# Evangelical Code Words — Jeremy Steele (Unbelief podcast) **Summary.** In a May 2026 episode of his podcast *Unbelief*, Jeremy Steele works through the everyday evangelical phrases that carry political and psychological systems beneath a spiritual surface — "spiritual warfare," "rebuke," "one nation under God," "rededication," "biblical values," "purity." His claim: these phrases are learned in childhood, tied to safety and belonging, and so become emotionally normal long before their political payload is legible. Tradition: progressive / post-evangelical rhetorical analysis from a deconstruction voice. (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/The Hidden Meanings (and Trauma) Behind Evangelical Church Language.md) > [!note] Why this source matters — the rhetorical layer under Christian nationalism > The wiki documents Christian nationalism's *doctrines* (seven mountains, apostolic mandate) and its *harms*. Steele supplies the missing rhetorical mechanism: how ordinary congregants get formed into the politics without ever hearing the political argument made. It was already synthesized in the vault as the permanent note [[Evangelical Code Words Package Political Systems as Spiritual Wisdom]]; this page ingests the underlying episode as a source. ## Key Claims 1. **Code words as emotional habituation, not deception.** "This episode is about evangelical code words, the phrases that sound harmless or spiritual or wise or patriotic… until you realize they're carrying entire political and psychological systems and theological systems underneath them." The resistance to recognizing this is not that the meaning is concealed but that "when you hear these phrases since childhood, they stop sounding extreme, they start sounding normal… comforting even" — which is why many people only register it after leaving. (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/...) 2. **Spiritual warfare as political frame.** Steele traces the cultural lexicon to Frank Peretti's novels *This Present Darkness* and *Piercing the Darkness* plus the Ephesians 6 "armor of God" study, recalling "many, many weeks" of church classes on protecting against demons. The effect: "political disagreement becomes spiritual corruption… social change is also demonic influence… and criticism becomes spiritual persecution." An aunt posting about pronouns is reframed as a combatant in a satanic assault on civilization. This is the congregational-formation counterpart to the apostolic [[Spiritual Warfare Theology]] the wiki already documents. (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/...) 3. **"Rebuke" expands past exorcism.** Steele describes a Christian-nationalist DC event where a speaker "rebuked" the forces making people more accepting of queer people. The word migrates from confronting demonic possession ("I rebuke this in the name of Jesus") to dismissing whole categories — "ideas get rebuked, movies get rebuked, politicians get rebuked, history books get rebuked, therapists get rebuked" — because all are cast as demonically influenced. (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/...) 4. **"One nation under God" as dog whistle.** To outsiders it reads as generic patriotism; inside Christian-nationalist culture, "under God means… the government being aligned with a very specific, very conservative view of Christianity" — legislating evangelical theology, not recognizing pluralism. Steele notes the irony that "Christian nation" language "never even includes Christians they disagree with." (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/...) 5. **"Rededication" applied to a nation.** Revival language for a backslidden individual — recommit at the altar or face God's judgment — is scaled to the country: America "has drifted away from God in rebellion" and faces divine punishment now. This rides on the America-as-Israel move ("you look at Israel… those apply directly, one for one, literally to America, which is just made up") and the historically false "founding fathers were all Christian" narrative. The result turns Christianity "from religion practiced within America into the thing that America supposedly is," so everyone else "starts sounding like they're a guest here." (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/...) 6. **"Biblical values" and "purity" as policy carriers.** "Biblical values" presents a specific contemporary policy bundle as a direct translation of Scripture rather than a debated ethical choice; "purity" encodes a separation-versus-engagement framing that ranks people on insider/outsider lines — the rhetorical adjacent to the wiki's [[Purity Culture]] material. (Source: Readwise/Snipd/Data/Unbelief/...) ## Connections to Existing Wiki - **[[Christian Nationalism]].** Supplies the rhetorical-mechanism vantage — "under God," "rededication," America-as-Israel, "biblical values" as dog whistles — beneath the doctrinal and harm analysis already on the page. - **[[Spiritual Warfare Theology]].** Steele's Peretti/armor-of-God formation account is the congregational-rhetoric layer under the apostolic SLSW systematization; add as a second, non-charismatic-insider vantage. - **[[Purity Culture]].** "Purity" named as an insider/outsider ranking code word. - **[[Deconstruction]].** The "delayed realization on leaving" is a documented deconstruction trigger. - **[[Evangelical Code Words Package Political Systems as Spiritual Wisdom]]** (vault permanent note) — the synthesized claim this episode grounds; it also links the pattern to the vault's two-tier-text-use analysis. ## Source Caution A solo commentary episode from a post-evangelical host, not a sourced brief — Steele is arguing a thesis he clearly holds, and the examples (the DC rally, the pronoun-posting aunt) are illustrative rather than documented cases. The core mechanism — that a phrase can carry political content its surface meaning does not name — is well-established in rhetorical analysis, but the strong version ("this is one of the most effective things evangelicalism ever did") is asserted, not measured. Read as a sharp insider account of how the formation works, corroborated by the wiki's independent Christian-nationalism sources, not as an empirical study.