A hearing of President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission ought to be serious. It should reward proportion and memory. It should be where people who invoke faith also remember what faith has done when certainty outran humility. Americans of different faiths and convictions are supposed to gather in such rooms to protect the arrangement that lets them live together without persecution.

Instead, the group’s session on antisemitism became a spectacle.

And in that spectacle, Carrie Prejean Boller offered something praised by her admirers as courage but delivered unmistakably as performance. Repeatedly, she returned to the line meant to thrill an audience already primed for confrontation: I will not bend the knee to Israel. Christ is King.

For Christians, those last three words are sacred. They are meant to bend the speaker downward, not aim him outward. They belong to prayer, to worship, to believers who placed divine authority above earthly rule.

But phrases gather histories. Their meaning depends on where they land — and at whom they are aimed. When “Christ is King” is hurled at Jews, at Jewish national existence itself, it crosses into different territory. What is presented as devotion sounds like warning. What claims to elevate faith becomes accusation.

Anyone who has watched Jewish public life online understands this. The phrase has become a cudgel, directed not heavenward but at Jews, frequently in moments of harassment. During the antisemitism hearing, Seth Dillon tried to say exactly that. Boller brushed it aside.

But history does not retreat because someone finds it inconvenient.

Boller, who entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil in April 2025, insists she stands squarely inside tradition. She invokes the idea that the Church is the “new Israel,” as if metaphor can erase Jewish continuity or cancel Jewish self-determination — as if theology can nullify a people and a country.

But modern Catholic teaching moved the other way. In 1965, Nostra Aetate rejected collective Jewish guilt and condemned antisemitism without ambiguity. Since then, popes from John Paul II, to Benedict XVI, to Francis, have reinforced that turn, affirming the enduring Christian covenant with the Jewish people and, in practice and diplomacy alike, recognizing the legitimacy of Jewish national life in Israel.

This was not cosmetic. It was civilizational.

None of it requires every Catholic to support every Israeli government action or policy. Israelis do not.

But it does close off something essential: the claim that the Christian faith demands hostility to Jewish sovereignty or that Jewish nationhood is itself an affront to God.

To advance that argument now is not preservation.

It is retreat — toward medieval habits the Church spent generations trying to escape.

Once that cover drops, the rest of Boller’s discourse becomes easy to understand.

The Jews as alien.
The Jews as dangerously powerful.
The Jews before whom one must refuse to kneel.

These ideas existed long before Zionism. They helped build a Europe in which Jews were permanent outsiders, tolerated in second class existence, until they were not.

People might use modern vocabulary. They call it anti-Zionism. But the grammar is medieval.

What gave Boller’s performance its charge was the insistence by many that it represented bravery. In the media worlds, where figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens prosper, denunciations of Jews are packaged as resistance — as truth finally spoken against malignant power.

In reality, they are career accelerants. They bring followers, invitations, and notoriety. They manufacture prominence. In those markets, antisemitism is not punished. It pays.

And the market responded immediately. In the days following the hearing, Boller’s audience on X exploded into the six-figure range. What was described as backlash functioned instead as promotion.

That’s why this theatre is different from actual martyrdom. Martyrs give things up. Influencers acquire them.

Nor did her message cool once the cameras were off. Freed from the structure of the hearing, the rhetoric intensified. Praise from figures long associated with conspiratorial and demonic portrayals of Jews was welcomed and amplified. Distance from extremity did not grow. It vanished.

Boller told Dillon she listens to Owens every day and hears nothing antisemitic. That claim is staggering. Owens has invoked the phrase “synagogue of Satan,” trafficked in conspiracies of Jewish control, attacked “Talmudic” morality in language recycled from 19th-century polemics, and echoed Louis Farrakhan’s lie blaming Jews for the transatlantic slave trade. She has also connected Jewish belief to occult imagery and revisited themes that sit beside the medieval blood libel — the accusation that Jews prey upon children.

These are not subtle references. They are not policy critiques or debates over borders. They live among the most catastrophic accusations in Jewish history. To encounter them constantly and feel nothing is not innocence. It is adaptation.

It is also a sign of Boller’s apprenticeship — the process by which Owens’ mainstreaming of antisemitic extremity and outrage became Boller’s calling.

What disappears in moments like this is not just decorum. It is the long, difficult work of Christian-Jewish repair. Generations labored to uproot reflexes of blame that had once seemed natural. They built a vocabulary in which disagreement did not require degradation. That inheritance is fragile. And it weakens each time someone rediscovers how intoxicating it can be to hint that Jewish existence itself stands in defiance of heaven.

What happened in that room was not revelation. It was transmission — old suspicions moving through new circuitry. Medieval accusations formatted for the digital age, equally comfortable in far-right grievance, far-left agitation, Islamist supremacism, and populist resentment.

Different costumes. Same Jewish target.

And those deploying this rhetoric understand the mechanism. They deny animus while activating it. They profess reluctance while benefiting from the applause.

Carrie Prejean Boller did not design that engine. She stepped onto its conveyor belt. She clothed resentment in religious language and called it conscience. But vestments do not absolve what they carry. When faith becomes camouflage for hostility toward Jews, the act ceases to be theological. It becomes agitation with borrowed authority.

For a commission tasked with defending liberty, that matters. It teaches audiences that exclusion can sound devout, that hostility can masquerade as fidelity, that prejudice can be recited as creed. That’s why Boller was rightly removed from the commission.

And it teaches something else as well: that the quickest route to influence in certain American subcultures is to accuse Jews loudly enough while insisting you are merely being faithful.

The people applauding may imagine they are defending Christianity. But what they are defending is the permission to spread hate against most Jews while claiming virtue. That is the real spectacle.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.