A Pennsylvania Prophet

Meet the Christian nationalists who want to assert dominion-starting with the Keystone State.

- By Emily Hofstaedter

Every monday, Abby Abildness leads her "Penn's Sacred Challenge Tour," a guided walk through the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. On the day I join, a group of stylish and well-behaved Christian homeschoolers trail her through marbled hallways, beneath mosaic ceilings, and past stained-glass windows, dissecting the early-20th century art for hidden meanings, like a Christian nationalist Da Vinci Code.

"God's message is on the walls," she says, directing our eyes to Edwin Austin Abbey's "Spirit of Light," a fresco of semi-nude nymphs silhouetted against burning oil derricks, each holding their own flame. "Doesn't this remind you of Pentecost?" she asks the students.

To Abildness, the building's art doesn't just transmit Pennsylvania's founding myths-it reveals her state's, and the nation's, true Christian origins. The fresco is not only an homage to Pennsylvania's role in birthing the oil industry, she says, but a call for spiritual light to be "taken to the nations as a holy example." Abildness traces her particular proclamations back to William Penn, a freethinking Quaker whom she and many other evangelicals have rebranded as "America's founding grandfather," pointing to his 1681 pronouncement that the territory he'd been granted would be a "holy experiment" and the "seed of a nation."