Mira Fox recently had an article for MSN called “The Podcasters Making Antisemitism Christian Again.” She explained antisemitism is rising among certain evangelical Christians.
The theme of the “Stone Choir” blog she watched: “Satan is using the Hebrew language to undermine Christianity.”
This was the guiding argument of an episode Fox listened to from “Stone Choir,” a Christian theology podcast hosted by a couple of Missouri Synod Lutherans. The episode was ostensibly about different translations of the Bible. “Stone Choir” was promoted on one Christian site as “the podcast no one is allowed to admit they listen to” and said it was sneaking Nazism into the church.
This ideology is “blogging” its way into the hearts of millions of Americans. For example, “Stone Choir” is in the top 0.5% of podcasts globally. It has a rabid legion of fans, who hang upon every word as though it is gospel.
In the view of Fox and others, this pushes a severe theology of a wrathful God, a literal hell and a Puritan theology and culture. It mixes Christian nationalism with misogyny. A gendered performance props up the entire ideological scaffolding.
Theologian J. Kameron Carter has warned us antisemitism is the root sin of American theology. It rose from Gnostic roots in the second century, when Jesus was torn from his Jewish roots and made a white man. The ensuing racism and colonialism mixed thoroughly into theology and now, more than ever, race is still a theological problem.
That’s how you get preachers pretending to be theologians espousing heretical views.
Among Southern Baptists and other evangelicals, these preachers are known as the TheoBros. I find them as hard to read as I do President Trump’s rally speeches. They seem the reincarnation of John Winthrop and John Cotton, although I suspect they are more likely to think they are the second coming of Jonathan Edwards.
“They seem the reincarnation of John Winthrop and John Cotton, although I suspect they are more likely to think they are the second coming of Jonathan Edwards.”
Problem: Compared to Edwards, America’s greatest theological mind, the TheoBros seem borderline illiterate.
I sincerely ask, “Can we please stop calling the TheoBros Christian?”
Any theology that mixes a brew of sexism, antisemitism, racism, Christian nationalism, resentment, nativism, intolerance, conspiracy mindedness, overt displays of patriotism and gendered performance is not Christian.
Hiding pernicious evil in a plethora of words about the Bible is as awful as using the Bible to justify the dehumanizing of fellow human beings.
Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis says: “There is too much historical evidence that the Bible has been read in ways that seemed at the time to authorize appalling abuse, even murder, of women, Jews, slaves, colonized peoples, homosexuals. One of the great advances within critical study of the Bible in our own lifetime is that we now have methods for investigating this history of abuse and means of articulating the problems that are gaining wide acceptance within the church. That is unquestionably a good thing,”
In many ways, I think the TheoBros are a natural response to the encroaching power of secularism. Not an effective strategy, but an inevitable one. When people are convinced they have lost their “Christian way of life” and “biblical worldview” and God has been pushed out of the public arena, it is expected some will push back by attempting to return to an earlier era that is perceived as a golden age of American Christianity.
“The TheoBros are a natural response to the encroaching power of secularism.”
I have two primary criticisms of the TheoBros. Emotionally, they are producing a dangerous melancholy and in practice a disturbing masculine superiority.
A dangerous melancholy
One of the primates of the TheoBros is Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor. He describes himself as a “paleo-Confederate,” believing the Civil War in 1860 was only one part of an ongoing war. He is convinced the Confederacy was right in almost every political sense. In other words, he is a part of the “Lost Cause.”
And there is both the weakness and the danger. The Lost Cause is the most explicit exhibition of a dangerous melancholy that dominates the lives of the TheoBros.
Melancholy warps historical consciousness. When the newly freed Hebrew slaves experienced difficulty in the wilderness, they turned to melancholy.
The TheoBros worry about the loss of “Christian America.” They confuse loss with lack. According to them from the theological perspective and Trump from the political side, America has lost its faith and its greatness. They pretend the lacking object once was possessed and then lost.
They are theologically naïve, nostalgic and reactionary. When melancholy leads to the conclusion that a people would prefer the alleged security of slavery to the rigors of wilderness freedom, we should know we have a problem.
TheoBros know we are in trouble, but they are offering us a false way out. This is not the time to mourn the loss of an imagined past but the moment to face the demons of our culture and come face to face with the fundamental lack around which our understanding of the faith has been based.
In biblical terminology, we walk into the valley of the shadow of death, we face the “beast kings of Daniel,” the “fiery furnace,” and the “lion’s den.” We go through the fantasy and we face the lack, the same lack our ancestors faced. And we find the courage to keep the faith. We learn how not to be secular.
“TheoBros know we are in trouble, but they are offering us a false way out.”
The TheoBros are not really Calvinists in a political sense; they are Campbellites (restorationists). The are not courageous; they are cowards.
The goal of the TheoBros’ melancholic rhetoric is a public political will that cedes the power of the citizenry to white male patriarchs who promise to protect America and restore her primal glory.
This is a determined (think predestination), determining and dangerous rhetoric. Trump is the religious leader of MAGA evangelicals. Pastors imitate his demolition rhetoric and cruelty. They make empathy a sin. Doug Wilson’s influence grows under the shadow of Trump. David French says, “There is a new demand for Wilson’s message because it matches the Trumpist spirit of this evangelical age.”
Their movement, like Trump’s, is grounded in a toxic mix of economic angst, racism, antisemitism, religious bigotry, antifeminism, hostility toward science, the media and the establishment.
Eventually, Americans will remember they don’t like being told what to do.
Suffocating maleness
David French notes, “To simply call (Doug Wilson) patriarchal is too mild. The body of churches he co-founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, includes pastors who believe that the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, should be repealed and replaced by something called ‘household voting,’ where it’s no longer one person, one vote, but one household, one vote.”
The lynchpin of the TheoBros is gender performance. Their ostentatious masculine posturing is a malleable and useful tool. This religious masculinity, propped up with some biblical citations, allows them to position themselves as outsiders yet insiders, bad boys yet good fathers and leaders.
I wonder if TheoBros are ever jarred from sleep in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting and at some ungodly hour they are pitched into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness they might not even believe what they are spouting to the world. I imagine this scenario because their theology is so absurd and evil.
Performed political masculinity connects the cult of popular leaders with conservative religious and political gender norms. The adoption of macho approaches by the TheoBros is not accidental. This is the fulcrum that makes all their other positions possible.
Their machismo reveals a bullying, masculine set of performances with a paternalistic dominance that claims to be the only path to saving the nation and the faith. It is no accident that Wilson would pass for a professional wrestler in Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s stable or that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a member of Wilson’s group.
The problem with the TheoBros is not that they are right-wingers overreacting to a secular culture, but that they’re melancholic misfits and misogynists attempting to control women and the nation. Far from being knights in shining armor protecting the faith, they are models of leaders pursuing a confused politics of gendered performance, racism and antisemitism. The excessive pile of theological, biblical jargon filling their blogs is ultimately an expression of impotence.
The TheoBros, in fact, are not Christians. They are new-age Gnostics at best. And the church decided in the second century Gnosticism was heresy. I’m sticking with the church’s decision.
Rodney Kennedy
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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