“Staid” is the word the Wall Street Journal applied to government commissions on religious freedom. The February 10, 2026 meeting of Donald Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission, however, was anything but staid. Contentious might be a better word, Carrie Prejean Boller’s testimony cut through the conventional interreligious pieties and accused the rabbis on the committee of imposing Zionism as the equivalent of a state established religion on American Catholics like herself. As we have come to expect, the Jews attempted to turn the tables on Carrie. Rabbi Frankel told her “You don’t get to block me because I’m a Zionist and a Jew,” at the very moment when the Jews were blocking Carrie because she was a Catholic and calling for her ouster from the panel because of her Catholic beliefs. Refusing to be cowed, she responded, “I am a Catholic and I do not embrace Zionism,” adding that Zionism and Catholicism are incompatible. Before anyone realized what was happening, she took control of the debate by making it a Catholic-Jewish conflict.
As I predicted, the collapse of Protestantism which became apparent as the third republic drew to a close had a dramatic effect on American identity and the terms of civic discourse. America was always a country with three ethnic groups based on three religions—Protestant, Catholic, Jew—with the Protestants being the dominant group. As Samuel Huntington pointed out in his book on American identity Who Are We? an American was an “Anglo-Protestant,” who acted as a buffer between Catholics and Jews, defusing conflicts between them by blurring the clear theological distinctions which made conflict inevitable.
As Protestantism continues to evaporate, the confrontation between Jews and Catholics becomes more contentious. The mainline Protestant sects—Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians—have been taken over by homosexuals and marginalized, while sects at the lower end of Protestant demographics like Southern Baptists and other Evangelical churches have adopted Christian Zionism as their creed, as represented by Texans like Ted Cruz, who told Tucker Carlson he had a religious duty to support the state of Israel.
Carrie was no stranger to the culture wars. She debuted as a national figure when running as Miss California for the Miss USA title. One step away from claiming the title, Carrie was ambushed by Perez Hilton, who asked her what she thought of gay marriage. When she declared that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman, she lost her chance to become Miss USA, but her decision to come out in favor of traditional marriage launched her career as a national figure in the culture wars. Her identity at this point was a conservative in the mold of Sean Hannity, who co-wrote her autobiography Still Standing. During the round of talk show appearances which surrounded its publication, Carrie would tell people like Larry King that the person she admired most was Sarah Palin. The King interview took place on November 11, 2009, when loyalty to the conservative party line was already sounding dated.
The most significant change in her life between Carrie’s appearance on Larry King in 2009 and the brouhaha of the Trump committee on religious liberty in 2026 was her conversion from the Protestantism of her youth to Catholicism in 2025. Her conversion freed her from the straitjacket of an obsolete conservatism and was replaced by ethnic Catholicism as her identity marker at precisely the moment when the Jews had overplayed their hand in Gaza and had become odious in the eyes of the entire world. The disappearance of Protestantism at the end of America’s third republic made the Jewish-Catholic conflict inevitable. Carrie was correct in her reading of the signs of the times. The moment had arrived for a Catholic-Jewish showdown. The Israeli genocide in Gaza had called the existence of a universal moral law, with no genetic exceptions, into question, and that question had to be answered before America could proceed to the fourth republic. (more...)
Catholic Talking Heads Throw Carrie Under the Bus
