Josh Howerton is an authoritarian theocrat who thinks his penis, pulpit and piety give him the right to rule the world.
In a recent episode of his “Live Free” podcast, Howerton accuses YouTuber Rhett McLaughlin of gaslighting Christians. And in doing so, Howerton demonstrates how white evangelicals are redefining following Jesus as becoming the empire.
“Christians should have radically different postures toward people who are standing in their faith and wrestling with some doubts to try to keep following Jesus, than they should have toward people who are standing in their unbelief and then promulgating unbelief to try to get other people to move to unbelief,” Howerton said. “We should have compassion and tenderness toward a doubter. Really, we should be a lot more forceful with people who are trying to get other people to doubt.”
Rhett McLaughlin
In Howerton’s mind, McLaughlin is a wolf who hates Christians and who is attempting to convince Christians to doubt their faith and obey him instead.
“You got a guy who has de-converted from Christianity, says he hates Christianity, doesn’t believe a single word of the Bible. But he’s really gonna make sure you obey his interpretation of it,” Howerton declared. “You will see this from non-Christian people constantly. It’s the guy that you know who hates everything about the Bible, wants to advance every evil cause that’s in opposition to the Bible. He couldn’t quote one verse from the Sermon on the Mount. But he knows the verse ‘Judge not.’ And he’s gonna make sure you don’t do it.”
Howerton spends 32 minutes responding to this threat with his smug, infantilizing tone in a pathetic attempt to be forceful with McLaughlin the wolf.
Does McLaughlin actually hate Christians and the Bible?
Of course, McLaughlin never said he hates Christians or that he doesn’t believe a single word of the Bible. He also doesn’t promote “every evil cause that’s in opposition to the Bible.”
To the contrary, McLaughlin says during one interview, “If we’re talking about subscription to the teachings of Jesus, then I’m a Christian.” The reason he doesn’t identify as a Christian is that the Christian identity today includes way too many ideas McLaughlin finds harmful and because a lot of the faith statements about Jesus’ divinity or resurrection are impossible to prove. As McLaughlin puts it, “The person of Jesus, the nature of Jesus and what is fiction and what’s fact, I’m not really that concerned with.”
In another video, McLaughlin asks, “What if the president and a lot of the most powerful people in your country were doing all sorts of stuff that seemed to be very inconsistent with what you remember about the character and teachings of Jesus, so much so that you found yourself almost compelled to defend Jesus’ reputation against these people?”
With that background, McLaughlin’s YouTube short Howerton misrepresents is a video where McLaughlin talks about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness when Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world.
McLaughlin on the temptation of Jesus
After reading from Luke 4, McLaughlin says, “To me, this is pretty wild, considering the state of the current American church because the one opportunity that Jesus has to make a commentary about embracing political power over the kingdom or the kingdoms of this world is presented as a temptation of Satan. This is presented as a temptation of Satan. To fall for this, ‘We’ve gotta be in control of the kingdoms of the world.’ Does Jesus say, ‘Well OK, maybe you’re in charge right now. But you just wait until a few of my followers are in government,’ or ‘You wait until we’re in charge’?”
McLaughlin says Jesus didn’t promote a kingdom about attaining political power.
“It just blows my mind that we’ve gotten to this place where this seems to be the way that the kingdom of God is going to be established is by infiltrating and taking over the government,” he says. “I think it’s worth noting that the more that Christians have embraced this pursuit of political power, the more they have embraced political leadership that looks a lot less like Jesus and a lot more like the devil himself.”
The kingdom according to Howerton
Filled with supposedly righteous indignation at McLaughlin’s understanding of Jesus, Howerton attempts to correct the record.
“Jesus is called the King of Kings. That’s literally what we call him,” Howerton retorts, without offering any reflection on how Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom subverted first-century understandings of power.
So how does Howerton interpret Jesus’ resistance to Satan’s temptation? He claims, “The commentary that Jesus is making when he rejects Satan’s offer of ‘the kingdoms of the world’ is not a commentary on embracing political power. The commentary is about taking it as a present from Satan.”
In other words, to Howerton, Christians can wield power and sacralize violence over their neighbors as long as they see their power and violence as a gift from God. This is perhaps why he’s also spent significant time on his podcast defending the actions of ICE, as if there’s nothing to be concerned about.
“Everyone everywhere that bears the image of God must bend their knee to God,” Howerton demands. “Guess who that includes? Caesar. So Jesus is implying in that passage Caesar belongs to God and every king on this earth must bend his knee to the lordship of Jesus.”
But what does that mean for democracy? Are we to demand that all three branches of the U.S. government be led by white evangelicals?
‘I’m going to take all your stuff’
According to Howerton, Jesus’ message was: “I’m going to take all your stuff. And that includes every throne and every kingdom in this world.” And how does Jesus plan to do this? Howerton says Jesus taught, “I’m going to get them on my own through my disciples.”
Then he claims Jesus’ message to white evangelicals is: “All the nations belong to us. Let’s go bring them under my lordship.” He says, “It’s about establishing the lordship of Christ over all things and establishing the reality of him as king of kings.”
