D
riving north on state Route 56 as you enter Jackson County, Tennessee, the road winds through lush, green hills, past a few homes, an abandoned auto shop, and the Country Cabin Quik Market before reaching a large billboard. Pull forward into the parking lot of Fatboy’s Barbie-Q, where sweet, vinegary clouds puff from a large smoker, and you can read one side of the sign:
“God bless Jackson County! We’re proud to call it home!”
The words “land,” “liberty,” and “legacy” frame a deer-head logo above a company name: RidgeRunner.
On the other side, there’s a different message: “Small town — big heart. Here, nasty notions play no part. Bide a spell in Gainesboro. Where all are welcome!”
If you don’t live in Jackson County, you might not recognize the contentious subtext between the two sides of the billboard. One went up in late July by RidgeRunner, a real estate company that bought hundreds of acres in Jackson County with plans to develop “town and country charter communities” that it hopes to fill with hundreds of new conservative Christian residents.
The other sign was put up by a group of county business owners out of fear that these new residents will be far-right Christian nationalists set on gaining control of local government. The billboard’s message that “all” are welcome here and the mention of “nasty notions” are a rebuke to what RidgeRunner’s critics see as the company’s exclusionary ethos, which they believe renders anyone not a white, Protestant man as a second-class citizen — or maybe not even a citizen at all.
Josh Abbotoy is the CEO of RidgeRunner, a real estate company that bought hundreds of acres in Jackson County, Tennessee.
Shelby Tauber/”The New York Times”/Redux
Josh Abbotoy, RidgeRunner’s CEO, drives me to the dirt lot at Fatboy’s. “It’s a parable,” he tells me, proudly, “a flashpoint that’s happening in small towns across this country.” He motions toward the billboard. “‘We’re proud to call it home’ versus ‘Come bide a spell.’ Which is the path to economic growth?”
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Abbotoy, 38, a Harvard-educated lawyer, is compact and bulky, and the day we meet, he wears a hunter-green polo shirt, jeans, and some stubble on his face. He says he doesn’t identify as a Christian nationalist, an ideology that generally posits America is a Christian nation and should be ruled by evangelical Christian men according to arch-conservative principles. To him, this is a dispute over how large swaths of Appalachia can be revitalized. RidgeRunner’s detractors, he says, want to chase fickle tourism dollars by suppressing the area’s long-held Christian conservative values and appeal to liberal city dwellers by proving “we’re not like those hillbillies in the Scopes trial.” His plan instead is to market rural, small-town living to a certain kind of buyer.
“There’s a heavy political component to this,” he says. “We don’t quite advertise this bluntly, but maybe we should: ‘Are you fed up with crime, corruption and wokeness in your big, blue city? Then move here.’” He says he’s already sold a handful of parcels, mostly to those looking to relocate. “Out-of-staters who move to Tennessee love the way it is now. They love the traditional Bible-belt feel.”
Two of his first customers, Andrew Isker and C. Jay Engel, have sparked considerable alarm here. According to Abbotoy, they’re just two guys who’ve bought land from RidgeRunner and moved here with their families into rental homes until their land is ready to build on. But they’ve also become de facto ambassadors for the company, setting up shop in RidgeRunner’s Gainesboro office, hosting what Isker has called “the number-one Christian Nationalist podcast in the world.”
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Isker, a pastor from Minnesota, co-authored a 2022 book, Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide to Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations, with Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a social media platform popular with white supremacists, antisemites, and conspiracy theorists. Isker, who’s said he’d “like to dissolve Congress and the judiciary and vest all power into a sovereign ruler named Donald J. Trump,” has a history of inflammatory remarks about women, immigrants, Jewish people, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Engel, a native Californian who runs a company that manufactures off-roading trailers, has used social media to denounce democracy, declare gay people are only employable if they “work on not being gay,” insist America’s survival “is predicated on the removal of foreigners,” long for returning the country “to how it was before the Civil Rights movement,” and argue that “women were happier and lived more fulfilling lives before they got the vote.”
