For a brief moment in November, the TheoBros, a network of militant Christian nationalist influencers, made news when Donald Trump nominated one of their allies, former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth attends a church that is affiliated with the TheoBro movement, and he has cited TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, as someone who has had a major influence on him. While the controversies surrounding Hegseth’s alleged alcohol abuse and mismanagement of funds meant for veterans continue to make the news, the TheoBros have receded into the background.
But as it turns out, they are embroiled in a major controversy of their own. A simmering divide over how Christians should regard Judaism has ignited into a conflagration. The resulting rift has left two factions of TheoBros retreating into their separate camps—one of which is doubling down on antisemitic rhetoric to a widening audience.
The backstory—as much of it as I’ve been able to piece together—goes something like this: An undercurrent of antisemitism, which has long rippled through the TheoBros’ social media spheres, has intensified over the last year. In May, Samuel Holden, a pro-Hitler content creator, released a video that he called “White Boy Summer,” a nod to an earlier song and meme popularized by white nationalist influencers, including head Groyper Nick Fuentes. Holden’s video combined hyper-masculine and Christian nationalist content with pro-Nazi imagery. Wilson, the TheoBro patriarch, condemned the video, calling it “Nazi triumphalism.”
But Wilson’s acolytes seemed titillated by “White Boy Summer”—or maybe they were just flattered. In the video, Holden tagged several younger TheoBros, including Texas pastor Joel Webbon, Utah pastors Eric Conn and Brian Sauvé, and Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism. Shortly after Holden released the video, Conn reposted it on X, commenting, “By God we shall have our home again,” a white nationalist slogan. The following month, Sauvé posted, “Pride month is canceled. Welcome to White Boy Summer.” Wolfe, meanwhile, criticized Wilson for disavowing it. “A better tactic would be friendliness to these young rightwing guys,” he said. Conn, Sauvé, and Wolfe didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones about their reactions to the video.
Webbon, one of the most outspoken of the TheoBros, praised the video in a June podcast. He clarified in an email to Mother Jones that he had initially “shared the Samuel Holden video without watching closely” and that he condemns “both Nazis and Bolsheviks/Communists. However, the latter is by far a more present threat today.” Yet the video’s message fit in nicely with some of the sentiments he had been expressing earlier in the spring. “You thought Christian nationalism was scary,” he posted on X in May. “Enjoy Jewish nationalism.” The same day, he posted: “America has long had a separation of Church and State. Perhaps one day we might also have a separation of Synagogue and State.”
“America has long had a separation of Church and State. Perhaps one day we might also have a separation of Synagogue and State.”
The disagreement over the video simmered for a few months. Then, this past fall, a skirmish erupted on X and in various podcasts over an accusation by German TheoBro Tobias Riemenschneider that Webbon had failed to adequately address the problem of a young man in his church who had allegedly been sharing pro-Nazi memes. Wilson sided with Riemenschneider, agreeing that allowing such hatred to go unchecked was dangerous for a church community.
In November, Wilson issued a statement he called the Antioch Declaration, a rambling document that eventually condemns “the racial and antisemitic theories of Adolf Hitler and neo-pagan doctrines of the Nazi cult.” Several prominent TheoBros signed on, and some wrote statements of their own. Wilson’s sidekick Toby Sumpter, a pastor in Wilson’s church, for example, endorsed his friend’s argument, adding in a blog post that a church that tolerated antisemitism was just as bad as one that tolerated homosexuality. In the same post, Sumpter called the “White Boy Summer” video “as gay as socks on a rooster.” Hegseth hasn’t signed the declaration, but his views on Judaism seem to align with those of the Wilson camp: He is strongly pro-Israel and posted on Instagram that he believes antisemitism “is running rampant on ‘elite’ university campuses.”
Webbon, meanwhile, has dug in his heels. In the last few weeks, virtually all of his posts on X have focused on the TheoBro rift. For him, the problem with Judaism, at least theologically, appears to be the Talmud—a sacred text of ancient rabbinical teachings in Judaism that, he argued in an October blog post, not only rejects the notion of Jesus as the son of God, but also “effectively corrupts and totally undermines all of the Old Testament.” In early November, he posted on X, “I hate Judaism but love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.”
