Vice President JD Vance speaks before swearing in Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense in Washington on January 25, 2025.Rod Lamkey Jr./AP
On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Wednesday evening, Vice President JD Vance held forth about what he called an “old-school, very Christian concept.”
You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, then you love you fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.
These may sound like familiar anti-liberal talking points, but one particular corner of the internet was ecstatic about Vance’s words: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.
After Vance’s Hannity appearance, Andrew Isker, a reformed preacher and co-author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, was triumphant in a post to his 37,000 followers on X. For years, Isker wrote, people had called him “‘racist’ for speaking about the ancient, traditional Christian idea of ordered loves.” But now, he wrote, “To see it articulated clearly by the Vice President of the United States shows that we are winning and the postwar liberal rejection of all unchosen bonds is on its last legs. Our fathers will be honored once again.”
In response to a post on X that was critical of Vance’s remarks about the supposed Christian hierarchy of love, Andrew Torba, Isker’s co-author and CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, posted to his 469,000 followers on X: “The Vice President of the United States is talking about rightly ordered loves…and you’re blackpilling?” (In other words, he suggested, it was ridiculous to complain about such a happy turn of events.)
Indeed, what is known as the Christian order of love is one of the TheoBros’ favorite topics. One key element of this doctrine for them is that it’s un-Christian to love foreigners as much as you love your countrymen. Yet for many of them, this idea is more than just an expression of patriotism. Rather, it’s rooted in the concept of kinism—a white nationalist term, popularized a few decades ago, that nations should be ethnically and racially pure and that the United States specifically is the domain for white Christians.
Which was the quiet part that some of the TheoBros said out loud after Vance’s remarks.
“Any Christian who denies ‘hierarchy of loves’ has white men at the lowest level of their hierarchy of loves,” posted Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism.
William Wolfe, no relation to Stephen, served in the previous Trump administration both as deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of legislative affairs at the State Department. He posted, “Liberal Christians really are like: ‘There is no such thing as a hierarchy of love and also all white men are the worst.’”
This isn’t the first time Vance has amplified ideas from the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last fall, he touched on similar themes in his address in July at the Republican National Convention:
Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
Vance’s connections to the TheoBros are well documented. Not only has he been photographed posing with them, he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, who serves on the board of the TheoBro magazine American Reformer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has connections to the TheoBros movement.
The TheoBros have noticed the new vice president’s embrace of their ideas, and they’re delighted. “JD Vance and [former Fox News host] Tucker Carlson definitely have been reading reformed right wing X,” one anonymous TheoBro X account gushed to its 67,000 followers Thursday. “I’m convinced that J.D. Vance has an alt and reads our tweets,” posted Brian Sauvé, a TheoBro in Ogden, Utah. “And there’s nothing you can do to convince me otherwise.”