Isker and Abbotoy had been friendly since meeting a few years ago through mutual friends in conservative and evangelical circles. RidgeRunner essentially recruited Isker to move to Jackson County as an early adopter, and Isker in turn invited his podcast partner Engel. Although Abbotoy maintains he never “designated them ambassadors of this project,” they’ve consistently promoted it.
Podcaster Andrew Isker stands on the property of Brewington Farms in Whitleyville, just outside of Gainesboro, Tennessee.
Tamara Reynolds for Rolling Stone
Last July, on an episode of their podcast, Contra Mundum — Latin for “Against Everything” — when they announced their move, Isker said, “We’re building a town,” and revealed he’d also be starting a new church there. A month later, he described broader ambitions: “If you were able to take even a few hundred people that all think the same way, have all the same ideas about common good and politics and so forth and consolidate them in the same place, you can exercise far, far more political power, even with a few hundred or few thousand people, than you can on your own, widely dispersed across the entire country.”
The prospect of anyone coming in and “building a town” where one has existed for more than two centuries has unsurprisingly gone over poorly. The perception among many I spoke to in Jackson County is that Isker and Engel represent, as someone put it, “exhibits A and B for the kind of people that would come to what RidgeRunner is selling.” This has been troubling, even in a county where Donald Trump won nearly 81 percent of the vote in 2024 and a majority identify as Christian conservatives.
Linda McNew, who lives on a farm in the county and describes herself as “an absolute full-force conservative Christian woman,” was initially skeptical of the negative local press about RidgeRunner and researched to debunk it. What she found was sobering. “They’re antisemitic, anti-Black, anti-Native American. They don’t want anything except what they think. It’s about moving here and finding power. They’ve got big bucks behind them.”
Abbotoy maintains he’s simply an “outspoken political conservative,” and that local opinion has been skewed against RidgeRunner by the media and the more progressive Gainesboro residents. “I’m not hurting anybody. I’m selling land, running my business, trying to be a good neighbor.”
There’s a history of planned communities being built around a common religious or political ideology — by Christian nationalists, Mormons, Amish, Hasidic Jews, and others. Efforts to create Christian nationalist settlements in places like Elohim City, Oklahoma, Alpine County, California, and Tigerton, Wisconsin, go back to the 1970s. Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, has been working for decades to transform Moscow into what he calls a “church town.” (Isker graduated from Wilson’s ministerial program.)
RidgeRunner put up a billboard in July advertising the real estate development.
David Peisner
“Christian nationalism has been present throughout American history,” says Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of How to End Christian Nationalism. “But it’s the well-funded political movement that’s really seizing and exploiting that ideology for their own political gain right now. These extreme ideas are gaining more of a foothold in elected power.”
Pete Hegseth attends a Tennessee church affiliated with Wilson and has reposted a video of Wilson and other pastors in his congregation saying, among other things, women shouldn’t have the right to vote. (A Pentagon spokesperson later said, “Of course the secretary thinks that women should have the right to vote.”) Russ Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, is Trump’s budget director. Jeremy Carl, recently nominated to become an assistant secretary of state, has written admiringly of Christian nationalism, and is close with Abbotoy. Ex-Department of Defense official William Wolfe is an ardent Christian nationalist whom Abbotoy has repeatedly called “a friend and colleague.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has long espoused Christian nationalist views. J.D. Vance has ties to Christian nationalists, too, including Abbotoy’s colleagues.
“The networks are very diffuse, but it’s very dense, with a lot of overlap of people, funders, nonprofits,” says Andrew Whitehead, an Indiana University sociology professor and co-author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
What separates RidgeRunner from previous religious or political enclaves is the scale of its ambition. RidgeRunner’s Jackson County developments are a model for what the company and others like it hope to export around the country. And with supporters and friends in and around the Trump administration, as well as among powerful conservative think tanks such as the Claremont Institute, where Abbotoy was a fellow in 2023, and the Heritage Foundation, RidgeRunner may be able to make its goals a reality.