Later in November, in his podcast episode after Wilson released the Antioch Declaration, Webbon said that in his version of a Christian nationalist America, “No practicing Jew who hasn’t converted to Christianity will be able to serve in public office.” He called Judaism a “parasitical” religion in the subsequent episode. “What it has done historically throughout the ages is typically go into other countries, other peoples with other religions, and kind of cozy up but not really for their benefit—not a mutually beneficial relationship, but where they ultimately get far more out of the deal than the Christian nation does,” he added. In mid-December, mixed martial arts champion Jake Shields appeared on Webbon’s podcast. Afterward, Shields posted a clip to his 800,000 X followers in which Webbon argues that ever since the Allies triumphed over Hitler’s Germany in World War II, Christianity has been diminished in the West. In an email to Mother Jones, Webbon said he stands by “everything I’ve said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil.”
Webbon’s damn-the-torpedoes social media approach to this conflict is somewhat ironic, given that he learned how to shitpost from none other than Wilson. For the last six years, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a video a few years ago, Webbon described being inspired by Wilson not to censor himself. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like, that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.”
While a well-known figure in the world of the TheoBros, with only about 27,000 followers on X, Webbon’s influence outside those circles is difficult to determine. But there is some evidence that the antisemitism he and other TheoBros espouse may be breaking into the MAGA mainstream. The week after Wilson released the Antioch Declaration, Webbon appeared on the podcast of Calvin Robinson, a British Christian nationalist pastor, where he argued that the Talmud was “uniquely hostile to Jesus Christ.” Robinson posted that portion of the conversation to his 403,000 followers on X. In addition to his robust social media following, Robinson is connected to the Trump team: He spoke at a Trump rally at a Georgia church a few days before the election.
And then there is William Wolfe, a TheoBro who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon in the first Trump administration. He has posted phrases that are widely recognized as antisemitic dog whistles, such as, “Notice things. And point them out to others.” That may appear to be anodyne, but antisemitic extremists use the word “noticing” to refer to identifying Jewish people in powerful positions. Around the same time, Wolfe posted, apropos of no previous conversation: “You know what’s a beach I love? Hilton Head.” The initials “HH” are often used as neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” Wolfe didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.
The TheoBros’ attitudes toward Judaism differ starkly from those of adherents to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a rapidly growing charismatic movement that calls Christians to take over the government. As I wrote a few months ago, many NAR believers are fervently pro-Israel because they are convinced it will play a crucial role in ushering in the return of the Messiah just before the End Times. This scenario isn’t entirely benign—eventually, they believe, all Jews will convert to Christianity, and those who don’t will perish. The NAR crowd’s extreme love for Israel can have a love-bombing quality about it: At NAR events, I have seen many charismatic Christians wearing Stars of David and Jewish prayer shawls. At one in Pennsylvania, a group of Christian teenagers set up a chuppah—the canopy used at Jewish weddings—and danced the horah.
The TheoBros’ fixation on Judaism, however, is much less admiring. It’s also an example of a broader shift on social media over the past year, where, against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, extremists have become emboldened to use more explicitly antisemitic memes and rhetoric. One prominent example of this is former bounty hunter-turned-livestreamer Stew Peters, who since October 7 has transformed from a garden-variety anti-vaccine activist into a full-on Nazi sympathizer. (At the time of this writing, his most recent post on X was: “Putting a television set in your living room is like inviting a jew into your house. Using AI is like inviting a jew into your brain.”) In June, Webbon appeared on Peters’ show; he called the founding of Israel “one of the biggest mistakes in history.” He added, “There is no major world religion with a more hostile view toward the person and work of Jesus Christ, our savior and Lord, than Talmudic Judaism.” Peters has more than 550,000 followers on Rumble, the far-right platform where he broadcasts.
When asked for comment, Webbon clarified to Mother Jones that he does not “hold to Peters’ views.” In a separate email, he provided a link to a document called the “Statement on Natural Affections,” which he said he had helped write. The statement acknowledges “that Nazism was, and is, an anti-Christian ideology that exalts the state as savior and god” and that “while the Allied powers rightly opposed the evils of Nazis, that some of their actions violated Christian principles of justice and morality.”
Wilson signed the Statement on Natural Affections, but it doesn’t seem as though he’s forgiven Webbon. He recently withdrew as a featured speaker from a conference that Webbon plans to host next year. When I asked Wilson for comment for this article, he responded, “Because one of the accusations against us is that we only did the Antioch Declaration in order to placate commie publications like Mother Jones, I couldn’t risk any positive mention of us right now.”
