Cavernario Galindo

I came across the “Cross on the Moon Coalition” when researching Freedom 250, the Trump-backed organization that redirected funding from the bipartisan group planning America’s anniversary celebrations and turned the event into a MAGA morass of corporate conflicts of interest, questionable conservative retellings of history and right-wing Christian nationalism.

The Freedom 250 website prominently features another initiative, “America Prays,” which largely seems to consist of an online platform where people can share their semi-anonymized prayers. Recent offerings have included things like; “Please pray 🙏 for my Son Dwight and I that we win our upcoming court case,” “open the eyes of the pastors of churches in the US to the importance of praying for Israel,” and “God bless President Donald J Trump, our great military and God bless America the beautiful.” “America Prays” also features an extensive list of “partners” that includes major right-wing Christian groups, individual churches, religious media companies, the “influencers” Jack Posobiec, Alex Bruesewitz, and “DC Draino,” and the “Cross on the Moon Coalition.”

Justin Park, founder of the coalition, gave an interview to the Catholic Messenger, a church-backed publication in his home state of Iowa. In it, Park talked about the group’s lunar ambitions and how it hopes to achieve this galactic goal.

“(The cross) sits on top of a lunar lander, and yeah, it’s got a little high-gain antenna on top,” Park said. “There’s also a drill … It augers into the lunar (surface) because we also don’t want to get knocked over later on … (We’ll) have a video stream of the earth, and in front of it will be Jesus Christ.”

Park says he carries a miniature moon cross lander almost everywhere he goes. According to the coalition’s website, the group hopes to make “millions” of similar models to give to “believers around the world.”

Of course, all of this will not be cheap. Park said he hopes the Moon Cross can hitch a ride on a commercial spaceflight craft. He knows that will cost well over a million dollars and, as of last month, Park told the Catholic Messenger the coalition had “raised about a quarter of a million.” But Park has a plan for how to get the rest of the cash. 

“The idea is really to find a big space advocate who hasn’t found the Lord yet. Ideally, we would want to convert someone like Elon Musk. The world would just be a whole lot better if we could, evangelize Musk and then make him into an evangelist,” Park told the Messenger. 

Earlier this week, I emailed Park to see how all of that is going. He told me they “are actively fund-raising and working towards evangelizing the tech community.” 

“Reaching Elon and others is an ongoing process that our team works on and prays for every day,” Park wrote.

I also asked Park about the political aspect of his coalition. He told me that the group is “definitely aligned with Trump’s efforts to bring more prayer to America.” 

“I have volunteered at multiple Freedom 250 events and applaud his participation in honoring our Savior Jesus Christ,” Park wrote.