“What makes it different from some white-supremacist idiots who just want to burn crosses and stuff is this is married to a business, promoting a way of life,” says Mark Dudney, a public historian whose family has lived in Jackson County for seven generations. “I understand why they see rural, isolated places as fertile ground for their grandiose plans, but it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. People in Appalachia don’t like outsiders coming in and telling them anything.”
UP THROUGH THE LATTER PART of the 20th century, Jackson County, like much of Appalachia, was strongly Democratic, but over the past 25 years, a variety of factors — some economic, but more social and cultural — shifted the region to the right. In 2012, Mitt Romney was the first Republican to win Jackson County’s presidential vote since 1920. Trump has won the county with widening margins in the past three elections. Down-ballot Republicans roughly matched Trump’s 81 percent vote share last year. Despite this, party politics rarely seemed to play a big part in public life here until recently.
Public historian Mark Dudney is opposed to the RidgeRunner real estate development.
Tamara Reynolds for Rolling Stone
“A lot of the way people voted was just family tradition,” says Dudney, who describes himself as a centrist. He’s become a somewhat reluctant central figure in the opposition to RidgeRunner. In April, he posted a Facebook video outlining his concerns, which led to what he says were hundreds of requests and messages. “People came out of the woodwork supporting me.”
In late July, I meet Dudney at his family farm a few minutes from downtown Gainesboro, in the Free State community, so named because it never had slaves. Dudney’s people have been on this land since the War of 1812. He’d moved away for college, work, to raise a family, then moved back last year.
“I had a Huck Finn childhood,” he says, nodding toward the fields surrounding his house. “I didn’t wear shoes. I was just wearing cutoffs in the summertime, running on the farms, fishing in the ponds, living in my imagination.”
Back then, the area was relatively thriving, but like much of Appalachia, Jackson County has struggled to adapt to larger economic forces over the past three decades. The closing of textile mills, the loss of manufacturing jobs — particularly from an Oshkosh B’Gosh factory in nearby Clay County that moved to Mexico in the mid-Nineties — induced a steady contraction of the local economy.
In 2013, though, Diana Mandli, who’d moved to Gainesboro a few years earlier, opened the Bull & Thistle pub, kickstarting a renaissance in the tiny downtown. Since, more restaurants, an upscale grocery, an artisanal moonshine distillery, and a modern-art museum have opened.
“Some people who weren’t from here moved in and had the capital to restore some historic buildings, put in great restaurants, then success bred success,” Dudney says. “Now, Gainesboro is this hip foodie destination.”
Gainesboro has seen recent growth downtown with new restaurants moving in.
Tamara Reynolds
The town is home to just more than 900 people, and while the entire county has close to 12,000, that population is older, poorer, and more homogenous than the rest of the country. More than 92 percent of residents are white. Less than one percent identify as Black or Hispanic, and only .1 percent are foreign-born. More than 20 percent live below the poverty line. All of this has undoubtedly made the county more susceptible to someone promising new residents and investment while playing on old fears.
ABBOTOY GOT TO KNOW THIS AREA growing up, before the recent revitalization. His parents met in Berkeley, California, where they were loosely affiliated with the hippie-ish Christian movement known as the Jesus People. When he was young, his father’s engineering work took the family all over, but they landed in Hartsville, Tennessee, in Trousdale County, about halfway between here and Nashville. “I’ve always thought it’s great out here,” he says. “The mountains create a permanent bottleneck on population density. It’s got relative proximity to cities and land is fairly affordable, so there’s room to run in the real estate market.”
We’re in Abbotoy’s aging Lexus SUV, driving through the hills outside Gainesboro. In person, Abbotoy’s affable, chatty, and eager to debate the finer points of political theory without raising his voice. He was homeschooled, attended Union University, a private Baptist institution, and Catholic University for his master’s, but it was in law school, at Harvard, as a member of the campus’s Federalist society, surrounded by liberals, that — as he put it somewhat cheekily on a podcast last year — he “was radicalized.”
