The simulation that said too much: How America’s liberal elite roleplayed blue state secession in the run-up to the 2020 election — and the right took notes

The simulation that said too much: Benedict Options USA, Part I — How Christians are building the Local Christendom in a Fragmenting America– CHAZ/CHOP, Calexit, Texit, American Redoubt, Greater Idaho

In this ongoing series Benedict Options USA, or Exodus Americana 2000–2025, The Christian Statesman chronicles a phenomenon largely overlooked by both mainstream media and institutional Christianity: the emergence, in 21st-century America, of intentional Christian communities — separatist, sovereign, and Scripturally grounded.

This is not an endorsement. It is an accounting.

What began as fringe experiments by home-church networks, survivalists, and agrarian revivalists has, over two decades, matured into a complex ecosystem of Christian enclaves — from desert communes to blockchain-backed microstates.

We map them here, not to glorify or condemn, but to understand. Because whatever else one might say, this movement is real. It is growing. And no one is telling its full story.

I. The Simulation That Said Too Much

In July 2020, as the United States simmered with political anxiety, a coterie of former officials, legal scholars, and policy veterans gathered under the aegis of the so-called Transition Integrity Project to role-play various post-election crises. This was not a fringe think tank or radical advocacy group. The participants were drawn from the highest strata of the American political class—former governors, national security officials, White House staffers, law professors, campaign veterans. They met not in basements or bunkers, but in Zoom rooms and executive suites. Their stated goal: to game out the fragile machinery of American democracy and test how it might fare under pressure.

One scenario, in particular, startled even seasoned observers: what if Donald J. Trump won reelection?

In this simulation, John Podesta—former White House Chief of Staff and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 failed presidential campaign—was assigned the role of Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic nominee for the presidency of the union. The fictional Trump eked out an Electoral College victory, and Podesta-as-Biden responded not with legal challenges or dignified concession, but with something far more jarring: he encouraged the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington to reject the results outright, to withhold their electors, and to secede unless Trump stepped down.

Let us pause here.

This was not a piece of satire. Not a Reddit thread. Not a militia cosplay. This was the political establishment of the United States—those who pride themselves on defending the rule of law—dry-running the dissolution of the Union if their side were to lose. And the most telling detail is not that the scenario occurred, but that it received no serious censure. The proceedings were reported in major media outlets, treated with the hushed reverence usually reserved for tabletop military exercises. There was no scandal, no Congressional investigation, no hearings. The Republic, it seemed, could be abandoned in theory—so long as it was Harvard and Georgetown doing the abandoning.

The roleplay revealed more than its architects intended: that elite liberalism in America has a conditional view of the Union. The nation, in their eyes, is sacred only so long as they govern it. When they do not—all bets are off.

This is not merely hypocrisy; it is a symptom of regime fragility. Strong empires do not simulate their own death to pass the time. They do not rehearse collapse unless they are already unsure of cohesion. For decades, America’s managerial elite viewed themselves as guardians of an eternal republic — custodians of an idea too sacred to splinter. But here, in the waning summer of 2020, something broke through: a candid admission, cloaked in proceduralism, that the Union might not be worth preserving if it failed to deliver their preferred outcome.

To some, this looked like a one-off absurdity — a Beltway parlor game gone too far. But to more discerning observers, it was a mask slipping. A ritual of unbinding. The moment the elite consensus quietly conceded what dissidents, homesteaders, and backwoods pamphleteers had suspected for years: that the American project is now negotiable. Conditional. Optional.

It is one thing for obscure libertarian blogs or far-right Telegram channels to discuss the breakup of the United States. It is quite another for the old regime itself to start running simulations of secession.

II. CHAZ-CHOP: When the Left LARPed secession with impunity

Let us not forget that just a few weeks earlier, in the high fever of the George Floyd summer, a group of activists in Seattle had declared the creation of the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” — CHAZ, later renamed CHOP — a quasi-anarchist enclave that blocked police, issued its own decrees, and styled itself as an independent republic. Flags were raised. Borders were marked. Armed men patrolled perimeters. Local politicians indulged it. National media cooed.

