God and Guns in Pennsylvania

It's All About The Rod

“And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” - Barack Obama.

Today, dear readers, your Freakshow guide leads you inside a tent that puts the F in Freak, in a corner of the state that political strategists predict will decide the election in a few weeks. For years I’ve heard of a cult based in Pennsylvania that worships the AR-15, an offshoot of the Unification Church founded by rabid anti-communist Korean expat Sun Myung Moon. The Moonies became famous for holding mass weddings. They also own the right-wing paper, the Washington Times.

Old Moon, known to his cult as “True Father,” has sailed into his rest but his son Sean grew up to start his own schismatic nominally Christian sect, which he calls Iron Rod Ministries. He preaches that Rambo Jesus is the messiah son of an armed Old Testament God known by the Hebrew name for “the lord of armies.”

Pastor Moon’s flock is smaller than the one started by the man he calls True Father but it does also engage in group weddings, with couples in traditional American wedding attire, with the addition of an AR-15 strapped on.

Needless to say, the clan is rock solid MAGA. This year a few former Trump officials graced the Rod of Iron’s annual “Freedom Festival,” an event sometimes referred to as Gunstock. The two-day event celebrates the gun in all its forms as a tool of God, with speakers, vendors selling Trump and NRA swag, musical performances (a “European choir” and “Korean dance”), and even an art show of Pastor Moon’s paintings of Satan and Trump triumphant. The festival happens each fall in deep rural northeastern Pennsylvania, near the grounds of Pastor Moon’s small arms manufacturing company, Kahr Arms. 

The guest of honor on Saturday was Trump-pardoned felon and Q Anon crackpot General Mike Flynn, who spoke and screened his latest movie, "Flynn: Deliver the Truth, Whatever The Cost." 

I was sorry to have missed Flynn, but I could only devote one day to the Gunstock experience. The venue is remote, in no-GPS, no-cell territory. I only knew I was on the right road when I noticed two pro-gun bumper stickers on the white Lexus in front of me. Following that car, I wound through miles of forest, passing the frequent “Trump Safety, Kamala Crime” signs planted on the roadside next to stands of dead goldenrod and poison ivy.

The Rod of Iron Ministry is clearly an integral part of the local community. Pike County Sheriffs’ police cars, lights flashing, provided one level of security at the entrance to the festival. The Blooming Grove Volunteer Fire Department was doing a brisk business selling egg and cheese sandwiches and coffee outside the main tent.

A cold drizzle fell. In this neck of the woods, for nine months of the year, the raw cold gets inside your clothes if you don’t keep moving. It’s the kind of bleak climate that drives people to vacant-eye stare at Fox from under a blanket on the couch, or to retreat to bed for a long sleep until the too-short months of next summer.

Open tents gave no protection from the whipping wind and rain squalls. Vendors with chapped faces struggled to keep their wares — guns, gun paraphernalia, Trump merch, and a traveling petting zoo and bubble castle shooting gallery for kids (a lot of little ones gamboling around) — tied down and dry.

Waiting in line for a hot cup of Joe from the volunteer fire brigade, the sounds of a crowd singing the national anthem wafted from a large tent. By the time I got inside and found a seat, a man, wearing a crown of bullets and a gold AR-15 slung over a shoulder, was well into an extended rant about pedophilia and “sexualized government.”

Pastor Moon was preaching to an audience of about 500 mostly white, mostly middle-aged Americans except for dozens of Koreans grouped on one side, all dressed in matching red shirts reading KOREA STRONG. For nearly an hour he riffed on many MAGA chestnuts, from communism to liberal pedophilia to the glory that guns bring to God.

“Currently in America we are in the midst of a real communist revolution where the opposite party leader Trump was raided by federal agents, has been indicted for over 34 felonies, potentially serving 700 years of prison and they have tried to assassinate him twice,” Moon warned. ”If the torch of liberty is snuffed out in America the world will enter a kingdom of hell on earth. Dystopian 1984-like world has never seen that will enforce social credit scores, tracing and tracking of all citizens, centralized digital currency, climate change, carbon taxes, and totalitarian governments will know the people as evil gods who make laws for you but will not follow any of these laws by themselves.”

Moon repeatedly called on “Jehovah Sabaoth … named in the Bible as the Lord of fighting armies 285 times-  more than provider or healer or flag bearer! He is named as a masculine commander and general leading the armies of angels and believers in the battle for the future of the spiritual and physical.”

Moon also suggested that Jesus not only used but made late Iron Age assault weapons. 

