Mid-Ohio Valley group blends religion, politics to affect policy in Ohio and West Virginia

athensindependent.com
By Laura Harbert Allen, Keri Johnson & Dani Kington
February 27, 2025

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From the Tea Party to Trump, the MOVCAC mixes religion and politics to inform its members’ activism.

MARIETTA, Ohio — Most Sunday afternoons, Glenn Newman hosts church in his living room. It’s much cozier than a typical religious space, with stuffed leather recliners and gas logs glowing in the fireplace. More a grandparent’s den than a sanctuary.

A half-dozen attendees watch a sermon from a California pastor and follow along with a study guide. Afterward, they make small talk between bites of homemade nachos and chocolate cake prepared by Newman’s next-door neighbors. 

Quietly, over the past 15 years, these small group Bible-study-style gatherings have been the foundation for a movement that appears to punch above its weight in terms of political influence. 

It started in 2009 when Newman invited his neighbors over for dinner. Like him, they were angered by the Great Recession of 2008 and the ensuing $800 billion American Recovery and Rescue Act. 

“I realized that my grandchildren would never enjoy the lifestyle I’ve had,” Newman said. 

This was the Tea Party era of U.S. politics, when a populist social movement — animated by a backlash to the George W. Bush administration’s bailout of banks deemed “too big to fail,” along with the election and policies of Barack Obama — was catapulted into the national spotlight.

Small groups like Newman’s popped up all over the country, amplified and supported by a pre-existing political advocacy infrastructure powered by Big Oil. 

In southeast Ohio, Newman’s early gatherings evolved into the Marietta 9-12 group, which aligned with the Tea Party and prominent Fox News personality Glenn Beck. Throughout the 2010s, the 9-12 group hosted a range of events, including candidate forums and presentations from organizations like Turning Point USA. 

Newman and the 9-12 group also unequivocally supported President Donald Trump. Several members attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. — a galvanizing moment for Newman.

“We had a bunch of people there,” Newman said (he rejects the term “insurrection”). 100 Days and the Independent confirmed that multiple people affiliated with his group attended the rally at the U.S. Capitol, although they did not enter the Capitol building.

“After January 6, I told my wife, ‘We can’t continue this meet, greet, eat, retreat, so we are going to become a citizens action coalition,’” he said. 

For Newman, it was time for a renewed push for lasting political change in the country. The Mid-Ohio Valley Citizens Action Coalition*, or MOVCAC, launched in June 2021 and has grown to include chapters across West Virginia and in Meigs, Monroe, and Washington counties in southeast Ohio. 

MOVCAC’s influence on local and state politics reflects the nation’s current moment: a time when right-wing politics has fused with a version of Christianity that calls for a strict interpretation of Old Testament biblical law.

Mixing politics and religion in the Mid-Ohio Valley

MOVCAC holds its public meetings every other Monday in the sanctuary of Freedom Gate Church in Marietta, Ohio. While some attendees are also regulars at Newman’s home church, the crowd has grown beyond the confines of his living room, with dozens of people regularly attending MOVCAC’s meetings.

At the public meetings, members welcome newcomers with open arms; they laugh and cry together, and catch up on life’s goings-on. Discussions range from local school board races to presidential politics, alternative medicine, community news and homemade pickles. 

They also pray together — for each other and for the nation’s spiritual redemption.

Newman runs the meetings from behind a lectern at the front of the church’s sanctuary. Freedom Gate Senior Pastor Rodney Lord is often there too, offering opening prayers and running the soundboard.

While Lord claims no “official role” in MOVCAC, he says that most members “are very encouraged that I’m a pastor who will show up to a meeting like this, or even speak out on an issue, that kind of thing.”

Lord and Newman, who have known each other for years, both say their conservative political activism is informed by their Christianity. This has manifested itself in legislative pushes, like collaborating with other faith leaders and anti-abortion groups to lobby Ohio lawmakers to eventually pass the Heartbeat Bill in 2019. It was one of the strictest abortion laws in the country before being declared unconstitutional in 2024. 

That bill, Newman said, “reflects my commitment to protecting life.” 

For Lord, the bill reflects dominion theology, a system of religious belief that seeks a society whose laws are based on an extremely conservative interpretation of Christianity. Lord is a “church ambassador” for Center for Christian Virtue, an Ohio-based lobbying group, which has pushed anti-LGBTQ policy in that state. 

Mainline Christian leaders criticized Gov. Mike DeWine’s office for including CCV in discussions with the Governor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2015-16 designation of CCV as a hate group for their extreme anti-LGBTQ agenda. 

“The message of his (Christ’s) kingdom throughout the New Testament was, it would influence every mountain of culture, every sphere,” said Lord. 

There are seven major spheres — or “mountains” — of influence, he added, including government, family, arts and entertainment, media, education, and business. It’s a belief system, he said, that hearkens back to when the church was the “predominant influence on culture” in the U.S.