It was, by every measure, a symbolic act of secession — LARPed revolution cosplay in a major American city. And yet it was treated not as insurrection, but as progressive theatre. No tanks rolled in. No drones struck the perimeter. Instead, the ruling class applauded, excused, romanticized. That CHAZ eventually dissolved in violence and internal collapse was not taken as a sign of dysfunction, but as a noble experiment interrupted.

Taken together — CHAZ and the Transition Integrity Project — these were dress rehearsals for a post-national America, trial runs of selective sovereignty. One play-acted revolution from below; the other, secession from above. What unites them is not their ideology, but their implicit shared belief: that the Union is not eternal. That the fiction of indivisibility can be paused when convenient. That the map is not sacred.

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These were not outbursts. They were liturgies. In the hollowed-out cathedral of the American state, where faith in the republic flickers like a votive in wind, CHAZ and the Transition Integrity Project functioned as inverted sacraments — performances of rupture. Their purpose was not to seize power, but to normalize its dispersal. They were acts of magical unbinding, conducted by people who no longer believe in the Union as a covenant, only as a convenience. And like all rituals, they shape the imagination long before they shape the law. After 2020, the Overton window did not just shift — it shattered. The question was no longer “Could America break apart?” but “Who gets to decide where the lines are drawn when it does?”

III. When the Blue States Break First

The irony is almost too rich. For years, mainstream voices dismissed right-wing secessionist chatter as the mad ravings of gun-toting yokels and unreconstructed Confederates. Texas? Wyoming? The American Redoubt? Please. The Union was sacred, they said. Indivisible, they said. The product of struggle, blood, and moral clarity — not to be trifled with by toothless preppers in Idaho.

But in the Transition Integrity Project’s simulation, it wasn’t a Texan in a ten-gallon hat threatening to break the Union. It was the man playing Joe Biden. And when California’s roleplaying governor — reportedly a former Michigan official — followed Podesta-as-Biden’s cue to threaten disunion unless the outcome was overturned, the room did not erupt in laughter or legal outrage. They nodded. They debated next steps. They gamed it through.

Had the Claremont Institute run a similar simulation — with Trump-aligned figures urging red states to secede in response to a Biden win — the shrieking would have echoed from The Atlantic to the House Judiciary Committee. Congressional hearings would have been convened. Thinkpieces would have flown like locusts. The New York Times would have called it insurrectionary sedition. But when liberal elites did it, it was “scenario planning.” Democracy’s fire drill.

Yet this moment did not arrive from nowhere. In the wake of Trump’s 2016 election, the hashtag “#Calexit” trended for weeks. Progressive media toyed with the idea of California going it alone — free from the meddling of flyover states and Appalachian coal towns. “The Resistance” was not just branding. It was proto-secessionist posture. Artists created faux passports. Thinkers published speculative essays. Politicians hinted, softly, that a California Republic might not be the worst idea.

This is the double standard at the heart of our moment: liberal secessionism isn’t unthinkable — it is unspoken. When it happens on their side, it is not treasonous. It is “nuanced.” “Inevitable.” A thought experiment. An act of care. A defense of democracy. Call it soft disunion: not a rebellion against the American idea, but a redefinition of who qualifies as American in the first place.

In the simulation, the script was clear: if we cannot rule it, we might as well break it. And just like that, blue-state secession went from unthinkable to legible — not in a manifesto, but in a memo.

That this rupture came first from the blue states is not a vindication of the right, nor an exoneration of the left — it is a diagnosis of the republic’s condition. If even the progressive elite, steeped in institutional reverence and liberal proceduralism, could so casually entertain secession, then the seal has already been broken. The taboo is gone. The idea is in the bloodstream now — not just in cabins and compounds, but in boardrooms and think tanks. What began as a rehearsal in Georgetown has since echoed through grange halls in Kentucky and pulpits in Idaho. The left may have opened the breach, but they will not be the last to walk through it.

IV. A Union Held Together by Convenience

It is tempting to speak of the United States as a single nation — one people, one covenant, one story. But in truth, the American republic today is not bound by shared myth, nor common faith, nor even a common language of moral meaning. What remains is inertia, interdependence, and fear — the glue of exhausted empires.

The simulation made this plain. If the very stewards of the postwar order can casually toy with breaking the Union when it no longer serves their political interests, then the Constitution has already lost its sacral force. It is no longer the ark of a civil religion, but an aging document invoked like a family Bible: honoured, quoted, but no longer obeyed.

