Baptisms Under Disco Lights
Inside the MAGA Revival Where Faith, Ambition, and Power Blur
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
The most powerful networking event in Washington right now isn’t a fundraiser, a policy salon, or a donor dinner.
It’s church.
On Sunday mornings, hundreds of young staffers, interns, and Republican operatives line up outside a sports bar a mile from the White House. They clutch coffee, trade Hill gossip, and wait to be let into a dark basement where disco lights skim the walls, the bar is hidden by curtains, and worship music plays like a concert.
There isn’t a cross in sight. But there is power, and plenty of it.
I went inside to report on King’s Church for Vanity Fair. What I didn’t expect was how much it would remind me of my own family or how uncomfortable that recognition would be.
My parents were lifelong Catholics. Then they found an evangelical church, got baptized within months, and became more conservative in a way that felt less like a political shift than a cosmology shift — new friends, new rituals, new authority, new language.
When I told my mom about the Vanity Fair piece, her first reaction wasn’t pride or curiosity.
It was: “Am I going to have to apologize to my pastor for this?”
That moment, and what it revealed, is not in the Vanity Fair piece.
The magazine story, The Hottest Spot for Sunday Church Is a MAGA Dive Bar in Washington DC, which appears in print January 20, is reported, restrained, and focused on the political ecosystem forming around King’s Church.
🔒 Subscriber-only: The rest is about what it felt like to be in that room and why it hit me so personally, as someone who grew up Catholic, flirted with evangelicalism as a kid, and has watched it quietly reshape my own family.
