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Christianity in its original form (well what I strongly believe is its original form), in a “the words of Jesus decide 99% of the focus and the theology” form, has a rigorous immune system against vain purity spiraling.
Jesus specifically condemns those who prioritize ritual over substance. In fact, he saves his greatest condemnation for these people. He is put to death by these people, either directly or indirectly depending on your theology. It’s a surprisingly major part of the gospel. Some examples:
This trains Christians to be aware of anyone who signals virtue explicitly, where the spectacle of the virtue is sought rather than the substance. It trains Christians to be aware of anyone who prides themselves on stringent rule-following and burden-bearing. It then cuts out the possibility of the vain finding satisfaction in a prideful position, because Christians are told not to take any pride in that or even call themselves “teacher” or “instructor”. Then, it sets the actual standard for obtaining status: the more one humbles himself (in substance, understood as imitating Christ with all necessary sacrifices), the more exalted he will be in the community. Yet the one who exalts himself will be swiftly humbled by the community.
A purity spiral oriented around immaterial or vain issues is criticized. There’s a priority of importance.
This trains Christians to be cautious of those who appear outwardly righteous or who seem put on an act for attention.
This is great. It instantly reminds me of some high status academic giving a land acknowledge: do you really think, you status-seeker, that you wouldn’t have been the one taking the land were you alive back then?
This is the only place where Jesus goes absolutely demon mode condemning people. He was comparatively chill with the prostitutes and tax collectors. Even the woman with five husbands isn’t condemned but joined him for dinner, and she was a Samaritan, so not in his closest community. You see, the “scribes” are the journalists, “fact checkers”, and academic writers of Christ’s time. The Pharisees are like the combined “academic instructors” and “moral police” of his time. This is sufficient to understand his ire, really. And this isn’t an exhaustive list of criticism.
The crucial thing about Christianity is that Christ is conceived as a person (topical). As such, his character can be imitated in addition to his philosophy internalized. And his character was not “holier than thou”, which means that to obtain status, one cannot act that way. They have to act as follows:
What you see as a zero-day vulnerability would require all the Christians to be blind to it happening, to ignore the central teachings they are supposed to worship, and also for the Judas-defector to somehow be better at righteous conduct than the Christians. But by the defector’s very nature, they would be unable to defeat a good Christian in exemplifying genuine humility (no acclaim to be gained in the years of this practice, and they are apparently addicted to acclaim). And the reward for all of this would be genuinely miniscule compared to entering any other institution: it’s not like they would get extra gold or girls. If there exists some vicious person who is so addicted to power and status that they wish to subvert Christianity, it would seem that the years of Christlike conduct necessary to ingratiate themselves in the community would either cure them of their vice or make them absolutely mad. They would only be able to get their status fix from habitual conduct which is, if not debasing, equalizing. Now in modern Christianity they would be able to talk well, or claim to have a vision, or claim to know the most; not so in the OC religion.
I think it would be possible for a clever 130 IQ+ sleeper agent with low time preference and a genuine desire to destroy Christianity from the inside to be able to pass off long enough to reach a position of decent authority. If then you have 10+ of these agents once a few of them get high up they can start promoting the other sleeper agents until a critical mass of them are respected enough in the community that together you can form your own little cabal whose members protect each other and can also start throwing your weight around enough to start slicing off portions of the community you've thought about and identified the rest of the group would be least concerned about cutting off (clearly the Christians would be supportive of cutting off a bunch of satanists who tried to join them so it's not like they are infinitely accepting of everyone, you just need to find the dividing line and try and convince everyone that the slice you currently want to excommunicate fall on the wrong side of it).
Once you provide this blueprint to the 130 IQ+ sleeper agent I think they can imitate it well enough that to all external appearances they are a true believer and it's only on the inside that they are secretly trying to take over the community.
As for why someone would want to do this? To misquote the climber George Mallory who replied "because it is there" when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, I say there is a type of person who'd want to infiltrate Christianity just because it is there and available to be infiltrated. All the defenses you mentioned against infiltration just make this kind of person want to do it even more because it makes the challenge more interesting. The way to protect against him is to make the task appear boring so that he gets bored and goes off and does something else, while all the things you mentioned make it seem like an even bigger achievement to successfully infiltrate the sect.
Now yes you may be right that the years of following the rules will either make someone truly convert to the cause or go mad. But that doesn't mean that in this time they can't cause real damage, even as they themselves are changed irrevocably by the religion. In fact I think this is literally what happened with Saul of Tarsus. He was an infiltrator that like a virus managed to insert himself irremovably into the DNA of the Christian religion.
Now in his late life he may well have been changed enough by the religion to really believe in what that changed Christianity was telling him (indeed, we can be pretty sure he was executed and all for his beliefs) but that doesn't mean he didn't fundamentally change the system into something it was nothing like before him (e.g. Christianity minus the Pauline Epistles but replaced with some of the apocrypha is a very different belief system, we know there was a tussle between Saul and James the Just with the Sauline fraction winning out; if instead of the Pauline Epistles you had the Apocryphon of James included in the bible Christianity suddenly becomes a lot more Gnostic of a religion). Saul may well have been "converted" eventually, but the religion he was converted to was nothing like the original Christianity of Jesus but rather a religion that was in large part about him.
Similarly the biological cell which long ago after invasion by a foreign bacteria managed to control and convert it into becoming its mitochondrial slave may in one sense be said to have won, but that presence of the mitochondria would later go on to change the descendants of the cell completely and turn them into something which relied utterly and totally on the mitochondria for survival. In much the same way even if early Christians can manage to quell and assimilate any sleeper agents and prevent them from outright destroying the movement, that doesn't mean the sleeper agents can't completely subvert it and turn it into something it never was in the first place, and that in itself is a type of success for the goals of the original unsubverted agents when they were just starting out, and in fact I think if Saul the persecutor of Christians could see a few decades down the line at what he would turn Christianity into by the time of his death, I think he would be quite pleased with himself.
There are simple ways to protect against this threat if the threat were plausible. You could mandate that everything must be judged exclusively by Christ’s words and deeds as handed down unchanged for many centuries in the Christian gospel (with the apostles in a very far second place, never overruling Christ). This means that the standard of behavior can’t be changed. You can enact a “majority rule” vote decision, if any teachings needed to be changed. You could mandate that they must be married with children and have their children attend the religious schooling — meaning anything that harms the religion now harms their children. And so on.
In real life, people’s behaviors are motivated by rewards. This sleeper agent needs a genuine compelling reason to “take over the community”, such that they bear the discomfort of helping members of the community selflessly for decades for a small chance of taking over the community. Every time he helps someone he hates, he will be demoralized, while his virtuous counterpart is moralized. The virtuous counterpart enjoys pure cognitive efficiency, whereas the vicious one needs to constantly double-think everything he does. At the same time, the sleeper agent will be spending many hours a week being propagandized into loving Christ, which may involve persuasive arguments. At best, all of those hours are spent in discomfort; at worst, he is persuaded into virtuous behavior.
This is kind of like saying that an evil person who hates SpaceX will join SpaceX in an attempt to subvert it. SpaceX easily filters for people who genuinely care about the mission: they are made to work on it with their whole mind and heart and strength, to participate in “all night vigils” where they work on their project. A hater is less likely to be able to do all of this, because every aspect of it lacks the feedback loop of motivating reinforcement. Yet unlike SpaceX, Christianity involves rituals for propagandizing the faith, with music and poetry and spectacle and drama and stories.
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