As an attorney, Abbotoy specialized in negotiating what he called “complicated, high-stakes business deals,” which frequently put him across the table from real estate developers. In 2020, he read a book by journalist Bill Bishop called The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Bishop had looked at data and seen Americans were increasingly living among those whose politics mirrored their own. The 2008 book was intended as a warning, but as the pandemic hit, Abbotoy sensed an opportunity. By the end of that year, he’d bought property in Jackson County and started thinking about relocating from his Houston suburb.
“I had a lot of friends in white-collar professions — investment bankers, lawyers, consultants — and they were all looking at buying rural land,” he says. He mentions a 2022 Upwork study that estimated nearly 19 million people were looking to relocate due to remote work. He envisioned a turbocharged Big Sort. “The people who want to move to rural areas are overwhelmingly more conservative than the average American, more likely to be religious,” he says. “They want a neighborhood where they can assume agreement on basic political issues.”
Abbotoy had long been a staunch political conservative who subscribed to a hardline traditionalist Protestantism, but in his mid-thirties, he began to find platforms to put his beliefs more overtly into his work. In 2021, Abbotoy became a partner in a venture firm called New Founding, started by fellow Harvard Law grad Nate Fischer. New Founding’s website boasts, “We explicitly oppose DEI/ESG,” and denounces “left-wing ideology” that “attacks natural distinctions, traditional norms, and our nation’s heritage.” It goes on, “We seek to shape institutions with Christian norms and orient them toward a Christian vision of life, of society, and of the good.”
The company attracted investment from Silicon Valley billionaire and noted Trump convert Marc Andreessen and boasts connections to Republican power players including Vance and Erik Prince, founder of private military contractor Blackwater. Abbotoy and Fischer have both been fellows at the influential Claremont Institute, the unwaveringly conservative think tank whose other fellows have included Ben Shapiro, Laura Ingraham, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec. Under New Founding’s aegis, Abbotoy co-founded a far-right Protestant political journal, American Reformer, which also has a podcast he frequently hosts.
Abbotoy and his father partnered with New Founding to create RidgeRunner in 2022, to develop what New Founding called “aligned communities” in Appalachia. (Abbotoy’s father retreated into an advisory role in 2024.) RidgeRunner’s website touts a plan for “local self-governance” and “civic republicanism, in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech, and civilian armament can be maintained and perpetuated.”
RidgeRunner initially bought land in Burkesville, Kentucky, 45 minutes north of Gainesboro, but by last summer, Abbotoy had moved his own family to Jackson County and was focused on building his inaugural model community there.
On the New Founding Podcast in early 2024, Abbotoy explained his endgame: “The whole point is to plant a flag and say this small town is where our people are gathering. The hope is that, long-term, we continue to do this, we’re regionally focused, we can expand to states, [and] for these sorts of developments to spearhead a revival of the region and make it an exemplar to the country of a healthy, natural, human way of life, the Christian way of life, and demonstrate the superiority of that way of life.”
RidgeRunner hopes to break ground on development this fall.
TAMARA REYNOLDS for Rolling Stone
Abbotoy drives me to a 450-acre plot the company bought earlier this year for $2.5 million. They’ve split the property into 39 parcels, nine of which, he tells me, are under contract. We get out at the top of a hill, and looking down into the valley, Abbotoy sketches out the vision: community center, farm store, Isker’s church, walking trails, and 80 acres that will remain farmland. Later, he takes me to the mouth of a deep limestone cave where he hopes to open a bistro. He plays down the idea they’re building their own town from scratch and insists that, although he’s marketing to Christian conservatives, he isn’t purposefully excluding anyone.
“We don’t vet buyers at all,” he says. “There’s no occasion where we ask, ‘What are your political views?’ before we sell. I’m setting out to create a neighborhood that has a certain aesthetic appeal and ethos. The people that want that come.”
ABBOTOY BELIEVES MANY LOCALS HAVE been turned against him by unfair media coverage, particularly by Phil Williams, the Nashville NewsChannel 5 reporter who broke the story and labeled RidgeRunner’s ethos Christian nationalism.
