Are there Cults Inside the Church? The Infiltration of a Catholic Parish

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Part I Introduction

In our latest Questions from the Unsettled Mind, we have been exploring cult-like movements, some of them quite outside the Church, and others on its periphery. The impression you glean from the history of the Church is that from its inception this has been a constant problem. Even St. Paul and St. Peter struggled to contain teachers twisting the Faith for their own purposes. I am reminded of the lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem, “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” that the “Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” so that we must build “with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.” Building and defending, picking up the pieces from the latest disaster, and then starting all over on the ashes of wrecked lives and shattered hopes—that seems to be our frustrating task. But why? Because God is devoted to human freedom, to allowing us to choose for him or against him, with all the consequences of either decision on full display.

Today I take up the literary and spiritual sword to expose an ongoing (as of June 2026) infiltration of a Catholic parish by a man named John Mullen and the group he leads called The Arena. But like all successful infiltrators, he does not appear with horns and a tail, but instead with a smile and a meat smoker. He is a recent Catholic convert with a warm, self-deprecating voice and an evident gift for friendship, running a podcast called The Forum in which he interviews other earnest young men about brotherhood, fatherhood, mission, and the long loneliness of modern life. The episodes have titles like "Brotherhood, Mission, Adventure" and "Calling Men's Hearts to the Father"¹. The guests are likeable. They talk about quitting porn, getting off their phones, learning to pray, finding a wife, becoming the kind of man a child could look up to. Mullen tells his audience, again and again, that they were "called to GREATNESS" and not "to a mid life trapped in a cubicle and a suburb"^{2^^3}. He writes movingly about wanting to "waste time" with friends around a meat smoker instead of optimizing his life into spiritual emptiness, and he warns his readers — gently, repeatedly — not to "beat ourselves up" chasing holiness like one more American performance metric⁴.

It is, perhaps, attractive. A great deal of what Mullen says about the modern Church is true, or, perhaps better, close to true: that many parishes are inhospitable, that a generation of men has been left adrift, that consumer Christianity is thin gruel. He says these things well. He is not a crank, and he is definitely not stupid. He is, in his own description, a former engineer who spent "nearly a decade" in industry, converted to Catholicism in 2023, left his job in 2024 to become a full-time missionary, and now pours himself into the formation of young men in Columbus, Ohio⁵.

Behind the appealing language of renewal, however, Mullen is assembling something with a definite and disquieting shape: a tightly bonded, hierarchical, male-only movement organized around the conviction that the feminine is a kind of chaos to be mastered, that peoplehood is finally a matter of "ethnic group origin and continuation"⁶, that democracy is a mistake — "this… is why democracy always fails in the end"⁷ — and that the right men, properly initiated and properly led, should think of themselves as "the rightful rulers of a justly hierarchical society"⁸. He pursues this project, by his own account, "inside" the Catholic Church while a friend on the secular alt right pursues the parallel version "outside" it⁹. And in the past month it has acquired its first institutional body: a Columbus parish whose men’s adult-formation program his movement has taken over.

Since I began preparing this Question, Mullen has been deleting and de-listing substantial portions of his work from the internet. I anticipated this possibility and had already captured his full unedited Substack Notes, his longer form written essays in The Still Forge, as well as all of his Forum podcast episodes. That material together with the many other primary source documents referred to in this Question can be accessed at the Shared Folder, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HgL9UjDkCTvlSBUwRO14oYMyGPg-0Swn?usp=sharing.

Part II The Man and the Vehicle

Let’s begin with what is concrete, because Mullen's project is concrete. It is not only a worldview; it is a set of institutions, with names, a city, a budget, a campus, and a parish.

Mullen is a full-time missionary with St. Paul's Outreach (SPO) and one of the two chapter leaders of its "Columbus Young Adults" chapter¹⁰. SPO is a campus-based Catholic apostolate — "primarily focused on building rich community of believers on college campuses across America" — but Mullen's own niche is one step past the campus, and he says so plainly: "My job is a bit different: I work with men out of college, and I love it"¹¹. His mission field is the post-college Catholic young man in Columbus, and he is, by his own account, a tireless gatherer of them: "If you're in Columbus, just ask me for a connection: I know hundreds of these guys"¹².

Mullen is also a member of Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community in Columbus — a Catholic 501(c)(3) formed in 1975 (and also registered as "People of God's Love Community")¹³. This, too, is more than biography, because Christ the Cornerstone is a Sword of the Spirit community. That is not an inference: the Sword of the Spirit's own North American communities directory lists "Christ the Cornerstone, Columbus, OH" at the "Underway" stage of its membership ladder¹⁴. The Sword of the Spirit is the international network of charismatic "covenant communities" — a self-described "community of communities" founded in 1982 — whose troubled record is well-documented and which we will confront directly below. So, Mullen does not merely resemble the covenant-community movement; he belongs to one of its communities, and lets it slip in passing: he recounts being drawn into Catholicism through a neighbor's "group of charismatic Catholics" and a "Cornerstone gathering," and calls himself one of "the charismatics (of which I am one)"¹⁵.

These are not three separate worlds — the campus chapter, the covenant community, the Sword of the Spirit — but one apparatus, bound by shared leadership and shared money. The same Andrew Kebe listed as vice-president of Christ the Cornerstone on its public tax filings is also, by his own account, the senior mission director of St. Paul's Outreach's Ohio mission center in Columbus — the SPO operation that runs both the Ohio State campus chapter and the Columbus Young Adults chapter Mullen leads¹⁶. And the covenant community funds the campus outreach directly: Christ the Cornerstone's most recent public filing records a grant to St. Paul's Outreach¹⁷. Kebe's reach extends into the diocese itself — he has served on the Diocese of Columbus's "Real Presence, Real Future" commission, the body advising the diocese's sweeping parish-restructuring plan, and on its higher-education pastoral-care sub-committee¹⁸. And he is no reluctant functionary of this world: in the Sword of the Spirit's own magazine, Kebe paid public tribute to Stephen B. Clark — a founding theorist of the entire covenant-community movement — as his personal "mentor" and "father," crediting Clark's "fatherly love" with his own "desire… to be a builder in the Sword of the Spirit and Kairos"¹⁹. The man who helps run the Sword of the Spirit community, directs the SPO operation that feeds it, and advises the diocese on the future of its parishes is one and the same person.

Out of this base — an SPO campus chapter and a Sword of the Spirit covenant community — Mullen has built his own men's organization, The Arena. It is based in Columbus, "my adopted hometown"²⁰. It has held at least two annual men's retreats; he describes a friend who "made a massive impact on the men's culture of The Arena" at "The Arena's second annual men's retreat"²¹. It has a leadership cohort, one of whom Mullen calls "a close friend and trusted brother in building the culture of The Arena"²². And it is funded by donors, whom Mullen addresses with striking intimacy: "patrons of my mission. You have funded my quest… I get to go on adventures, rally the boys, because of you. Your sacrifice binds me to you"²³.

I dwell on the institutional plumbing here, because the vocabulary it runs on is not generic. "Households," "formation," "discipleship," "commit to a people on a mission"²⁴ — these are the load-bearing terms of the charismatic covenant-community movement, and Mullen reaches for them because he comes from inside it. He even maps the supply chain that feeds his work: "From The Vine… to Damascus. From Damascus to SPO. From SPO to me"²⁵. When he describes what he is making, he describes it in the movement's own words. The words have a history, and so does the model.

He is also unusually explicit, for a religious leader, about the scale of his ambition. He is not building a Bible study. "Your fraternal band of brothers will save society," he writes, "as you launch yourselves and each other into positions of trust and competence and retake captured institutions"²⁶. He invites readers, almost ritually, to enlist: "DM me if your soul is lit on fire by any of this… I will be loyal to you to the end as a brother in arms"²⁷. "We are building a group of men who can do things," he writes, borrowing a line from a science-fiction recruiting poster: "Would you like to know more?"²⁸.