This is not a constitutional crisis in the traditional sense — it is a covenantal drift. Americans no longer share the same basic assumptions about what the Constitution is for. Is it a procedural safeguard for pluralism? A firewall for moral order? A suicide pact? A marketing slogan? One need only look at the map of post-Roe America to see the reality: a patchwork of republics pretending to be one.

In the halls of Congress, politicians speak of unity while governing in a de facto cold war. Red and blue states increasingly function as parallel regimes, with contradictory legal codes on abortion, guns, education, drugs, and gender. A girl in Ohio can become a mother at fifteen; a girl in Oregon can become a boy at twelve. These are not trivial divergences. They are civilizational forks.

The judicial system limps along as referee, but everyone knows the rulings are political. The trust is gone. The American state still moves, still funds, still surveils — but its heart no longer beats in rhythm. The music has stopped. What we are left with is the choreography of a shared performance, acted out long after belief has died.

Empires often last decades after their moral collapse. The Soviet Union functioned — on paper — long after its soul had withered. Yugoslavia even fielded Olympic teams as it frayed. America is not immune. It remains the most powerful country in the world. But power is not the same as purpose. And the American project no longer offers a shared vision of what life is for, what freedom is for, what the future is for.

It continues not because of love, but because of logistics.


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And so, into this vacuum — this empire of convenience without covenant — something older has begun to stir. Not a rebellion, but a retreat. Not a manifesto, but a memory. Across the backroads and broadcast streams of America, a quiet realism has taken hold: that the Union is too fractured to fix, too impersonal to love, too compromised to follow. In its place rises a new imagination — of community, not country; of dominion, not democracy; of Christendom, not “America.” The Christian remnant is no longer trying to restore the republic. They are trying to replace it.

V. The Christian Fragment and the Rise of Post-American Localism

If the progressive establishment rehearsed secession from above, the Christian right has begun enacting it from below. Not through declarations or parades, but through withdrawal, founding, and refusal. The instinct is older than Trump, older than politics. It is, at root, a return to first principles: that a house divided cannot stand, and that a people without God cannot be a nation.

In the last decade, what began as reaction has hardened into resolve. Gone is the hopeful posture of 2004-era moral majorities. What remains is a spiritual localism — born not of anger, but of clarity. Red states now pass laws as if the Union has already fractured. So too, Christian communities have begun to build lives as if Washington, D.C. no longer matters.

The landscape is varied. In Idaho, the town of Moscow — anchored by Douglas Wilson’s Christ Church — functions as a miniature Geneva. It runs its own K–12 school system, its own liberal arts college, its own publishing house, its own media apparatus, its own vision of civic life. What outsiders mock as a cult, locals live as a town. Elsewhere, in Steubenville, Ohio, a Catholic revival swirls around the Franciscan University, drawing young families from across the country. In Tennessee, Texas, and the Ozarks, micro-communities and homestead fellowships spring up with no central plan — bound not by party or denomination, but by a shared desire to raise children in a world where God is real and Cæsar is not absolute.

Some of these projects are formal: planned communities with charters, bylaws, and economic blueprints. Others are organic: families moving within proximity of likeminded churches, building schools, co-ops, and economies of grace. Still others are frankly utopian, even delusional. But even the flawed ones reveal a startling truth: that the dream of Christian sovereignty is no longer theoretical. It is being attempted.

The influence of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option looms large here. His call for strategic withdrawal from a hostile, atomizing culture has seeded a thousand small projects — from rural homesteads to parallel institutions. What once felt like defeatism now reads as realism. If America is post-Christian, then Christian life must become post-American.

But this is not mere survivalism. It is visionary realism — an attempt to preserve, in fragments, what the national culture has abandoned: fidelity, liturgy, kinship, order. Some communities dream of reconstructing 16th-century Geneva on the prairie; others imagine a confederation of hill-country homesteads linked by faith and barter. Some will fail. Others will rot from within. But a few will endure — and in time, perhaps inspire.

This is the new secessionism: not a waving of flags, but a turning of backs.

