I think that Joel Webbon would crucify Jesus all over again. The Christian nationalist pastor, and founder of Right Response Ministries clearly can’t stand the things that Jesus actually taught and continually makes that clear with the things he talks about in his videos and on social media. I doubt his sermons are any better. Webbon is also one of the authors of the anti-Jesus and anti-democracy document entitled “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel.” This document is an attempt by Christofascists justify their their hatred, bigotry, white supremacy, and misogyny with baseless biblical justifications and terrible hermeneutics so that they can foist their hyper-Calvinistic nonsense on everyone else. There is nothing in it that even remotely looks like Jesus. It seems to escape Christian nationalists like Webbon that Christian nationalism is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and Paul for that matter because neither of them said to seek temporal power or to force beliefs on others.

Webbon came to my attention a couple of years ago on Twitter. I would see his antichrist tweets and comment on them occasionally. Last year, I did a deep dive into Webbon’s YouTube videos in order to feature him on the God Squad Podcast. It made me feel icky and I definitely need a raise for putting myself through that, but I digress. Here is a sampling of things that Webbon teaches: people receiving or performing abortions should be murdered, women should not have the right to vote, wives should only read books her husband approves of, America needs a dictator like a Protestant version of Franco or an American Caesar, that it would be merciful to shoot and kill immigrants approaching the U.S. border in order to prevent more from coming, and that he wants to reward his friends and crush his enemies. Yesterday, one of his tweets was making the rounds on social media in which Webbon chose to make an idol out of white supremacy and a virtue out of hate. Today, I saw, but didn’t watch a video on his YouTube page that states, “Christians hate sin…and sinners.” Yikes.

Webbon seems to think that if white supremacy, often couched in coded language such as “Western Civilization” or “the West,” will not survive if hatred is not seen as a virtue. Christianity would perhaps survive without hatred of others but “the West” will fall. Who wants to tell him that Jesus wasn’t white, that King David wasn’t a Christian (he mentions David in the video referenced above), and that love is literally of paramount importance in Jesus’ ministry and for his early followers. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman notes that in Matthew’s Gospel, “the entire Law is thus at its very core a commandment to love: to love God with one’s entire being and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. This is the real intent of the Law, and the followers of Jesus must adhere to it in order to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (1) He goes on to say that, “For this reason, love is the greatest commandment, and everything else is subservient to it.” (2) It seems Webbon profoundly missed the point.

In Luke 9:51-56 the disciples get angry with the people of a Samaritan village because the inhabitants refused to receive Jesus “because his face was set towards Jerusalem.” The Samaritans had ideas about where and how God should be worshiped and it was not in Jerusalem at the Temple. Suffice it to say, that’s why there was so much cultural animosity between Jews and Samaritans at that time. The disciples James and John were incensed at the lack of welcome from the Samaritan villagers and asked Jesus in their anger to let them “call down fire from heaven and consume them?” Jesus was having none of it. Rather than feed their hatred and anger, he rebuked the two disciples and went on his way. There’s a reason Jesus used a Samaritan as the provocative character in the next chapter of Luke, and it certainly wasn’t to extol the virtue of hate.

Webbon must also have missed the fact that Jesus never said anything about abortion, but he did teach non-retaliation instead of proportional violence. The Bible never condemns abortion. In fact, Exodus 21:22-23 says that the death of a fetus due to violence is not murder, therefore an “eye for an eye, life for a life,” does not apply as Webbon asserts when he claims that doctors who perform abortions and their patients should be murdered. (3) He seems to have missed the many places in the Bible that speak to how people should treat immigrants. Hint, it is not to shoot them for approaching an arbitrary imaginary line between nations. (4) He likely doesn’t care that many of those immigrants are Christians simply because they are neither white nor American. Webbon also ignores that Jesus taught his followers to love your enemies, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you –hatred does not enter the picture for Jesus.

Joel Webbon is wrong about what Christianity is supposed to look like. His every response to current political issues and what a Christians’ response to them should look like is wrong. He pastors a church in Georgetown, TX where he spouts his hate-filled invective towards everyone who doesn’t think, look, and believe like him. He’s a racist, a misogynistic sexist, a xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic bigot, seeking the kind of power Jesus told his followers to eschew. In short, he’s precisely the kind of person Jesus preached against. He’s anti-Jesus in every way and profoundly misses the point of what Jesus taught. This is the kind of thing that happens when authoritarians make an idol of the Bible and want to enforce by law their version of orthodoxy. No one should listen to him as an authority of Christianity. No one.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. John 13:34 NRSVUE

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(1) Ehrman, Bart, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, p. 126

(2) Ehrman, p. 127.

(3) I wrote about this here: https://tattooed-theologian.com/2024/03/15/lets-get-biblically-literal-abortion/ and we discussed it on the God Squad Pod with Rabbi Seth Goldstein here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/043-the-weaponization-of-judaism-against/id1754574318?i=1000706959638

(4) See the quote from Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggeman about immigrants here: https://tattooed-theologian.com/2025/04/05/a-failed-test/