“Calling it a Christian nationalist project is a tactic to make it sound scary, like the architect behind it is trying to create a separatist commune,” Abbotoy says. “That’s ridiculous. My views are close to the median of a resident of this county. I’m a Christian conservative dude. I’m not an extreme guy.”
While it’s true Abbotoy has generally been more measured in his public statements than Isker or Engel, he has written about America’s need for a “Protestant Franco” — a reference to the nationalist dictator whose authoritarian regime ruled Spain for more than 35 years — and argued against women in church leadership roles. He co-authored an article last year that declared, “Our obligations as Christian men — as husbands, fathers, neighbors, and Americans — require us to accrue and wield power. If this frightens you, consider a world where only our enemies have this mindset.”
Signs have gone up around Gainesboro protesting the development.
TAMARA REYNOLDS
He’s not wrong about the impact of Williams’ reporting in Jackson County, though. The day after Williams’ initial report aired, Diana Mandli, then-owner of the Bull & Thistle, responded. “I got our big black board we normally write our specials on and wrote, ‘If you’re an individual or a group that promotes the oppression of others, please eat somewhere else,’” she says.
Marc Stengel, a Nashville-based property developer who owns buildings in Gainesboro and a second home in the county, went further, organizing and underwriting the “All are welcome” billboard. Since then, signs declaring, “Hate has no home here,” have proliferated on lawns.
Abbotoy frequently characterizes RidgeRunner’s local opposition as a “small contingent of liberal, out-of-town business owners.” This isn’t strictly accurate — plenty of local conservatives have also come out against RidgeRunner — but a lot of pushback has been led by newer arrivals like Cassie Kessler, who owns and runs the Stolen Coin, a restaurant and oyster bar on Gainesboro’s town square, with her husband, Pete, who’s the chef.
Cassie Kessler owns and runs the Stolen Coin, a restaurant and oyster bar on Gainesboro’s town square.
TAMARA REYNOLDS
“I am everything they don’t like: a loud, outspoken Democrat woman business owner,” she says. She grew up in Pittsburgh and met her husband, a native New Yorker, while working in Florida. During the pandemic, they decided to find a spot to start their own restaurant and landed here.
Abbotoy used to eat at the Stolen Coin pretty regularly, often bringing potential clients, showing the restaurant off as a Gainesboro selling point. That changed after Williams’ reporting. The town splintered into factions. “It’s icky around here now because it does cause you to look at people differently in the grocery store,” Kessler says. “Like, are you with them or are you with us?”
Williams, for his part, stands by his coverage. “Almost all of my reporting was based on their own words,” he says. “They have one public message for most of America. There’s a whole different message in their podcast environment.”
ISKER AND ENGEL STARTED Contra Mundum in early 2023. Abbotoy has appeared on the podcast at least four times, including one “mash-up” episode with his own American Reformer podcast. The line between some of Isker and Engel’s rhetoric and white supremacism is difficult to discern. Isker has written that “the very concept of ‘racism’ was literally the creation of communists,” and has advocated turning civil rights back to the states. Engel has promoted the Great Replacement theory and decried a “war on white America.” He identifies himself as a “Heritage American” and, in a lengthy tweet last May, explained this concept, which “affirms the domination and preeminence of the European-derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life. Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants.”
When I speak to Engel on a lengthy video call, he doesn’t exactly walk back these contentions but tries to recontextualize them. “I hold to basic conservative, very constitutionalist arguments that have nothing to do with race,” he says. “I’m kind of a nerd and do take positions that are beyond what the typical person would think about, like, the Civil Rights Act,” which he sees as “justification for more centralized bureaucracy.” As for his Heritage America and who gets to stay or go, “it’s about cultural compatibility, not racial purity.”
This kind of commingling between Christian nationalism and white identity isn’t uncommon, according to Whitehead, co-author of Taking Back America for God. “A key element of Christian nationalism is a desire for strong ethno-racial boundaries around national identity and who is a true American. They view this country as made by white Protestant men to benefit white Protestant men.”
