Far-right political donors who felt that the late-night comedy genre has made an “outright mockery” of “traditional American values” dropped roughly $500,000 on a talk show that they believed would change late-night TV forever. Unfortunately, every prospective network aborted the show before that dream could come to life.

In the Christian Nationalism movement, members follow the Seven Mountain Mandate, which compels them to dominate seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business. And, while the religious far-right has been shockingly successful at taking over most of those mountains through the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the “entertainment” aspect of the mandate has proven to be a particularly pesky peak, especially when it comes to comedy. While conservative-leaning comedy podcasters have certainly expanded their influence in recent years, there has yet to emerge a proselytizing Christian comic who can topple the traditional, secular institutions of the industry like the Walls of Jericho.

Enter Eric Metaxas and Christian Nationalist organization Ziklag, which poured a half-million dollars into an attempt to turn the right-wing radio host, author and conspiracy theorist into a “faith-friendly” Jimmy Fallon. Together, in 2022, they created, The Talk Show with Eric Metaxas with the express purpose of expanding the Christian Nationalism movement’s influence over American television and wrest the comedy talk-show business out of the hands of “the secular elites who currently reign over late-night TV.”

However, after shopping the show to that same cabal of godless network executives, Ziklag failed to find a buyer.

According to The Guardian, which suffered through all five pilot episodes of The Talk Show with Eric Metaxas that earned a stern “pass” from even the most Rupert-Murdoch-owned networks, “The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze-inducing interviews.” Somehow, booking Carrot Top was the least of the show’s problems.

Before Metaxas became the Christian Nationalist movement’s candidate to unseat James Corden as the worst late-night host of the 21st century, he cut his teeth on TV comedy by — seriously — writing for the Christian cartoon VeggieTales. Metaxas also wrote a series of Donald Trump-themed children books, including Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp, before becoming a prominent voice in the right-wing push to overturn the 2020 election results and reinstate Trump as President.

Presumably, it was some combination of Metaxas’ election-denying and his kid-focused-propaganda-writing that caught the eye of Ziklag, a secretive, well-funded organization that plans to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains.” Shortly before the taping of the five doomed pilot episodes of The Talk Show with Eric Metaxas in 2022, Ziklag sent out a series of fundraising emails to its powerful supporters (membership in the organization is limited to individuals with a net worth of $25 million or higher) urging them to make late night the next battleground in their culture war.

“For too long, the late-night talkers on network TV have filled the airwaves with progressive rants and outright mockery of anyone who espouses traditional American values,” Ziklag wrote to its donors in leaked emails published by The Guardian, promising to “change that forever” with five pilot episodes of The Talk Show, “which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and TV ownership groups.”

While The Talk Show would obviously not lead with its extremist religious and political motivations, the plan was for Metaxas to become a cultural influence on the level of heathens like Jimmy Kimmel in order to give the Christian takeover of American television a friendly face.

Unfortunately for Ziklag and its uber-rich donors, Metaxas’ VeggieTales-style comedy doesn’t work in a medium that’s explicitly aimed at adults watching TV after the kids go to bed. Here is a selection of the terrible punchlines that Metaxas delivered to his groaning audience:

“Big news in the world of show business. Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. In this one, Harrison will find an ancient artifact — by looking in the mirror.”
“Barbie’s longtime companion, Ken, just turned 61 years old. And he said the perfect gift for his birthday would be to finally get a prostate.”
“In India, doctors removed 526 teeth from a seven-year-old boy’s mouth. The boy is recovering nicely. However, the Tooth Fairy declared bankruptcy.”
“Botanists have discovered a meat-eating plant in Canada. Researchers determined that the plant started eating meat because it just got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle.”
“Gas costs a fortune. It’s insane how much it costs. And who would have thought that the best deal at the Shell station would ever be the $3 microwave burrito?”

Unfortunately for Metaxas, all the Z-list guests and hack punchlines that $500,000 could buy him weren’t enough to convince any network to pick up The Talk Show. But, as The Guardian pointed out, the absolute, embarrassing failure of The Talk Show to find any sort of audience for its awkward and humorless soft-propaganda shouldn’t be mistaken for a cultural defeat on the part of its orchestrators. As they wrote, The Talk Show “serves as a reminder that the right wing is waging a well-funded war on the media that is unlikely to end soon.”

If the religious right ever finds a Christian Nationalist comedian who is charismatic enough to carry his own late-night show, they may yet reach that entertainment mountaintop. Meanwhile, Greg Gutfeld will continue to stew over the fact that the fundamentalists apparently don’t think he’s funny enough for their holy war.