Part III The Diagnosis Behind his Product

To understand his appeal — and the danger — you have to take Mullen's diagnosis seriously, because it is the part of him that resonates most with his intended targets. His fullest statement of it appears within the manifesto that opens the second season of The Forum, subtitled "Recovering the Language and the Demand for Masculine Initiation"²⁹. The argument runs like this. Modernity has "disenchanted" the world, hollowing out the myths and meanings by which human beings actually live. This disenchantment has crept "even and perhaps especially into the heart of the Catholic Church," producing "a generation of small-souled, weak-willed, empty-minded, pusillanimous-hearted men." The culture is a village being devoured by a "dragon" — Mullen's image, drawn openly from Jordan Peterson and the Orthodox iconographer Jonathan Pageau, both of whom he credits with re-enchanting the world for him in his twenties³⁰. The only cure is "re-mythologization": men must be "re-initiated," sent on a "hero's journey," to recover a purpose worth dying for, to slay the dragon.

Much of this is the common stock of a certain post-liberal cultural criticism. Disenchantment is real. The crisis of young men is real. The thinness of suburban parish life is real, and Mullen describes it with a satirist's accuracy — the "donuts after Mass" called "hospitality," the "folk guitars and felt banners," the "9-minute limp-wristed homily from a boomer priest"³¹. If this were the whole of him, he would only join the chorus of a familiar lament.

But watch what the dragon turns out to be. The chaos eating the village is gendered, and it is female. And watch what the cure requires. The village to be restored is the "integrated village," where "the city of man and the city of God were meant to be (as much as possible) the same place," ordered by "the great chain of being and hierarchy" rather than by "liberal ideas and mass participation in the political process"³². The "re-enchantment" is not only spiritual. It has a sex, it has a politics, and — as we will see — it now has a parish. Let’s take them in turn.

Part IV Mullen’s View of the Feminine as Chaos

Of the charges against Mullen, the one most fully and unambiguously supported by his own words is that his worldview is, at its foundation, a doctrine of female subordination — and that it is built less from the Catholic tradition than from the online "manosphere." He does not hedge the subordination. "The masculine is that which leads, shapes, and delimits the feminine," he writes. "It is the head… The masculine must initiate and the feminine must follow, or else society collapses"³³. This is not a passing metaphor; it is the organizing polarity of his whole cosmology, the same masculine-order-versus-feminine-chaos scheme that drives the "dragon."

What that dragon is, Mullen spells out — and it is explicitly gendered. Building his diagnosis on Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, in which order is coded masculine and chaos feminine, he describes the “village” of Catholic culture as “being chased down and eaten by the dragon of primordial evil chaos,” and then names it: “The masculine, ordering principle that founded Christendom and the West more broadly has been subverted in our culture by the self-doubt-causing rampant feminine. We are in a village that is being attacked by Tiamat”³⁴. The dragon is Tiamat, the feminine chaos-mother; the masculine is the order she has overrun. He works the same polarity at a funeral, judging a progressive congregation “fundamentally lunar (feminine)” so that “the solar (masculine) makes no sense within it… It would become… a mausoleum not a womb”³⁵.

On this gendered polarity he builds a frank program of patriarchy — and he uses the word as a compliment. Rejecting the mainstream Catholic language of the husband as "servant leader," he tells his readers: "you are called to be an actual leader in your home, not a 'servant leader' whose authority is always conditional upon your wife's approval… Assume patriarchy. Benevolent but functional patriarchy"³⁶.

The benevolence is doing heavy work in that sentence, and his other statements strain it. A healthy society, he argues, "is only viable under patriarchy, which teaches women docility," a system in which "men must appeal to the woman's father." He asks: "Are you really going to tell me with a straight face that a 24 year old woman is a better independent judge of masculine virtue… than her male relatives?"³⁷. Daughters, in his account of fatherhood, exist in relation to men: "Fatherhood is for building sons into warriors and daughters into women worthy of warriors"³⁸.

The most chilling single line he has written comes in a discussion of falling birthrates. Confronted with the fact that women, asked to bear more children, decline, Mullen does not propose persuasion. He writes: "When asked whether they would like to do what is necessary to continue mankind, women say no. This is why previous civilizations didn't ask. Those who did, did not endure"³⁹. Yes, read that again. The lesson he draws from women's reluctance is not that they should be convinced, but that healthy civilizations did not put the question to them at all. It is difficult to read that as anything but an argument that women's reproductive consent is a luxury the West can no longer afford, that rape is justifiable as a social and legal policy.

These are not stray provocations; they circle a single idea — that women belong out of view. The "must follow, or else society collapses" line quoted above was in fact one of three notes Mullen posted in a single sitting, all endorsing an essay by the dissident-right writer Johann Kurtz, titled without euphemism "Why should capable women be hidden?" Mullen’s verdict on it: "This one speaks for itself, actually. I have nothing to add. Well done @Johann Kurtz"⁴⁰. And what he is endorsing is a program of literal concealment. Kurtz's thesis is that woman "bears this symbol of the veil — sometimes expressed as curtain or physical separation — which hides her at the most profound moments of her life (worship, marriage, conception, childbirth, nursing, death)," her influence supposedly realized precisely by being hidden⁴¹. Mullen restates it in his own voice — "The feminine is that which is not for public consumption, public exposure, public gawking" — and faults only those traditionalists who fall into "obsessing about external forms and rules of modesty and privacy without understanding the deep feminine power therein expressed," producing "a somehow sterile baby factory" rather than a "luscious garden"⁴². The objection is not to hiding women. It is that the hiding is being done without enough conviction.

What makes Mullen distinctive — and what a reader steeped only in Church language might miss — is that the intellectual scaffolding under all of this is not Catholic complementarity. It is the framework of the "redpill" and "blackpill" subcultures: the world of pickup artists, men's-rights forums, and the involuntarily celibate ("incels"). Mullen has, in effect, baptized it.

The signature of that subculture is the idea that relations between the sexes are a brutal biological marketplace, in which women select hypergamously for status and men are ranked and sorted by it. Mullen states the thesis in precisely those terms, in his own voice: "women ARE the market," he writes⁴³. "Their desires are socially conditionable but economic status, confidence, competence, and physical prowess will always be what the female market is buying. There are male equivalents: youth, beauty, docility… what the me[n] market is buying." The aim of a healthy culture, he continues, is "to incentivize the market (women) to buy the products available (men)"⁴⁴. Women are the market; men are the products. That is not the Theology of the Body. That is the sexual-marketplace model of the manosphere, rendered almost clinically.

The vocabulary follows the framework. Mullen writes constantly of "the longhouse" — the manosphere's term for a feminized regime of social control — as the enemy: "the longhouse is not your friend… DM me. We have Christendom-rebuilding work to do"⁴⁵, and, of the same longhouse inside the Church, "it must burn to ash"⁴⁶. He amplifies, with the comment "Brilliant. Gen Z slang is real," a long post cataloguing the incel lexicon — "mogging," "rizz," "moid" and "foid" — and asserting that "social class is biological destiny"⁴⁷. He engages a Raw Egg Nationalist essay arguing that "the liberal-bureaucratic longhouse depends on suppressing the testosterone of young white men"⁴⁸. He treats the "blackpill" — the incel doctrine that the sexual hierarchy is fixed and merciless — not as a sickness but as a stage of insight: "the blackpill is just the start of the journey," he writes; "the question is what do you do with the blackpill that matters"⁴⁹.

The parallels are not incidental; they go to the center of his project. The incel begins from male dispossession, female hypergamy, and a rigged sexual order — and Mullen agrees with all three. Where he parts company is on the cure. The incel ends in despair or in the solitary self-optimization of "looksmaxxing"; Mullen rejects both — "Less looksmaxxing, more Catholic vitalism," he quips⁵⁰ — and offers instead a collective, religious solution: brotherhood, conversion, and the restoration of patriarchy. He is, in a precise sense, post-incel. He takes the blackpill's grim sociology as basically true and offers young men a way out of the despair it produces — not by questioning the premise that women are a "market" and men are ranked stock, but by promising that Christ and a band of brothers can lift a man's rank and, eventually, "re-impose social standards of modesty" once "we win"⁵¹. In the same breath he can name "misogyny" as one of the available male responses to a sexualized culture and treat it as a regrettable but understandable way station rather than a sin to be repented⁵².

This matters for the argument to come, because it means that Mullen's appeal to alienated young men runs along the very same channel that incel subculture runs along — the same diagnosis of grievance, the same vocabulary, the same enemy — but terminates in a church, a household, and a movement. He is not rescuing men from the manosphere's account of women. He is giving that account a cross to stand under.

