Tootfinder

This is actually not too far off from a pamphlet I wrote at my community college as an experiment in "turning assignments into creative writing." I was taking a religion class, so I decided to create one. I was working in a group and by the end we had developed 3 sects of the religion and we each talked about our sect and how it related and differed from the original text.
I also handed out pamphlets at a mall, half as part of a psychology class (because why not find a way to reuse my material) and part as an experiment to see how long it would take to get kicked out of said mall. (The answer was bout 15 minutes, if I remember correctly.)
Somewhere between there and here, the books "The Evolution of God" and "Non-Zero" came out (written, interestingly but probably unrelated, by someone who lived in the town with that mall where I handed out those flyers). These books both have heavily overlapping ideas with the original pamphlet (lost, which may not be the worst thing since it was full of spelling and grammar errors).
But both of those books had a decidedly theistic flavor, though, I think, they were more generally liberal. The whole #CultPunk thing feels like a missing piece to something that's been bouncing around in my head for... uh... some years. But not so much at the front of my mind.
It was actually in the hospital, on pain killers and ketamine, that this all came rushing back. Perhaps that's the right state of mind for such things.

Between the Donroe and Carney Doctrines https://jacobin.com/2026/01/carney-davos-speech-international-multipolarity/

Between the Donroe and Carney Doctrines
At Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney set fire to liberal platitudes. His actual politics, however, do quite the opposite.

Rob Jetten staat in een traditie van gemeenschapszin. Maar het coalitieakkoord ademt die geest niet | Trouw
#nlpol #Jetten

“‘For Orbšn in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year’
…
US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.
Worldwi…

This is actually not too far off from a pamphlet I wrote at my community college as an experiment in "turning assignments into creative writing." I was taking a religion class, so I decided to create one. I was working in a group and by the end we had developed 3 sects of the religion and we each talked about our sect and how it related and differed from the original text.
I also handed out pamphlets at a mall, half as part of a psychology class (because why not find a way to reuse my material) and part as an experiment to see how long it would take to get kicked out of said mall. (The answer was bout 15 minutes, if I remember correctly.)
Somewhere between there and here, the books "The Evolution of God" and "Non-Zero" came out (written, interestingly but probably unrelated, by someone who lived in the town with that mall where I handed out those flyers). These books both have heavily overlapping ideas with the original pamphlet (lost, which may not be the worst thing since it was full of spelling and grammar errors).
But both of those books had a decidedly theistic flavor, though, I think, they were more generally liberal. The whole #CultPunk thing feels like a missing piece to something that's been bouncing around in my head for... uh... some years. But not so much at the front of my mind.
It was actually in the hospital, on pain killers and ketamine, that this all came rushing back. Perhaps that's the right state of mind for such things.

Never forget that the liberals that cherry-pick his words now would have hated him back then:
#MartinLutherKing

The trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official:
The American-dominated liberal world order is over.
This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it.
Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security.
The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used ins…

America vs. the World
President Trump wants to return to the 19th century’s international order. He will leave America less prosperous—and the whole world less secure.

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

Why this is all relevant to the OP is that there is actually nothing preventing us from exploiting these same vulnerabilities (and doing so far more effectively). The (illusion of The) Satanic Temple has already given us some vision of what that could look like. We can imagine a religious institution that actually challenges power in the way TST claims to do. We could imagine an institution that is more radical. We could imagine an institution so dangerous it actually forces the state to choose between it's own survival and alienating liberals by (more) visibly clamping down on freedom of religion.
One could imagine an anarchist or solar punk religion that intentionally builds an alternative society within the shell of the old, one that recognizes the validity of other religious sects (like, for example, Quakers) who are doing similar things.
While there is a very interesting spiritual element to #CultPunk. I think there's also a very interesting set of radical opportunities that we have long since ignored....