. Our faith is too sacred and our witness is too important to allow Christian Nationalistic pastors and politicians to co-opt it. I will not surrender scripture, Christianity, or Jesus to them. Together, we can offer an alternative witness. But to do so effectively, we must understand the dangers of the Bible according to Christian Nationalists.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
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