It is worth being fair about what is not here. Mullen is not crudely contemptuous of individual women, and he frames much of this as descriptive "biological realism." But the structure of the view is his own, stated plainly: the feminine "must follow"; women must be taught "docility"; a woman's judgment is subordinate to her male relatives'; her reproductive refusal is a civilizational problem; and the entire relation between the sexes is a market in which she is buyer and he is product. Whatever one calls that, it is neither the moral equality the Church teaches nor the personalism of St. John Paul II — a point I will return to.

Part V Blood, Folk, and Nation

Let’s turn to his views of blood, folk, and nation, where his most important document is not a social-media post but a sustained essay, "Framing the Discussion for Intentional Rural Christian Community," which Mullen wrote in 2022 and republished on his Substack⁵³. It is a blueprint for building intentional Catholic communities — and its organizing premise is ethnic. Its opening sentence laments "the decline of heritage (European-descended) Western and specifically American cultures"⁵⁴. It argues that such a community's unity "should be strengthened by a shared sense of cultural and ethnic group origin and continuation"⁵⁵. It faults evangelical Christianity for "discouraging public acknowledgement and celebration of the positive aspects of its European-descended cultural origins"⁵⁶.

And the Framing essay is no aberration; the same ethnic premise runs through the essay series he has since unlisted. In "Awaiting Re-Enchantment" he mourns the loss of neighborhoods that “shared a homogenous, tightly-integrated European-derived culture,” and names their killer outright: “Integration of northern American cities destroyed the vast majority of the homogenous, high-trust Catholic inner cities… that had once dotted the nation”⁵⁷. In "College Oasis" the frame turns explicitly biological: the remedy for Catholic decline, he writes, requires that we “rebuild a multi-generational world of real social consequences for failing to pass along the family bloodline,” and “start seeing the consequences of genetic line failure as existential, rather than preferential”⁵⁸. And in "The Enlightenment Insomnia" the frontier metaphor turns nativist: the only “hostile tribe of Indians” left, he quips, are “those coming to take your tech jobs”⁵⁹.

None of this is coded. It is a Catholic convert proposing, in his own name, that the parish-anchored communities he wants to build be bound together by shared European ancestry. The same logic surfaces across his shorter writing. He frames immigration as contamination and theft: lamenting that "the kulaks have been targeted for liquidation by internal displacement and replacement," contrasting the small-town American with "newly arrived foreigners with obvious contempt for her"⁶⁰. He warns that "once a nation accepts that anyone can be a part of it as long as they work hard and adopt the values… its self-destruction by dilution is assured" — written in response to an article titled "Why Would You Care About White Demographic Decline if you're not a racist?"⁶¹.

Around this core, Mullen continually amplifies writing more extreme than his own. Presented with a post arguing that the West must reclaim "genetic mastery" over "the subservient… but intellectually and culturally inferior Oriental and third-world races," Mullen replied, "Agree with all of this except the final paragraph" — and the paragraph he excepted was a piece of marriage advice, not the racial hierarchy⁶². He calls the far-right publisher Imperium Press's account of moral order — a hierarchy of loyalty running "nation before race, and race before humanity" — a schema "accurately and nobly" summarized⁶³. He engages a pro-"remigration" essay (the identitarian euphemism for mass expulsion of immigrants) by calling that part of it "the hinge of the essay" and affirming "Tribe is life. Modernity is parasitic upon that life"⁶⁴. Of an anti-immigrant screed titled "Somalis and the Great Western Death Wish," he wrote admiringly: "I want to be able to write like this… Thank you boss for putting in the effort to get your vitriol this dialed-in"⁶⁵.

Mullen's feed is a curated tour of the intellectual far right: Imperium Press, Arktos Journal, Aporia Magazine, Barsoom, the Exit Group, Social Matter, the Vanguardist Journal, Curtis Yarvin, the pseudonymous "Bronze Age Pervert," Raw Egg Nationalist, and Jack Donovan. He names the dissident-right writer Derek Suszko as "my comrade in this fight" and says Suszko "is doing outside the Catholic Church what I am doing inside it"⁶⁶. He locates himself, approvingly, within what he calls "the dissident movement"⁶⁷. And he repeatedly invokes the white-nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes — never with explicit endorsement, but always as the understandable symptom of elite failure, the "preview avatar" of the "angry young white man energy" the establishment is busy manufacturing⁶⁸.

The honest description of all this is Ethnonationalism: the belief that peoplehood is fundamentally ethnic, that the relevant "we" is European-descended, that immigration is "dilution," and that a healthy society frankly defends its bloodline. Mullen will say that ethnicity is subordinate to faith. But watch how he says it. Replying to a post praising "a community united by bonds of blood and caste loyalty… sought by our Tribe," he writes: "This must be understood, Catholic young men: your ethnic/civilizational identity is subordinate to your Christian identity, yet IT REMAINS ESSENTIAL." We must "reject deracination," he continues, and not mistake "the folk spirit and identity which God has given us" for our final end — "and yet" it is only "by being embodied as part of a family of families (a kinfolk, a people)" that we can become the people of God. Then the turn: "We are not the Body of Christ in isolation from each other as individuals. Nor are we the Body of Christ as an amorphous blob of beige-colored 'humans.' No, we are the Body of Christ through our individual, sexed, bodies, and through our families and extended fraternal networks, and through our kin structures, and through our nations. This is Catholic subsidiarity"⁶⁹. That last sentence is the tell. Mullen has taken a settled term of Catholic social teaching and refilled it with blood — a Body of Christ mediated "through our kin structures, and through our nations," recoiling from a "beige-colored" humanity. "Subordinate but essential" is still essential; and as Part VIII shows, what he has imported here the Faith does not merely lack but explicitly condemns — including under the very word he has borrowed.

Part VI Against the Liberal Constitutional Order

If his gender doctrine is the most repulsive and his ethnonationalism the most disquieting, his politics is the most pervasive. It is not a side theme; it is the water Mullen swims in. He is, straightforwardly, an opponent of liberal democracy, and he says so openly.

"Democracy's telos is towards tyranny of the hidden in the guise of the many," he writes⁷⁰. More flatly: "This, in a nutshell, is why democracy always fails in the end"⁷¹. His objection is to the thing itself — to "mass participation in the political process," which his manifesto contrasts unfavorably with "the great chain of being and hierarchy spoken of during the heights of medieval Christendom"⁷². In his programmatic essay he faults conservatism for ever accepting "the liberal ideal of the 'marketplace of ideas,' which posits that free speech and individual rights should predominate rather than societal enforcement of desired values"⁷³. Free speech is the problem; "societal enforcement of desired values" is the goal.

In place of democracy, he offers rule by the worthy few. "It's time to build and to practice the skills of rulership," he tells readers; men must "take dominion and exercise just stewardship of creation," or "evil men will do it instead"⁷⁴. Presented with a Nietzschean encomium to "the despotism of [a] superior personality," his only amendment is theological: "This, but… as Catholic men bring it under Christ's dominion, as the true King"⁷⁵. Cultural standards, he insists, "are not bottom-up, but top-down… Elites must set the tone"⁷⁶.

The mechanism is not the ballot but the slow capture of institutions, and here Mullen is explicit and tactical. He admires how "it took decades, practically a century, of slow worming through the institutions" for the left to win the culture, and concludes: "If they can do it, so can we" — name-checking the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin even as he claims to have moved past Yarvin's fatalism: "I have departed from Yarvin's Cthulhu. Turns out you can just do things"⁷⁷.

And in his own writing the strategy has a name: insurgency. Giving thanks at Thanksgiving, Mullen is grateful to be “surrounded by a band of brothers that’s on mission, at war, fighting not to halt the retreat but to form a counter insurgency,” and grateful that “it’s easier than ever to strike deep into mushy local social networks of boomers if you have a mission and a vision and a warband”⁷⁸. The “slow worming through the institutions” he admired in the left becomes, in his own telling, a counter-insurgency staged through warbands.

The most revealing exchange came when Derek Suszko argued that a men's movement must teach "the men… that their group comprises the rightful state and ruling class of a future government," something "no one is going to believe… without a charismatic figure reinforcing it again and again." Mullen did not recoil. He agreed, and described the on-ramp: "if we can teach our men how to see themselves as the rightful rulers of a justly hierarchical society… then we're getting somewhere. But… we have to start with what we have: dinner parties, small groups, workout buddies, barbecues. This is the step before municipal influence"⁷⁹. The barbecue is the first rung of a ladder whose top is political control.