If the progressive establishment rehearsed secession from above, the Christian right has begun enacting it from below. Not through declarations or parades, but through withdrawal, founding, and refusal. The instinct is older than Trump, older than politics. It is, at root, a return to first principles: that a house divided cannot stand, and that a people without God cannot be a nation.

What we are witnessing is not mere grumbling from the pews. It is the rise of Christian separatism — a broad-spectrum phenomenon encompassing homesteading families, parallel economies, decentralized enclaves, and high-theology urban cells. For the purposes of this chronicle, we include:

Planned Christian intentional communities

Localist movements seeking legal or cultural autonomy

Benedict Option experiments, soft or radical

Postliberal schooling and ecclesial micro-polities

Even a few emerging crypto-theonomic enclaves and digital confederacies


These efforts range from modest to messianic. But they share a common impulse: exit, not protest. Formation, not litigation. The aim is not to win back America, but to outlive it.

Now, for the first time, this series will map that terrain. I have tracked every identifiable Christian Benedict Option-type experiment, project, settlement, or scheme from 2000 to 2025 — across all denominations, traditions, and levels of formality. To my knowledge, no one else has yet attempted this. This essay is the opening post in an ongoing series titled:

Benedict Options, USA — or Exodus Americana 2000–2025: How Christians Are Building the Local Christendom Across America



It is a chronicle, not a call to arms. I am not advocating these projects. I am documenting them. Not all deserve praise. Some are brave. Some are banal. Others are charlatanism wrapped in Scripture. But all reveal the same thing: the era of cultural integration is over. The remnant is no longer trying to change the culture. It is trying to survive it — and, in places, replace it.

Let us sketch a few key nodes on this new ecclesial map:

Moscow, Idaho: The most fully realized of the lot. Under the leadership of Pastor Douglas “Doug” Wilson, Christ Church has built what amounts to a postliberal city-state of ‘Wilsonia’ — complete with its own media (Canon Press), its own liberal arts college (New Saint Andrews), a classical Christian school system, and a muscular Calvinist vision of dominion. Wilson’s critics accuse him of patriarchy, authoritarianism, and worse — and yet his movement grows.

Steubenville, Ohio: A Catholic counterpoint to Moscow. Around the Franciscan University, a Catholic revival has taken root — not as separatist in tone, but equally intentional in its formation. Young families relocate to live near like-minded believers. Liturgy, education, and family life take center stage. It is less militant than Moscow, but no less serious.

New Saint Andrews vs. Patrick Henry College: Two rival models of Christian elite formation. One Reformed and classical, the other broadly evangelical and Beltway-adjacent. Patrick Henry once aspired to pipeline Christians into D.C. to retake the regime. New Saint Andrews aspires to outlive it altogether. Their differing orientations say much about the split within post-evangelical strategy.

Greater Idaho and Texit: Movements of legal, cultural, and geographic reconfiguration. Though not explicitly Christian, they are deeply informed by a religious demographic: red-county Protestants seeking detachment from blue-state control. These are political secession attempts as cultural preservation strategies.

The American Redoubt: A regional migration movement urging Christians — especially Reformed, homeschooling, gun-owning families — to relocate to the inland Northwest (Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and Wyoming). Part survivalist, part providential, part libertarian, the Redoubt is more cultural than corporate: a loosely affiliated vision of civilizational retreat into defensible terrain. Its media, prepper forums, and cottage publishers form an ecosystem of their own.

State of Liberty: A more overtly political and theonomic proposal, spearheaded by former Washington state legislator Matthew “Matt” Shea, a controversial Pentecostal firebrand and self-described Christian nationalist. His vision: to carve out a new U.S. state from the inland counties of Washington and Oregon, creating a polity explicitly rooted in Christian values and Biblical law. Derided by critics as delusional or fascist, the movement nonetheless reflects a deeper mood: a conviction that liberty and liberalism no longer mean the same thing.


The Hard Men of the Internet: A loose sphere of podcasts, publications, and personal brands orbiting around figures like Aaron Renn, AD Robles, Joel Webbon, Stephen Wolfe and Michael Foster. Their æsthetic is masculine, Reformed, and no longer deferential to liberal institutions. Though not separatist in geography, they are separatist in disposition: teaching men to build parallel lives, families, and institutions outside the regime’s moral reach.


