The New Right Has a Blueprint for Building a Christian America
Abbotoy has specific visions for Brewington Farms. The bulk of the land, he explained, will be parceled out and sold for single-family development, the aesthetic continuity of which will be ensured by a homeowner’s association and an architectural control committee. (“English farming village-in-Appalachia feel,” Abbotoy said of his desired look.) In each neighborhood, the company will hold some land to operate as communal farmland or shared amenities like parks or playgrounds. Other parcels will be rented out or sold to “aligned” businesses.
Crucially, the communities will be infused with what Abbotoy describes as a distinctively Christian cultural ethos. Some developments will be centered around “an architecturally significant church,” and the company is placing a premium on developing communal spaces — like schools, community centers and churches — where large families can gather to work, worship or socialize. In accordance with anti-discrimination laws, the communities are theoretically open to anyone, but in practice, Abbotoy, who is a practicing Southern Baptist, expects them to be populated primarily by right-leaning Christians. He has described his customers as “good, ‘based’ people who want to build something inspiring and authentic to the region’s history,” and has said that he expects “most of the leadership” for the project to come from Protestant Christians.
“Having faith integrated with neighborhood design — that’s just inextricably linked with the whole design process,” Abbotoy told me. “It’s thinking structurally about the things that Christians want in a neighborhood.”
Abbotoy, who holds a master’s degree in medieval history, knows all too well that the idea of bringing like-minded Christians together in intentional communities is not a new one — nor is it always a recipe for radical politics. In recent years, various conservative intellectuals have even embraced the idea of building insular conservative Christian communities as a kind of anti-political statement — a declaration that America’s thoroughly secularized and liberalized culture can’t be saved through conventional political means. That retreatist mindset was most memorably captured by the conservative writer Rod Dreher in his 2017 bestseller The Benedict Option, which counseled conservative Christians to take refuge in quasi-monastic communities dedicated to cultivating transcendent virtues. (Dreher apparently held out more hope for the people of Hungary, where he moved in 2022 to join a think tank allied with the country’s now-ousted conservative prime minister Viktor Orbán.)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/06/14/highland-rim-ridgerunner-tennessee-abbotoy-cover-00951382
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