And he wants that power actually seized, not merely admired. Mullen's quarrel with quietist Christians is that they are not political enough — that they refuse to reach for power at all. He derides the "no-touchy 'separate peas and carrots' nondenoms who hate trying to take state power," whose "total aversion to using any power lest you become corrupted by it," he says, "has led to the liquidation of our entire culture, civilization, and much of our progeny"⁸⁰. To seek power, in his framing, is to risk "put[ting] on Sauron's ring" — and his worry runs opposite to the usual one: the men who refuse to wear it may be "fools who deserve all that comes to the naive" (though he hedges: "I'm somewhat worried that they are both" right and foolish). And on the same night he let the harder question surface: "Who amongst us can offer the theological underpinnings for taking arms against evil without the blessing of the Church?… when the Church is paralyzed, what action shall the virtuous layman lead? Or will the cleansing be left to lawless men?"⁸¹. Note that — the cleansing.

It is important to be exact about what this is and is not — and the exactness cuts both ways. Mullen is not, in anything on the public record, calling his men to take up arms now; saying, "I would never suggest the men around me to throw their lives away in a futile stare-down with the federal government"⁸², and his actual method is the patient, non-violent capture of institutions, not the barricade. However, the fact that Mullen even raises the issue of military conflict with state power is worrisome. What soccer coach invests time mulling over how his players would fare in a military matchup with a Marine platoon? He wouldn’t — unless that coach is coaching something more than soccer. Further, notice the shape of his seeming renunciation of political violence. What he refuses is a futile armed confrontation — a judgment of prudence, not of principle — even as, in the passages just quoted, he keeps the category of force open: asking who will lead "the cleansing," and faulting the men who won't "put on Sauron's ring" as naïve fools. The "warband" and "Reconquista" language is built into the strategy of the long game. The disavowal of imminent political violence is contingent on the odds, and the door is left pointedly ajar. What is unmistakable is the project itself: to replace democratic self-government with the rule of a self-selected, hierarchical, religiously-defined elite — to "retake captured institutions" not by winning elections but by building a parallel aristocracy and waiting for the liberal order to fall, an event Mullen awaits with gratitude: "I'm thankful for the collapse of the liberal order that will happen in my lifetime"⁸³. That ambition sounds abstract until you watch where it touches ground. It has now touched ground in a Catholic parish.

Part VII The Strategy of Parish Capture

The instinct of a sympathetic reader is to treat all of this as online bravado — a young man's overheated rhetoric that has nothing to do with the actual work of a campus missionary. That reading is no longer available, because Mullen has written down a strategy for taking over Catholic institutions, and in June 2026 that strategy produced a result.

Let’s start with the strategy, in his own words. Mullen does not counsel patience with parishes that resist him; he counsels target selection. "Find your sandbox parish and get to work!" he writes. "Pick one anchor parish in your diocese where conditions are favorable to build something (aka friendly priest, a few good men already there)… The parish resisting you? Leave it"⁸⁴. The criteria are revealing: a "friendly priest," a beachhead of "a few good men," a place where you can "build something." Around a provocatively titled essay, "First, Kill All the Church Secretaries," he comments approvingly: "Yes. This is how influence is amassed and practiced"⁸⁵. He looks forward to a parish where there is "no Susan from the parish council able to stymie us"⁸⁶ — the gatekeepers of ordinary parish governance recast as obstacles to be removed. And he frames the whole effort as filling a vacuum left by exhausted clergy: priests are "handcuffed to the sinking ship… You're going to have to step into the breach"⁸⁷. The layman, in this vision, does not assist the pastor; he supplants the structures around the pastor. This is the general doctrine — "retake captured institutions"⁸⁸ — brought down to the parish level: identify a parish with a sympathetic pastor and a nucleus of allied men, move in, build a parallel program, and displace whatever was there before.

And the strategy is not aimed only at fellow laymen; Mullen has written a detailed appeal to the clergy themselves. In an "Open Letter to Young Diocesan Priests," he urges priests to redirect their "costly time" away from "the 101 'today' needs of the parish they're assigned to" — the needs of "Aunt Susan calling the parish front desk in a frenzy" — and toward young-men's apostolates like his own, dismissing the assigned parish's concerns as things that "will be irrelevant in 10-30 years when that particular parish closes"⁸⁹. He instructs priests to treat such apostolates as "your hunting ground, your places of relational capital accumulation, your own personal garden beds" — and, most tellingly, to pursue this even against their own superiors: "Yes, you are subordinate to a parish pastor with competing vision (or lack of it) and competing priorities; solving that problem is downstream of deciding to solve it. Decide"⁹⁰. He would prefer the apostolate be "disconnected from any particular parish so as to have a city-wide draw"⁹¹ — a power base under no single pastor. The goal, stated plainly, is to "capture the hearts of the Zoomers"⁹². This is not the voice of a man slotting into a parish's existing order. It is the voice of a man building a parallel institution and coaching priests to prioritize it over the parishes they were ordained to serve.

Now the result. In June of 2026, Mullen’s group, The Arena, became the new men's faith and fellowship program at St. Mary Catholic Church in German Village, Columbus, Ohio. The parish's own website bears out the institutional fact: St. Mary's Men's Ministry page now lists The Arena, describing it as "a young men's ministry that come [sic] together to become better men for future wives and families rooted in Christ"⁹³. Read against the parish infiltration strategy above, the event is not ambiguous. An anchor parish was selected. The Arena was moved in, not in isolation, but as a beachhead. Over the months to come, its sister groups joined: the Ascent, Wellspring (led by the other SPO Columbus Young Adults missionary), and Legacy — all of them linked to Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community. As of June 2026 the Arena is listed as an official ministry of the parish, a program run by the movement I have spent this essay describing: a movement whose stated content is female subordination, ethnonationalism, and taking political power for the rule by the worthy few. The "sandbox parish" is no longer a metaphor. It has an address.

There are also signs that the ground at St. Mary was prepared from within. In late Fall of 2024 — months before The Arena's installation — the parish's then-business manager, Tim Hughes (another Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community member), who also appears to oversee its recently added men's "Legacy" group, circulated an internal proposal headed "From Maintenance to Mission: Responding to the Shift from Christendom to an Apostolic Age"⁹⁴. The title borrows the very paradigm of James Shea’s book that Mullen presses on priests, and the substance is the covenant-community pipeline drawn as a parish org chart: a "funnel" moving parishioners up through programming into "Formation" and then into "leadership," a parish council expanded into "Director" committees, and a 2026 "Faith Fully Alive" program of graded commitments — weekly Mass, daily prayer, small-group nights, monthly confession — with relationships tiered, "after Jesus," into one's "Big 3," "12 apostles," "72 disciples," and "the Nations." Though it was not ultimately implemented, the proposal shows the parish being pressed, from inside its own staff, toward exactly the formation-and-leadership architecture of the covenant-community model — the architecture The Arena then arrived to embody.

And they line up on top of a foundation that is now documented rather than inferred. The Arena grows out of Mullen's SPO chapter — the Columbus Young Adults chapter he co-leads — and out of his Sword of the Spirit covenant community, Christ the Cornerstone. And the campus apostolate is no neutral third party: St. Paul's Outreach was born of the same early-1970s St. Paul charismatic-renewal milieu as the Sword of the Spirit's covenant communities, and the two worlds share their leadership — SPO's founder and longtime president, Gordy DeMarais, sits on the council of coordinators of the Community of Christ the Redeemer, itself a Sword of the Spirit covenant community⁹⁵. Both of Mullen's vehicles, then — the campus chapter that recruits the men and the covenant community that forms them — trace to the same network. Strikingly, that pairing is one the Sword of the Spirit's own governing manual anticipates: a community, it says, can "sustain outreaches that are not just part of the community itself… for instance, a university outreach, a men's movement"⁹⁶. A university outreach and a men's movement — SPO and The Arena — is exactly the pairing at the center of Mullen's work, atop a covenant community that sits at the manual's "Underway" rung of membership ("members, affiliates, underway A, underway B, full member")⁹⁷. The arrangement is not an echo of the covenant-community model. It is that model, built to spec.

