Texas pastor Joel Webbon is a radical Christian nationalist who has been very clear about about his virulent misogyny by, among other things, calling for women to be publicly executed for making false claims of sexual assault and repeatedly declaring that he wants to see women banned from voting.
While Webbon does not think that women should have the right to vote, he explained during a recent podcast that he currently allow his own wife to vote so that she can "concede" her rights back to him by casting her vote in accordance "with the decision that I make for our family." Only by doing so can Webbon guarantee that he retains his "full authority as a citizen."
"If we ever got to the point where it was on the docket and it was something, ironically, that America was voting for—voting to take away the vote of women—me and my wife would both vote on principle, with conviction to take away her vote," Webbon said. "I believe in representative government at every single level all the way down to the household. It doesn't go down to the individual; it stops at the household."
"The smallest building block of a nation's civic covenant is a family and not an individual," he continued. "On principle, it's wrong for there to be more than a household vote."
Webbon said that if he votes and his wife doesn't, then his household is losing half its vote and so "in prudence" he allows his wife to vote to ensure that he gets his "full household vote."
"We currently live in a wicked time with wicked rulers who are dominated by feminism and hate men," Webbon declared. "What we're doing is having to get creative with the wicked landscape and [my wife is] ensuring that I have my full authority as a citizen. What the wicked rulers wanted to do is they want to strip away half of a man's authority and what [she's] doing is [she's] conceding it back to me by voting in line with the decision that I make for our family."
In an effort to assure women that he is not just "picking on them," Webbon added that unmarried men, men without children, and men who do not own property should also be stripped of the right to vote.
"We should repeal the 19th Amendment because we love God and because we love women," Webbon said. "But beyond that, it's really more than just that. Universal suffrage is not God's design, so there's a lot of men who shouldn't be voting either."
"You need to be a head of household," he stated. "You need to have a stake in the country as it presently lies, but also a stake in the future. That's why marriage is important because it indicates child-bearing, these kinds of things, future generations. A stake in the country also in terms of ownership; land owning males."
"It's not just women can't vote because they're too dumb to vote. That's not the position," Webbon claimed. "Leaders should vote and God has given it to men to be leaders, and certain men have abdicated that leadership and therefore they should not have the right to vote either."
This message is in keeping 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.
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.
