My father is Tennessee’s unofficial welcoming committee. A Virginia native who retired with my mother to her home state, he enjoys swapping stories with other newcomers at the lake near his home in Lenoir City.
Lately, he’s been meeting a lot more folks moving to the area from places like California, Michigan and New Jersey. Many are fellow retirees or young families drawn to Tennessee for lower taxes and more affordable housing. But not far from Lenoir City, in the hills that roll across Northern Tennessee and Southern Kentucky, a group of Christian nationalists are moving into the region for entirely different reasons.
Kentucky RidgeRunner LLC is a property development company based in Hartsville, Tenn., whose goal is to build “pioneer communities in the old American heartland … around shared values and the American way of life” according to its website.
The company’s Highland Rim Project offers several individual lots along with a few “premium holler farms” for buyers interested in “unmatched seclusion as well as incredible opportunity for hunting, agricultural and prepping activities.” A “holler,” in Appalachian lingo, is a narrow valley surrounded by hills or mountains.
Tennessee native Josh Abbotoy heads RidgeRunner. Abbotoy also is managing partner at New Founding, the conservative venture capital firm backing the Highland Rim Project. The HRP will be the first in a series of “aligned communities” where residents with shared conservative values can live together and “aligned start-ups” can flourish without interference from DEI mandates and “corrosive ideologies.”
Abbotoy assures buyers the community he’s creating won’t end up like Asheville, N.C., “with a bunch of rainbow flags on Main Street.” There is an application process for anyone interested in moving to the area, and those in charge will be mostly “Protestant Christians.”
“We need cities on a hill that embody the healthy, natural, Christian way of life and demonstrate the superiority of that way of life,” he explains.
Abbotoy also happens to be executive director and co-founder of American Reformer, an online journal promoting “a vigorous Christian approach” to cultural issues.
Aligned Christian communities like the HRP are actually springing up all across the country, from Doug Wilson’s misogynist compound in Moscow, Idaho, to an orthodox Catholic enclave in Hyattsville, Md. What makes New Founding’s community noteworthy is the company’s dark political connections.
It’s helpful to visualize these connections as an Appalachian holler, one that grows increasingly darker and the path more twisted as we wind our way deeper into the valley.
To find out more about these aligned communities and the far right groups behind them, read more at Baptist News Global.