And that model carries a documented record of harm — not in the abstract, but in real people’s lives and, repeatedly, in Ohio. The Sword of the Spirit organizes members into sex-segregated "households" under personal "headship" and an explicit doctrine of submission: "the interdependence and total commitment of Christians to one another is not possible without authority and submission," its manual teaches; "to function as a body Christians must make themselves subordinate to one another"⁹⁸. Its campus arm historically ran gendered "Foundations" courses splitting "Single Men" from "Single Women," with a "Senior Pledge" and a track titled "Choosing for Discipleship"⁹⁹ — the sex-separated, staged-commitment template that recurs wherever this movement plants itself. Where the doctrine has been put into practice, the results are on the record: in the Steubenville area, Bishop Albert Ottenweller's investigation found ex-members' allegations against a Sword of the Spirit–linked community valid¹⁰⁰; the Catholic press chronicled "Catholic Covenant Communities in Turmoil," with former members describing lives dominated by the sect¹⁰¹; and abuse reckonings have continued for decades¹⁰².

That record of harm is not only the testimony of ex-members and investigating bishops; it includes one of the movement's own founders. The Sword of the Spirit's training in headship and submission proved so divisive that in 1990–91 the mother community itself — the Word of God in Ann Arbor, some three thousand strong — tore in two, and its co-founder Ralph Martin, who with Stephen B. Clark had built both the Word of God and the Sword of the Spirit, broke with the project and recanted it. Evaluating the community's formation system before the membership, Martin called it "an ill-advised venture that led to considerable confusion, turmoil, spiritual distress," one that "fostered elitism," "attempted to build a comprehensive Christian culture by fiat," "had a negative impact on many marriages," and was "especially harmful to women"¹⁰³; he and his fellow leaders, the contemporaneous press reported, "begged forgiveness for misusing their authority in the community"¹⁰⁴. The community split along that fault line — and which side it left standing is the fact that matters here. Martin's faction reclaimed local autonomy and pulled back from the Sword of the Spirit; Clark's loyalists kept the system intact and remained within it, his celibate brotherhood the Servants of the Word staying "firmly within the Sword of the Spirit" while Clark went on "promot[ing] the approach"¹⁰⁵. It is Clark's branch — the unrepentant one — that runs down through the Sword of the Spirit to Christ the Cornerstone and, thence, to Andrew Kebe and John Mullen. The covenant-community model The Arena embodies, then, is not merely one a bishop once censured. It is one a co-founder publicly renounced as harmful — above all to women — and that Mullen has now installed, intact, inside a Catholic parish.

Most pointed of all, there is a documented precedent for the precise event now unfolding in Columbus — a Sword of the Spirit affiliate capturing a Catholic parish from within. In the 1980s the New Jersey community People of Hope — a covenant community so controlling that Margaret Atwood kept its "Catholics say cult taking over" coverage among her own research clippings for The Handmaid's Tale¹⁰⁶ — was found by fellow parishioners to be "trying to take over the parish and its school." The Archbishop of Newark, Peter L. Gerety, "order[ed] its members to end their affiliation with… the Sword of the Spirit," declared its teachings "not in accord with the Archdiocese of Newark," and "removed at least 75 members of the People of Hope who had served on the parish council or the home school association"¹⁰⁷. That community's full arc — from formation, through the parish takeover, to the escalating control and the abuse allegations that followed — is retraced in the 2024 documentary podcast Shadow of Hope: Life Inside a Catholic Covenant Community. Drawing on former members and the Seton Hall University archives, that reporting describes a community that instructed parents to use physical discipline on infants and to withhold food as punishment, enforced strict gender roles, and eventually faced allegations of sexual abuse by its leaders¹⁰⁸. Its host, returning to her own hometown to understand how neighbors were drawn in, draws the lesson plainly: "We all have to remain vigilant to protect our freedom of thought, because there are real consequences to that"¹⁰⁹. Forty years later, a men's program grown from a Sword of the Spirit community in Columbus has become an official ministry of a Catholic parish. The pattern is not new. What is new is that, this time, no one has yet intervened.

The point here is not guilt by association. What the record shows is a common lineage and a common methodology. Mullen belongs to a Sword of the Spirit community; he builds with the covenant-community toolkit of households, formation, and discipleship; he recruits from a campus chapter; and he has now installed his program inside a parish by the very infiltration strategy he wrote down. He is, in his own admiring phrase about the movement he comes from, building a community that demands total commitment and runs on personal loyalty — "Your sacrifice binds me to you," he tells his patrons¹¹⁰; "There is no 'you' without the unit of men you belong to," he tells his men¹¹¹.

Mullen gives us a glimpse of the formation method he admires and is actively trying to adopt in a podcast interview with Sam Halligan of the allied group Forge. Pressing his guest on how the Forge secures commitment, Mullen receives, with open enthusiasm, a description of a high-demand recruitment technique: prospective leaders must affirm a three-part rule (Forge's "TAO": Thriving, Apostolic, Orthodox), with the "Orthodox" plank functioning as a loyalty test requiring agreement with "everything the Church teaches regardless of exception"; then they must, in Halligan's words, "sign a freaking paper." The method is to "force the decision" and treat hesitation as refusal¹¹². Mullen's response is appetite, not caution: "I really, really, really want to push beyond [the] two hours a week… I need to know how to do this in my own life and my own work"¹¹³. I note carefully that the signed-commitment apparatus is documented for Forge, not (yet) for The Arena; what the record shows is that Mullen covets it and is studying how to import it. But a man assembling a campus pipeline, a covenant-community base, a parish foothold, and a high-pressure loyalty mechanism has told you the kind of thing he is building.

Part VIII The Collision with Church Teaching

Mullen presents all of this as a recovery of authentic, muscular, pre-modern Catholicism against a soft, "bureaucratized" Church of "95% mushy yeses"¹¹⁴. The presentation is essential to his appeal; it is also, at several decisive points, false. On each, the actual teaching of the Catholic Church — not the opinions of theologians he can wave away, but the Catechism, the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the popes, and the Church's own law — stands against him.

On the State and Religious Liberty: Mullen's ideal is integralist in substance: a restored "Christendom" in which "the city of man and the city of God" are "the same place"¹¹⁵, brought "under Christ's dominion, as the true King" by Catholic men¹¹⁶, with the state enforcing "desired values" rather than protecting "free speech and individual rights"¹¹⁷. But in the actual City of God [Bk 19] St. Augustine describes the two cities as overlapping places—not identical places—each with its own purview and limitations. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Dignitatis Humanae echoes St. Augustine, teaching that "the human person has a right to religious freedom," that this freedom must be "recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed," and that no one is "to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs." The post-conciliar Church does not seek the coercive confessional state Mullen longs for — which is perhaps why he treats Vatican II itself as a catastrophe whose "downstream cultural effects have been… overall destabilizing"¹¹⁸.

On Race and Nation: Mullen's ethnically-bounded communities and his rhetoric of "dilution" run directly into the most explicit, most repeated teaching of the modern Church. The Catechism states that "every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design"¹¹⁹, and that all human beings possess "the same nature and the same origin" and "an equal dignity"¹²⁰. The Council's Nostra Aetate rejects "any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion." Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti is an extended argument against precisely the closed, ethnically-defined peoplehood Mullen advances, and the U.S. bishops' 2018 pastoral letter Open Wide Our Hearts names racism a sin and "a life issue." A Catholicism organized around "European-descended" peoplehood and the danger of "dilution" is not a stricter Catholicism. It is a contradicted one.

On Subsidiarity and the Body of Christ: Mullen does not merely advance this ethnic vision; he baptizes it with a borrowed name, calling his ordering of the Body of Christ "through our kin structures, and through our nations" "Catholic subsidiarity." It is nothing of the kind. Subsidiarity, in the Church's actual teaching, is a principle about the allocation of authority, not about blood: "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need"¹²¹ — the point being, as Pope Pius XI put it, that it is "a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do"¹²². Authentic subsidiarity concerns families, associations, and towns over against the centralizing state; it has nothing to do with ethnicity, "kinfolk," or "folk spirit." By contrast, the “Body of Christ” into which Mullen folds his "kin structures" and ethnonationalism is, in Scripture, precisely what overcomes them: "There is neither Jew nor Greek… for you are all one in Christ Jesus"¹²³; in Christ "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all"¹²⁴. The "amorphous blob of beige-colored 'humans'" Mullen recoils from is, in fact, nearer to the catholicity — the universality — of the Church than the ethnically-sorted body he offers in its place. He has not deepened subsidiarity; he has emptied it and poured in the very thing the Church spent the modern era learning to condemn.