But if Jesus is really a top-down king of kings as Howerton describes, why would he need his disciples to establish his reality? Doesn’t this vision of Jesus essentially make him about as powerless as the golden calf in Exodus 32?
None of these questions seem to cross Howerton’s mind because of how obsessed he is with power by putting white evangelicals in charge of everything. “Christians should 100% be trying to win the culture war and establish Christian people in positions of power and Christian principles as the standpoint of our nation,” he says.
And where is Howerton learning such concepts?
From the power-obsessed patriarch of Moscow, Idaho, Doug Wilson, of course.
Howerton says: “In the words of Doug Wilson, it’s not whether, but which. The question is not whether someone’s worldview is going to guide our nation. The question is which worldview. The question is not whether morality is going to be imposed through government. The question is whose morality is going to get imposed.”
Let us pause and remember here that people often dismiss Wilson as not a threat because he is not a megachurch pastor. Yet from his church and publishing house in Idaho, Wilson is influencing megachurch pastors like Howerton.
With 21,000 people in attendance across its campuses each week, Lakepointe Church is the 15th largest church in America.
Institutionalizing the penis
With Jesus supposedly threatening to plunder possessions and take power through his disciples, Howerton proposes this happens through three institutions.
“God has created three institutions to establish good order and lordship in the world — the family, the church and the state,” he says. “What you’ll notice is that in all three jurisdictions, whatever God creates, Satan tries to capture. So go back to Genesis 2 and 3, God creates the family. Adam stands passively by. He refuses to lead his wife and his family.”
This is where penises come in.
For complementarians like Howerton, it’s important to mention Adam leading his family because they believe in male headship and female submission. Men are to be in charge of the home, the church and society. Or as Howerton once put it, women are supposed to treat their husbands as kings even if they aren’t worthy of respect, and women are to stand where their husbands tell them to stand, wear what their husbands tell them to wear, and do what their husbands tell them to do.
Or as Howerton’s fellow complementarian pastor Kevin DeYoung asks, “What school or church or city center or rural hamlet is better off when fathers no longer rule?”
The ascension of Howerton’s Jesus to the top of the kingdoms would ultimately be about giving power not simply to white evangelicals, but to white evangelical men.
Three political leader archetypes
Of course, the elephant in the room at this point becomes the fact the convicted sexual predator Donald Trump is in the White House, chosen overwhelmingly by white evangelicals in every primary and general election for the past decade. And given how Trump has bragged about sexually assaulting women and is so present throughout the Epstein Files, this creates a bit of a moral dilemma for Republican Christians.
“How are Republican Christians so in favor of Trump, despite how he’s used his power to assault women?”
How are Republican Christians so in favor of Trump, despite how he’s used his power to assault women?
Howerton deals with this question by mentioning three types of political leaders. He says Josiah leaders are those who are godly, Jezebel leaders are those who are wicked, and Jehu leaders are those who are not Christian but who give Christians power.
He explains: “If the choice in front of us is between a Jezebel leader that’s an unrighteous person advancing unrighteous causes like infant murder, the redefinition of marriage, ‘transing’ a bunch of kids, gender mutilation, using the government school system to indoctrinate everybody’s kids into unbelief and godless viewpoints of education, all the things. If the choice is between a Jezebel and a Jehu, that should be pretty dang obvious for every Christian. OK?”
It’s all projection
According to Howerton, those who deconstruct his penis-powered, neighbor-plundering Jesus are replacing Jesus with the government at the top of the hierarchy.
“When you become a secular person, you reject the idea of God. Now there actually is no power higher than the government. There is no God over the government. So the government is the highest remaining authority left. So in their schema, what happens is the government functionally becomes God,” Howerton claims.
Of course, nowhere does McLaughlin suggest government should be worshiped as God. He’s simply saying followers of Jesus shouldn’t be obsessed with seeing and taking the kingdoms of the world if they claim to follow Jesus’ example of resisting Satan’s temptation for power.
But Howerton claims McLaughlin is worshiping the government and then suggests that for people like McLaughlin, “Politics becomes religion, candidates become saviors, rallies become worship services, and campaigning becomes evangelism.”
These accusations are pretty rich coming from a Christian nationalist like Howerton. After all, white evangelicals are the ones who are equating Republicans taking control of the U.S. government with Jesus being crowned king. White evangelicals are the ones holding worship and revival tours that double as political campaigns meant to sign up conspiracy theorist conservatives to get out the vote and work the polls.
In fact, white evangelicals have blurred the lines between church and state so much that worship leader Sean Feucht says, “We are planning and plotting to do revival meetings, sponsored by the U.S. government, all across the nation.”
Still, Howerton claims, “The church is not getting more political. Politics are getting more theological and spiritual.”
Everything Howerton is smugly accusing McLaughlin of is a complete projection. He’s the one obsessing over defining the presence of God at the top. And in his silly attempt to forcefully deconstruct McLaughlin, he never even mentions the least of these — those Jesus was concerned about.
The Jesus Howerton promotes assumes the rules of empire, plays the game of thrones as defined by the devil by posturing white evangelicals over their neighbors, and turns the church into a pyramid scheme run by men. By presenting a Jesus who sees and takes power, Howerton strips Jesus of any power he might have to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed and the Lord’s favor to all.
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.