All these movements — from the formal to the fringe — are shaped by economic and logistical realities. Land prices matter. Homeschooling regulations matter. COVID mandates, mask fights, and vaccine controversies turned many quiet families into amateur theorists of sovereignty. The suburbs now house quiet dissidents. The countryside hosts unregistered congregations. The very act of owning land and educating one’s children is now a low-grade revolutionary act.

This is the ecosystem of the Christian counter-state. It is uneven, uncoordinated, and often doctrinally fractious. But it is real. And it is growing. Not fast, perhaps — but faster than most have noticed.

These are not the heirs of Jerry Falwell. They are the heirs of the desert fathers. They are not building monuments in Washington. They are building altars in the woods.

What unites these projects is not a single creed or strategy, but a mood — an atmosphere of holy estrangement. A recognition that something vast has ended, and something small must now begin. To most Americans, they remain invisible. To the commentariat, they are dismissed as curiosities or cranks. But to those with eyes to see, they form the early scaffolding of a post-American Christian future — imperfect, inchoate, and yet unmistakable. And it is from outside the republic, beyond its borders and illusions, that their shape comes most clearly into view.

V. A Foreign Watcher Speaks

I am not American. I write from outside the bounds of your republic, and I have no personal desire to live within it. I do not suffer its dreams or share in its ruins. I study it not as a would-be participant, but as a chronicler of its unraveling — and as a student of the forms that rise when empires fall.

From this distance, one sees more clearly. Not the noise of the news cycle, but the deeper liturgy beneath it. Not the left-versus-right puppet show, but the spiritual entropy that runs like dry rot through the foundation. It seems to me that while the American left dreams of ruling a broken empire, the right dreams of leaving it. And neither side speaks much of repair.

That is the great silence.

What is coming is not a second civil war, nor a sudden collapse. It is a dignified fragmentation — slow, granular, and irreversible. A soft unraveling into zones, enclaves, confessions, cartographies. Already, the differences between Massachusetts and Mississippi are civilizational. Already, a boy raised in Manhattan and a girl raised in rural Arkansas do not share a common moral grammar. The fiction of national unity survives only by inertia. America is not falling apart. It is already apart. It is simply beginning to notice.

And in that vacuum, the Christian remnant is preparing. Their visions differ — and not all are holy. Some dream of prairie Geneva. Others of tribal hill communes with goats, guns, and Bibles. Some are sincere. Some are opportunists. Many are both, as always. But the point is not purity. The point is preparation.

In April, Aaron Blackwell published about such projects in his Substack essay Bible, Bitcoin, and Barbed Wire, chronicling the ambitions of the New American Founding Company to build intentional communities from scratch — mixing faith, capital, and sovereignty in frontier soil. Elsewhere, pockets of Orthodox revival flicker in Appalachia. Reformed catechesis gains ground in the Dust Belt. It is scattered, small, often foolish. But it is happening.

And it is not just America. It can be seen elsewhere — in mountain valleys in the Balkans, in Pentecostal settlements in Paraguay, among Karens in the Burmese highlands. Wherever modernity crumbles and the state cannot be trusted, the faithful begin to build for themselves. Not because they hate the world, but because they no longer believe the world will protect them. The temptation is always to mistake this for politics. But it is not politics. It is exodus.

That is why I write. Not to romanticize, nor to instruct, but to bear witness. The simulation has become the strategy. The empire rehearsed its own breakup, and the remnant took notes. What was once dismissed as LARP now walks in boots. What was once called coping is now called homesteading. The Benedict Option is no longer optional.

Christians are not waiting for permission.

They are already gone.

Postscript: A Map in Progress

This essay is the opening chapter in an ongoing series:
Benedict Options, USA — or Exodus Americana 2000–2025: How Christians Are Building the Local Christendom Across America

Each entry will explore a distinct strand of the post-American Christian movement — from high-profile enclaves to obscure rural communes, from Calvinist townships to Catholic homestead rings, from crypto-theonomic schemes to backwoods lay monasteries. Some will be impressive. Some will be absurd. All will be real.

This is not a utopian catalogue. It is a field report.

In a time when the American regime still pretends to be universal, it is more important than ever to record those who are quietly opting out — not to fantasize, but to understand. Not to endorse, but to name.

The map is changing. This is an attempt to chart it before the cartographers catch up.