On Women and Product Personhood: Mullen's doctrine that the feminine "must follow," that women must be "taught docility," and that their reproductive consent is a civilizational liability collides with Gaudium et Spes, which teaches that "every type of discrimination… whether based on sex… is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God's intent"¹²⁵, and with St. John Paul II's Mulieris Dignitatem, whose argument is the equal dignity of women and whose reading of "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" in Ephesians 5 insists on a "mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ" between the spouses — not the one-directional submission Mullen demands. But the deeper collision is with the personalism at the heart of recent Catholic teaching on sex. St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body, and the "personalistic norm" he drew from Love and Responsibility, hold that a person may never rightly be treated as a means or an object of use — that the antithesis of love is using. Mullen's framework, in which "women ARE the market" and men are "the products available" to be "bought"¹²⁶, is the instrumentalization of persons stated as a first principle. It is not a hard saying of the tradition that soft moderns have forgotten. It is the precise thing the tradition forbids — which is why Mullen does not merely strain against the Theology of the Body but tells men outright to throw it out: "Any man who wishes to transcend this shallow cultural age of Church-taught masculinity will have to reject the framework of TOB as it is usually enforced: as an endless call to self-sacrifice in hopes that your family magically thus respects your nonexistent authority because of all the brownie points you amass as a servant leader"¹²⁷. The Theology of the Body is St. John Paul II's own teaching, and the self-sacrificial spousal self-gift Mullen here mocks as amassing "brownie points" is the very thing that renowned saint places at the heart of authentic marriage. That the charge against the model is not merely theoretical is something the movement has itself conceded: when the Sword of the Spirit's regime of headship and submission was finally weighed by one of its own co-founders, he judged it to have been "especially harmful to women"¹²⁸.

On Political Power and "Vitalism": Beneath these specific contradictions lies a deeper one. Mullen's gospel is one of dominion, mastery, and "the skills of rulership." The Gospel he professes says the opposite at the decisive moment: "You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them… But it shall not be so among you… whoever would be first among you must be slave of all"¹²⁹. Mullen's repeated, stated project of weaving "vitalism into my Catholicism"¹³⁰ — vitalism being the Nietzschean exaltation of strength, will, and life-force — is an attempt to graft onto Christianity the very will-to-power ethic Christ refused. Mullen is candid that this is what he is doing; he should be judged by the Church's word on it. Again and again, the early Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul urge Christians to live peaceably with all men, never to form a warband culture of authoritarian males preparing to seize political power. That’s the religio-political methodology of the Norsemen and their war gods, Thor and Odin, not Christianity. Mullen’s followers might do well to remember the fate of Viking religion and culture—they all eventually converted to the real Faith. Love, not force, is the power of God.

On Authority, Movements, and Parish Capture: Finally, the events of Part VII raise a distinctly ecclesiological problem. In Catholic order, a parish is governed by its pastor under the diocesan bishop¹³¹; lay associations of the faithful are "subject to the vigilance of competent ecclesiastical authority" and to its governance¹³², and no undertaking may even "claim the name Catholic" without the consent of that authority¹³³. A tightly-bonded movement that selects a parish for its "friendly priest," repeatedly replicates itself within that parish, and then installs itself as an official ministry sits uneasily with this order — all the more so when the movement's animating commitments are the ones documented above. Nor is the concern hypothetical at the level of the universal Church. Responding to a long train of abuses of authority and "spiritual abuse" within precisely these kinds of lay movements and new communities, the Vatican's Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life issued a General Decree in 2021 — approved by Pope Francis in forma specifica — capping governing mandates in international associations of the faithful at a maximum of ten consecutive years. Its accompanying explanatory note warned that the absence of such limits favors "forms of appropriation of the charism, personalism, and centralisation of functions… which easily cause serious violations of personal dignity and freedom and even real abuses." Pope Francis named the underlying disease in his own vocabulary: clericalism, "self-referential" community, and the spiritual abuse that follows when a charismatic leader's authority outruns accountability. The Church, in other words, has spent the last several years building guardrails against exactly the dynamics this essay has traced. Mullen presents his project as more Catholic than the Church. On the questions that most define it — the confessional state, race and nation, the dignity of women, the meaning of power, and the governance of movements within a parish — he is, in plain terms, at odds with it.

Part IX The Case for the Defense

A reader who knows Mullen, or who has read only his gentler material, may feel by now that a man is being flattened. The honest way to guard against that is to state his defense as strongly as it can be put. So, first, perhaps Mullen only flirts with violence. He tells his men he "would never suggest" they "throw their lives away" against the state, dismisses armed insurgency as suicidal folly, and insists that what he proposes is "not political but meta-political"¹³⁴. When he engages essays that advocate literal violence, he pulls back toward the interior: "This is not a call for violence itself," he writes of one, "It is a call for violence as a possible category of behavior to be reborn properly within your psyche"¹³⁵. Is it possible, then, that his militancy is, for now, only figurative?

Second, he appears to subordinate his ethnic politics to his faith, "your ethnic/civilizational identity is subordinate to your Christian identity"¹³⁶ — nor is he a crude social Darwinist. When a correspondent offered a brutally contemptuous vision of ruling the masses "under a despotic whip," Mullen recoiled: "Really wish I could see another frame of reality as plausible besides 'manage peasants strictly,'" he answered, and offered his own rule: "never torment the peasants"¹³⁷.

Third, much of what Mullen does is simply Catholic men's ministry, and good of its kind. He tells men to quit pornography, to marry, to build real friendships, to pray daily, to put down their phones. He seemingly redirects his readers' anger toward conversion: "Christ builds slaves into kings. He came for your freedom, not your enslavement"¹³⁸. He insists he became Catholic "because I think it is true," not for tribal reasons¹³⁹. He can be ecumenical, self-critical, and funny.

So, who is John Mullen? Is he an intense, intellectually omnivorous young convert who has merely fallen in with a provocative online milieu, borrowing its vocabulary because he finds it bracing, but whose actual work is the unglamorous, orthodox business of helping lost young men become better Catholics, husbands, and fathers — and who should accordingly be read as a man thinking out loud at the edges, not as the architect of something dangerous?

I don’t think so, and I think we need to carefully consider why. First, Mullen’s disclaimers of violence are real but narrower than they sound: what he forswears is a futile armed stand, as a matter of odds, even while he asks aloud who will lead "the cleansing." One can forswear the gun, for now, and still be building a political aristocracy that waits for the liberal order to fall and draws recruits from an unsuspecting parish endorsement. Second, the subordination of ethnicity to faith might seem real, but it does not retract the ethnicity: "European-descended… and continuation" remains his own stated basis for community. Moreover, his willingness to suppress fundamental human sexual, political, and religious rights provides for an ethnic subordination to a twisted faith, a faith that has already adopted his misogyny and ethnonationalism. Finally, even if the ordinary ministry is real, it functions as his delivery system, not the refutation of these charges. The porn-quitting, the brotherhood, the prayer are exactly the channel through which young men are drawn toward the deeper structure of belief — the gender hierarchy built on the manosphere's marketplace, the ethnonationalism, the dream of rule — that Mullen, in his own words, holds. A movement is not innocent because its on-ramp is wholesome. The covenant communities he descends from also began with prayer and friendship.

Part X Is this Infiltration a Cult?

There is a word that hovers over the preceding pages, and it would be evasive not to say it: cult. It is also a word thrown around far too easily, and the responsible thing is to test it rather than brandish it. The literature on high-control groups — Robert Lifton on "thought-terminating clichés," Steven Hassan's "BITE" model of behavioral, informational, thought, and emotional control, and the specific, well-documented pattern of the charismatic covenant communities — supplies a checklist of the features that separate a merely demanding religion from a coercive one. We examined twenty-five of these categories in our previous Question, “Am I in a Religion or a Cult?” If we compare the Arena and its Covenant Community context against that list, what do we find?