Isker would only answer questions by email. He describes his own politics as “paleoconservative, much like Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, or Matt Walsh,” but doesn’t shirk the “Christian nationalist” label, which he claims has been used “as a pejorative for evangelical Christians who supported Donald Trump sometime after the mostly peaceful protests of January 6.”
Engel says that whatever his beliefs are, he doesn’t represent RidgeRunner. Abbotoy says Isker and Engel don’t speak for his company, but he doesn’t really distance himself from their views. “I agree with a lot of their politics,” he says. “I don’t agree with all of it. They’re bringing a lot of energy and excitement to the table. And they’re very welcome participants. In large part, the attacks on them have been wildly overblown and unfair, but I don’t want to validate those bad-faith attacks by saying, ‘These customers do not represent our company.’”
In January, when word leaked that Isker and Engel planned to meet a group of local veterans for breakfast and Bible study at Dairy Queen, between 75 and 100 people showed up beforehand, occupying all of the seating and disrupting the meeting. While it can be hard to get an accurate gauge on public opinion within the county — there’s no official polling and no elected officials I reached out to would talk —the Dairy Queen incident suggests resistance runs deeper than the downtown business community.
“Seventy-five people coming there on a cold winter morning at 7:30 was a win,” Dudney says.
Not everyone in the county opposes RidgeRunner. Mickie Davis, who moved here from California more than 20 years ago, started a Facebook group for the county back in 2015, which now has more than 8,500 members. Rarely a day passes without heated discussion about RidgeRunner. Davis, a staunch libertarian, is one of the company’s steadfast defenders.
“We have free speech, and people can say what they want,” she says. “Until they take away basic rights from someone, they should be able to do whatever they want.”
This live-and-let-live argument is popular among RidgeRunner’s backers. But the concern is if nothing is done now, once these communities are populated, it’ll be too late. In a county where commissioners typically win with 250 to 300 total votes, and town aldermen can win with little more than 100, it doesn’t take a huge influx of new voters to flex real political muscle.
This summer, the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce rejected RidgeRunner’s bid to join, the first time anyone could remember a business being denied. “With Josh and his colleagues, their public statements are incongruent with the mission, vision, and values of the chamber,” says John Deane, the board’s president.
Barring RidgeRunner from the chamber has relatively few real-world implications, but the rejection’s symbolism stings. Abbotoy says he’s considering suing to challenge it. “The contingent of business owners who’ve said from Day One, ‘All are welcome here,’ are dead set on trying to use whatever power they have to box RidgeRunner out for its perceived views.”
IF THERE’S ANYTHING BOTH SIDES AGREE ON, it’s that what happens in Jackson County won’t stay here. RidgeRunner has already bought a storefront in downtown Celina, the county seat in neighboring Clay County, and Abbotoy just closed on 1,000 additional acres in Jackson County.
More projects seem to be spawning from this one, too. Josh Haywood, an investor in both New Founding and Engel’s off-road trailer business, has said his company Haywood Ventures is looking to build “aligned small communities throughout the U.S.,” with a first development planned in North Georgia.
“The model is portable to a lot of rural America,” Abbotoy says.
In Jackson County, RidgeRunner is still a long way from political power. At the moment, Abbotoy is focused on more pedestrian concerns like how to run water, electricity, and fiber-optic cable to his properties. He plans to break ground on the first lots this fall with an eye toward families moving in next summer.
“They’re going to be law-abiding citizens, good neighbors who pay their taxes, and spend money at local businesses,” he says. With time, he’s convinced angst over RidgeRunner will subside. “I just want to be a guy who can build excellent neighborhoods while also wearing my values on my sleeve.”
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This seems to be part of Abbotoy’s strategy: Hang in there, pretend there’s nothing radical about his plans, and wait for his opposition to lose steam. It could work, but as Dudney points out, it fails to consider the famous cliché about people in Appalachia: They’re stubborn as hell.
“I’m never going to act like it’s normal,” Dudney says. “I’ve got the rest of my life here. I’m not going anywhere.”
