Last week, the People For the American Way Foundation partnered with political analyst and cultural influencer Kat Abughazaleh in releasing a video series called “The Dangers of White Christian Nationalism.”
In the series, Abughazaleh explained how modern Christian nationalism is "rooted in white supremacy" and that point was driven home during a sermon recently preached by radical Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon.
Webbon, who has a history of making controversial comments regarding the issues of race and religion, said that he has become a one issue voter in the upcoming presidential election, and that issue is which candidate will "deport millions of illegal immigrants." The reason Webbon has settled upon this as his primary issue is because, he claims, this nation belongs to "us and our posterity" and not a bunch of non-white foreigners.
"It comes down to natural affections, natural loves," Webbon said. "And these are categories that Christians have always had for a very, very long time, but we lost them over the last century. We lost them and we started to feel guilty for certain things that the Bible doesn't actually condemn. We were blessed by God, these United States, with much prosperity, much success, much strength and victory and instead of offering to the Lord as a response for all his blessing, offering him gratitude, instead, we chose to respond with guilt."
"And so, out of guilt for all the blessing that he gave us, we decided that we should just give all the blessing away," he continued. "And instead of it belonging to us and our posterity—that is, our children—we decided to give it to strangers. We have spit on the graves of our fathers. We've broken the Fifth Commandment. Read the Founders in their writings. They bled out and died and sacrificed. They didn't do it for India. That doesn't mean they hated India, but they did it for us and our posterity. And for you, the children of your fathers who died for you as their children, to say, 'Dad died for me and the kids, and we're going to take it and give it to strangers,' that is dishonoring dad! That is a breaking of the Fifth Commandment, and you have to be able to talk about that without being called a racist."
This message is, of course, perfectly fitting with Webbon's entire Christian nationalist agenda, which is rooted in his belief that the American people are too degenerate, stupid, and cowardly to abide by the Constitution and must therefore be governed by a Christian dictator. This dictator, Webbon believes, must “rule with an iron fist” and force everyone to, at the very least, “pretend to be Christian.”
Under his preferred form of Christian nationalist theocracy, Webbon wants to see the Apostles’ Creed added to the Constitution; abortion, pornography, no-fault divorce, in vitro fertilization, and birth control outlawed; non-Christians kept out of his neighborhood; and every non-Protestant Christian reduced to second-class citizenship. Webbon is also a virulent misogynist who wants to see women banned from voting and publicly executed for making false claims of sexual assault.
In 2023, Webbon was among the contributors to a document called “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel.” Drafted by Christian nationalists like Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, former Trump administration official William Wolfe, and others, the document declared that the United States must formally “acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in all its laws, “abolish abortion,” outlaw marriage equality, and “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities who present a grave threat to civilization.”
In addition to serving as pastor at Covenant Bible Church in Texas, Webbon is also the founder of Right Response Ministries, through which he organizes events like next year’s “Christ Is King: How To Defeat Trashworld” conference that is scheduled to feature a variety of far-right Christian nationalist activists like Deevers, Steve Deace, Stephen Wolfe, Auron MacIntyre, Andrew Isker, and others.