There is the charismatic leader who theorizes his own indispensability — the movement, he agrees, needs "a charismatic figure reinforcing it again and again"¹⁴⁰. There is the concealed, funneled recruitment: a parish men's group with an anodyne public face — "better men for future wives and families rooted in Christ"¹⁴¹ — sitting atop an apparatus, SPO (which has scrubbed its own literature of any mention of its origin in Sword of the Spirit) and Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community whose name a recruit need never hear. There is the deliberate targeting of the demographic every such group targets — young men in the loneliness of the post-college transition, gathered into an age- and sex-segregated body that is the precise inverse of the cross-generational, mixed congregation that makes manipulation hard. There is the dense insider jargon — "the longhouse," "the dragon," "based," "deracination," "folk spirit" — that sorts the world into the saved and the enemy. There is the staged ladder of escalating commitment that the covenant-community model runs on and that Mullen openly covets ("I really, really, really want to push beyond… two hours a week")¹⁴². And there is the subordination ethic beneath all of it, the one the movement's own co-founder, Stephen B. Clark — whom SPO's own Andrew Kebe publicly revered as a "father" — reduced to a chilling pair of words in his early notes on the coming covenant community structure: the leaders "dictators," the members "null sets."¹⁴³ Mullen's version may be gentler in tone but it is identical in shape: "There is no 'you' without the unit of men you belong to… [it is] MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU"¹⁴⁴.

What follows is that The Arena is at least a group built to the blueprint of a cult — the recruitment, the leadership form, the concealment, the descent — and planted inside a Catholic parish by a man whose stated convictions stand in direct contradiction to Catholic teaching. The right question for the parishioners of St. Mary and for the leadership of the Diocese of Columbus is, therefore, less "has The Arena already become a cult?" and more the harder one its own pedigree forces: isn’t this just the kind of structure that has repeatedly become one — and what, in a parish that has just handed it the keys, is there to stop it?

Part XI Conclusions

Strip away the dragon and the warbands and the militant imagery, and the thing Mullen has understood — the thing that makes him effective — is that young men are starving for two goods the modern world rations cruelly: belonging, and a mission worth one’s life. That hunger is real and can be good. The Church should be feeding it.

That is what makes this hard, and what makes it matter. Mullen is not winning young men because they are necessarily drawn to ethnonationalism or to the abolition of democracy. He is winning them, because he offers brotherhood to the isolated and significance to the overlooked. By the time a young man has joined the brotherhood, learned to despise the "longhouse," and come to picture himself among the "rightful rulers of a justly hierarchical society," he will have arrived there by way of friendship and prayer and a meat smoker. However, that is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

The covenant communities of two generations ago — the world Mullen belongs to through Christ the Cornerstone and the Sword of the Spirit — show how this story can go. They began, too, with renewal and zeal and the intoxicating experience of belonging to something total. They built households and taught submission and demanded everything, and in their worst expressions they produced the wreckage by now so well documented: broken families, spiritual coercion, and abuse that took decades to surface. Perhaps not every such community became that. But the structure made it possible, and that structure is what Mullen is rebuilding — with the gender hierarchy intensified, and a dangerous ethnic theory of peoplehood added, an explicit politics of authoritarian rule attached, a loyalty mechanism he is shopping for, and now a parish of his own. Moreover, the worldview he has put on the public record — that women must follow or society collapses, that the relation of the sexes is a market, that peoplehood is finally European descent, that democracy deserves to die, and that the right men should rule — is not Catholicism, however much Catholic language is wrapped around it. And it now has an official home in a Catholic parish. The young men walking into the Arena as well as the parish that just handed him the keys deserve to be told what is actually being sold.

A final piece of evidence Mullen has supplied himself. As this essay neared publication, he began deleting his Substack Notes — not across the board, but selectively: the brotherhood and the formation posts stayed; what he scrubbed was concentrated in two themes and two alone — the racial-and-national “blood and folk” material and the writing on women. From within a single six-month window, roughly three-quarters of his archived Notes vanished from public view¹⁴⁵. The Notes were not the only casualty. Of the fifteen essays in his Still Forge series he has quietly unlisted twelve — left live at their URLs but hidden from public browsing — and the buried twelve are precisely the ones carrying the material this essay has catalogued: the “blood and folk,” the “family bloodline,” the dragon who is the “rampant feminine,” the “counter insurgency.” The three he kept publicly visible are his blandest¹⁴⁶. A man does not edit his record that precisely by accident; the deletions and de-listings are his own ranking of his views, a quiet admission of which commitments he dare not defend in the open. And note what he did not do: he issued no retraction and recanted nothing. He did not change his mind — he removed the evidence. In this he does, as one man, exactly what the movement does as an institution: St. Paul’s Outreach scrubbing its literature of the Sword of the Spirit, the covenant communities burying their own names, the surface sanitized while the substance holds. That on the eve of scrutiny he reached for precisely the two categories this essay has spent its length describing is not a rebuttal of the argument. It is the nearest thing to a confession he was likely to give.¹⁴⁷

Endnotes

1. The Forum, S2E1; S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

2. Notes, 2026-03-31; CAPS his -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

3. A note on sources: Many of John Mullen's Substack Notes cited in this essay were publicly posted and have since been deleted by him. As of 27 June 2026, 186 of the 255 archived Notes from the prior six months (roughly three-quarters) were no longer retrievable from his public Substack feed. The deletions fall most heavily in the two areas most damaging to him: his racial-and-national ("blood and folk") material, such as notes on the "anglo folkghost" and on "the resurgence of local tribal politics," and his material on women, such as notes praising female "privacy and modesty" and "the veiled" feminine and casting women as a "market." Notes quoted directly in this essay are among those now gone, including the 7 January 2026 note on women as the market and the 19 May 2026 note attacking meritocracy. All Notes are therefore cited to a preserved archive of record, copies of which are linked in these endnotes.

4. The Still Forge, "Enchanted Culture" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

5. The Forum, S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

6. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

7. Notes, 2026-01-17 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

8. Notes, 2026-03-09 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

9. Notes, 2026-05-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

10. spo.org/ohio -- Sources: SPO Columbus Young Adults (folder); spo.org/ohio (public)

11. The Still Forge, "The Opening of The Forum" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder); Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

12. The Still Forge, "Re-Open the Internal Frontier" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

13. Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community, IRS Form 990, FY2023 (EIN 51-0148402; "People of God's Love Community"), via CauseIQ.com -- Sources: Christ the Cornerstone IRS 990 (folder)

14. Sword of the Spirit, North American communities directory, swordofthespirit.net (Christ the Cornerstone at level "Underway A"; screenshots available in shared public folder) -- Sources: SoS directory/Underway PNG (folder); swordofthespirit.net (public)

15. The Forum, S2E5; The Still Forge, "On Post-College Catholic Dating" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder); Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

16. Christ the Cornerstone IRS Form 990 (EIN 51-0148402), via CauseIQ.com; Andrew Kebe, LinkedIn; St. Paul's Outreach, spo.org/ohio -- Sources: Christ the Cornerstone IRS 990 (folder); Andrew Kebe LinkedIn (folder); SPO Columbus Young Adults (folder); spo.org/ohio (public)

17. Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community, IRS Form 990, FY2023 (EIN 51-0148402; "People of God's Love Community"), via CauseIQ.com -- Sources: Christ the Cornerstone IRS 990 (folder)

18. Diocese of Columbus, "Real Presence, Real Future" Commission roster, columbuscatholic.org/real-presence-real-future/commission -- Sources: Diocese RPRF roster (folder); columbuscatholic.org (public)

19. Andy Kebe, "Steve Clark's Generous Investment," Living Bulwark, vol. 30, May 2009 -- Sources: Kebe tribute/Living Bulwark (folder)

20. The Still Forge, "Re-Open the Internal Frontier" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

21. The Forum, E6 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

22. The Forum, E7 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

23. The Still Forge, "Enchanted Culture" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

24. The Forum, E7; S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

25. The Forum, S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

26. Notes, 2026-05-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

27. Notes, 2026-04-27 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

28. Notes, 2026-01-12 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

29. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

30. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas"; Notes, 2026-01-12 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder); Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