“Jesus is not the effeminate castrated Jesus that we hear of in Sunday school,” he said. “He is the perfect man. In John chapter 2 we see that Jesus Christ God in the flesh is an assault weapon manufacturer as he manufactures a sword which is a nine-tailed whip with blades on the end for the express purpose of assaulting the money changers in the temple.”

What would William Penn, Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, among the early American advocates of religious freedom, think about this interpretation of Jesus, I wondered. 

The people of Pike County, hobnail-booted men and women, looked stunned and cold. Standing room only, not a few holding canes or leaning on walkers. A row of elderly Korean ladies were already asleep.

Had they all heard of this armed and lethal Jehovah and Jesus the arms manufacturer before?

The man next to me had his eyes shut. A man in front of me sported a black leather jacket with a Black Robed Regiment patch on the back. He looked bored, but maybe he’d heard this sermon before. The Regiment is, according to its website,  “a network of national and local pastors that equips and empowers pastors to engage in their Biblical and historical role to stand boldly for righteousness and transform society through spiritual and cultural engagement.”

After the bullet-crowned pastor finished, featured speaker Sebastian “Seb” Gorka took the podium. The former Trump advisor, in his navy blazer and speaking with a British accent, is so personally combative that even the Trump White House had to send him packing after he shoved and used anti-semitic language on a journalist in the Capitol. Gorka is still a MAGA star, with countless media and think tank gigs. A posh accent goes a long way in American media and politics on both sides of the spectrum. 

Gorka got right to the point: Biden, he said, has let 40 million illegal immigrants inside America, he said, citing his America First comrade Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller. “You will not have a country!” he shouted. “America is finished!”  (No one was inclined to do real-time fact-checking but that number sounded radically inflated, and sure enough — a quick check finds the official Center for Migration Studies figure is  around 10 million.)

 “Pennsylvania is the epicenter of the saving of America!” he shouted. The crowd cheered. No one seemed to mind that the main acts in this xenophobic spectacle were all immigrants or immigrant-adjacent. Like Sean Moon’s parents and the sizable section of the audience that spoke Korean — Gorka himself is an immigrant. Not only is Gorka an immigrant to America, his parents were immigrants too, having fled to the UK after the failed Hungarian uprising in 1956. 

Gorka was born in London, married an American, and became a U.S. citizen only five years before Trump’s election. Five years is apparently long enough to feel entitled to yank up the ladder on the poor tired masses behind him — and use them as an organizing tool for an autocratic movement.

The closest most of the white and Korean forest people living in rural Pennsylvania come to a real-life undocumented migrant is very likely Jesse Watters ranting about the invasion nightly on Fox News. Fear stalks the land anyway, evident in all the “Trump Safety, Kamala Crime” signs. Defendant meet Prosecutor meet Orwell. The Trumpers have little else to run on, certainly offering nothing like hope or help to residents of this stony forgotten land. (Fun fact: Pollsters have found that the nearer Americans live to the actual border, the less panicked they are about migrants.)

Gorka was followed on stage by his wife Katie, a soigné blonde, and also a former Trump White House employee. Both are mobbed up with the Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for Project 2025. 

The couple was clearly dispatched from their Beltway manse to goose the Republicans’ laggard ground game in the critical state. It’s both the height of all-American absurdity and the essence of MAGA for Washington insiders like the Gorkas to believe rural homeowners will chat politics on their doorsteps with men and women who on spare Sunday mornings listen to sermons from a man wearing a bullet crown.

The crowd nodded off again as Katie talked about her doorknocking excursions in the suburbs of Satan’s DC — an exercise in retail politics prompted by her “sweet little local library” hosting a drag story hour for toddlers. “The left knows the importance of organizing. This came from Lenin, through Alinsky,” she said. “Republicans are individualists, we are all about taking care of our families, but we can be organized.”

For his part, Gorka urged the attendees to become captains in “Trumpforce 47” — the campaign’s attempt at GOTV — and then took a few questions. Someone asked about Trump’s recent visit to Arlington Cemetery. Gorka took a theatrical moment of silence and some deep breaths, containing this rage. “President Trump was invited to Arlington by the gold star families,” he said through his teeth.

The morning’s program ended with a gun auction, starring a “Trump edition” Tommy gun — “You can’t buy this is in a store! Do I hear $3000?” the auctioneer started. No one bid. Eventually, someone coughed up $2,600 for it. I searched in vain among the faces for someone who appeared to have that kind of disposable income. Maybe the owner of the 2A festooned Lexus went home with a new rod of iron, engraved with Trump’s profile and the holy number “45.”

Candidate Obama infuriated rural Pennsylvanians over his clinging to God and guns comment.

But he won anyway.

Sold! For $2,600. The Trump Tommy Gun.