Dominionism advocates for a society transformed by a far-right version of Christianity. 

And religion scholars have said that taken to its extreme, dominion theology erases the boundary between church and state.

The goal is the complete transformation of the country by taking control of its political and cultural institutions, according to Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a Boston-based think tank.

That transformation, across the “Seven Mountains” of society, is a guiding principle of the New Apostolic Reformation, one of the fastest-growing religio-political movements in the U.S. and abroad.

“The NAR celebrates Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States once was, and should once again be a Christian nation,” said Clarkson.

And just as MOVCAC has expanded its influence in Ohio and West Virginia, NAR has gained powerful allies. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump tapped longtime adviser Paula White-Cain, an NAR apostle, to lead the new White House Faith Office. 

Extremism experts also worry that some of the Trump administration’s early moves — including the formation of the White House Faith Office — reflect the goals of Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for radical government change published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023. That document outlines hard-right policies, described by critics as “very clearly on a path to Christian nationalism as well as authoritarianism.” 

For Freedom Gate pastor Rodney Lord, these religion-infused hard-right political successes are 15 years in the making. 

“You’re seeing the zenith of Make America Great Again,” he said. “It kind of flows out of that same heart as the Tea Party, basically saying, ‘We want change.’”

Fusion, contradiction and identity in Tea Party, MAGA movements

Most of MOVCAC’s positions reflect a mix of libertarian politics and hardline conservative Christian values: small government, lower taxes, opposition to abortion and the civil rights of transgender people. The group supports the diversion of public funds to private schools through “school choice” programs and the elimination of vaccine requirements for school-age children. 

Conspiracy theories about immigrants were also a frequent topic of conversation at the group’s meetings this past presidential election cycle, including false accusations that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets. 

Pepperdine University professor Christina Littlefield said the current anti-immigrant rhetoric popular with the Christian right is an outgrowth from the Tea Party movement, when “we saw the quiet part said out loud, the racism and anti-immigrant language as a reaction to the country’s first Black president.”

Littlefield says these positions are also a fusion of small government libertarian ideas with the culture war positions of the Christian right. The Tea Party, she said, is a recent historical example. 

“The Tea Party takes on the Christian right’s restriction of liberties, particularly when it comes to issues like abortion rights, but also now LGBTQ rights,” she said. 

Another element of populist movements like the Tea Party and its evolution to the MAGA movement is probing the culture to see what sticks. “They are always asking, ‘What’s going to get the most public outrage to get them to vote for us?’” said Littlefield. That’s what happened with the right’s focus on transgender issues, she said.

Within MOVCAC, however, members appear to deviate from right-wing positions in some areas. 

For example, the group opposes some natural gas fracking practices, including the use of injection wells to store waste underground. Newman said that he has spoken to left-leaning environmental groups and said that they share common concerns. 

“I want my grandchildren to have clean water,” he said. 

William Callison, a researcher at Harvard University focused on climate change politics and far-right political movements, said that in the “post-COVID era,” leftwing movements are increasingly “being grafted onto far-right projects.” Callison said that is an “increasingly common and quite effective” tactic for bringing political communities together.

Traditional left politics showing up in right-wing spaces include vaccine conspiracies, an emphasis on health and wellness, and environmentalism, as reflected by the ascendence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. within the Trump administration, Callison said. (MOVCAC has shared RFK Jr. videos on their website.)

Political change happening ‘in God’s time.’ 

True to its name, MOVCAC members have engaged in “citizens action,” including political activism and outreach. And they are in it for the long haul. 

One example is the group’s fight against public libraries with collections that include LGBTQ-themed books. 

In 2022, MOVCAC members lobbied the Parkersburg City Council to censure the Parkersburg & Wood County Public Library over the placement of the book “Gender Queer” in a Banned Books Week display. 

The following year, MOVCAC members got West Virginia lawmakers to introduce a bill that would have kept books deemed “obscene material” from being in or near state public schools. A similar bill got some traction in 2024. The measure would have made public library and public school employees vulnerable to prosecution for displaying “obscene materials” where minors could easily view them; several MOVCAC members supported it at a public hearing, but the bill ultimately failed in the state senate. 

While these efforts were unsuccessful, this year’s political landscape is different. West Virginia House members have already introduced an identical library bill. And Gov. Patrick Morrisey has signaled support for another MOVCAC policy push: religious and moral exemptions for childhood vaccinations in schools. 

For pastor Rodney Lord, this political momentum is happening in God’s time. “We see the Kingdom of God increasing,” he said. “Does that take 25 generations or 100 years, we don’t know.” 

Working to usher in that kingdom requires a generational mindset. “We’re hard at work pouring ourselves into the things that matter. Government matters,” he said. 

“I want to change this nation because I see where it’s going, and I don’t like it.”

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Disclosure: Laura Harbert Allen serves on the board of the Southeast Ohio Independent News, which operates the Athens County Independent.

*Motivate – Organize – Volunteer Citizens Action Coalition