31. Notes, 2026-04-27; 2026-05-21 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

32. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

33. Notes, 2026-05-21 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

34. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

35. The Still Forge, "Two Funerals" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

36. Notes, 2026-04-04 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

37. Notes, 2026-01-07 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

38. Notes, 2026-01-20 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

39. Notes, 2026-05-21 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

40. Notes, 2026-05-21 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

41. Johann Kurtz, Becoming Noble

42. Notes, 2026-05-21 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

43. CAPS his

44. Notes, 2026-01-07 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

45. Notes, 2026-05-01; CAPS his -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

46. Notes, 2025-12-26 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

47. Notes, 2026-03-21 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

48. Notes, 2026-03-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

49. Notes, 2026-03-19 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

50. Notes, 2026-04-28 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

51. Notes, 2025-12-23 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

52. Notes, 2025-12-23 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

53. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

54. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

55. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

56. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

57. The Still Forge, "Awaiting Re-Enchantment" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

58. The Still Forge, "College Oasis" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

59. The Still Forge, "The Enlightenment Insomnia" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

60. Notes, 2025-12-09 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

61. Notes, 2026-05-04 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

62. Notes, 2026-05-26 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

63. Notes, 2026-02-24 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

64. Notes, 2025-12-12 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

65. Notes, 2025-12-22 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

66. Notes, 2026-05-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

67. Notes, 2025-11-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

68. Notes, 2026-01-10 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

69. Notes, 2026-05-02; CAPS his -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

70. Notes, 2025-11-25 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

71. Notes, 2026-01-17 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

72. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

73. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

74. Notes, 2026-03-05 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

75. Notes, 2026-05-14 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

76. Notes, 2025-12-23 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

77. Notes, 2026-01-17 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

78. The Still Forge, "Giving Thanks" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

79. Notes, 2026-03-09 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

80. Notes, 2026-05-03 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

81. Notes, 2026-05-03 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

82. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

83. The Still Forge, "Giving Thanks" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

84. Notes, 2026-01-22 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

85. Notes, 2026-01-16 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

86. Notes, 2026-01-22 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

87. The Still Forge, "Re-Open the Internal Frontier" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

88. Notes, 2026-05-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

89. The Still Forge, "Open Letter to Young Diocesan Priests" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

90. The Still Forge, "Open Letter to Young Diocesan Priests" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

91. The Still Forge, "Open Letter to Young Diocesan Priests" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

92. The Still Forge, "Open Letter to Young Diocesan Priests" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

93. St. Mary Catholic Church (German Village, Columbus), "Men's Ministry" page, stmarychurchgv.org -- Sources: St. Mary Mens Ministry (folder); stmarychurchgv.org (public)

94. Tim Hughes, "From Maintenance to Mission: Responding to the Shift from Christendom to an Apostolic Age," internal St. Mary document, September, 2024 -- Sources: Hughes proposal (folder)

95. "Community of Christ the Redeemer, a Sword of the Spirit Covenant Community"; PDF Shared Folder, Sword of the Spirit, swordofthespirit.net -- Sources: Christ the Redeemer doc (folder); swordofthespirit.net (public)

96. Sword of the Spirit, Leaders Manual v1.0, PDF Shared Folder, (2015) -- Sources: SoS Leaders Manual 2015 (folder)

97. Sword of the Spirit, Leaders Manual v1.0 PDF & Christ the Cornerstone as Sword of the Spirit Underway Level PNG, Shared Folder -- Sources: SoS Leaders Manual 2015 (folder); SoS directory/Underway PNG (folder)

98. Sword of the Spirit, Leaders Manual v1.0, PDF Shared Folder, (2015) -- Sources: SoS Leaders Manual 2015 (folder)

99. University Christian Outreach, Year-2 "Foundations" course outlines for single men and single women incl. "Choosing for Discipleship" and the "Senior Pledge" handouts, Shared Folder -- Sources: UCO: Choosing for Discipleship (folder); UCO: Senior Pledge (folder)

100. "Ottenweller Finds Allegations Valid," Steubenville Register, June 21, 1991 -- Sources: Steubenville Register 1991 (folder)

101. Ann Rodgers-Melnick, "Catholic Covenant Communities in Turmoil" and "Charismatic Sect Dominated Lives, Ex-Members Say," The Pittsburgh Press, December 1991 -- Sources: Pittsburgh Press: Turmoil (folder); Pittsburgh Press: Dominated Lives (folder)

102. Lathrop GPM, independent investigation summary re: Sword of the Spirit / Servants of the Word sexual abuse (2024); Treadwell victim impact statement (PDFs shared folder) -- Sources: Lathrop GPM 2024 (folder); Treadwell statement (folder)

103. Ralph Martin, 1991 community evaluation, reported in National Catholic Reporter, Apr. 18, 1997 -- Sources: National Catholic Reporter (public)

104. "Charismatic Communities Split by Controversy," Christianity Today, Sept. 1991 -- Sources: Christianity Today (public)

105. Christianity Today, Sept. 1991 -- Sources: Christianity Today (public)

106. Margaret Atwood interview, Penguin, on the real-life inspirations for the novel; The New Yorker profile of Atwood's archive, R. Mead, 2017

107. "Ties to Sect Curbed at N.J. School," The Washington Post, Feb. 15, 1986; with contemporaneous 1985–86 People of Hope coverage (shared folder) -- Sources: Washington Post 1986 (folder); 1985-86 People of Hope articles (folder)

108. Shadow of Hope podcast (2024); "Podcast Goes Inside the Troubling World of an Accused NJ Cult," New Jersey Monthly (James LaForge, July 2025) -- Sources: New Jersey Monthly 2025 (folder); njmonthly.com (public)

109. "Podcast Goes Inside the Troubling World of an Accused NJ Cult," New Jersey Monthly (James LaForge, July 2025) -- Sources: New Jersey Monthly 2025 (folder); njmonthly.com (public)

110. The Still Forge, "Enchanted Culture" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

111. Notes, 2026-05-19 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

112. The Forum, S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

113. The Forum, S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

114. The Forum, S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

115. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

116. Notes, 2026-05-14 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

117. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

118. The Still Forge, "Framing the Discussion" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

119. CCC §1935

120. CCC §1934

121. CCC §1883

122. Quadragesimo Anno §79

123. Galatians 3:28

124. Colossians 3:11

125. §29

126. Notes, 2026-01-07; CAPS his -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

127. Notes, 2026-04-29; CAPS his -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

128. cf. Part VII

129. Mark 10:42–45

130. Notes, 2026-03-12 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

131. Code of Canon Law, c. 519

132. c. 305

133. c. 216

134. The Still Forge, "Big Ideas" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

135. Notes, 2026-01-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

136. Notes, 2026-05-02 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

137. Notes, 2026-04-29 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

138. Notes, 2026-03-18 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

139. The Still Forge, "Awaiting Re-Enchantment" -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

140. Notes, 2026-03-09 -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

141. St. Mary Catholic Church (German Village, Columbus), "Men's Ministry" page, stmarychurchgv.org -- Sources: St. Mary Mens Ministry (folder); stmarychurchgv.org (public)

142. The Forum, S2E5 -- Sources: Mullen Forum podcast (preserved, shared folder)

143. Stephen B. Clark, 1964 manuscript, Thomas Yoder Papers, University of Michigan (intro. John Flaherty, 2011); Andy Kebe, Living Bulwark, May 2009; both docs in shared folder. -- Sources: Kebe tribute/Living Bulwark (folder); Clark 1964/Yoder Papers (folder)

144. Notes, 2026-05-19; CAPS his -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

145. Substack deletion verified 27 June 2026 against his live public feed; the deleted Notes are preserved in the shared folder -- Sources: Mullen Notes (preserved, shared folder)

146. Still Forge essays: 12 of 15 unlisted from his public feed as of 28 June 2026; all preserved in the shared folder -- Sources: Mullen Still Forge essays (preserved, shared folder)

147. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Anthropic (whose owners bear no responsibility for any of the content of this essay) for the Ai system Claude that proved invaluable to the data mining and preparation of this essay. I would also like to thank a supporter whose donation made possible my Claude subscription. Finally, I am indebted to John Flaherty for his dedication to the many covenant community survivors and his painstaking collection of primary source documents.

148. Copyright by Jeffrey Tiel, 2026. All rights reserved.