The podcasters making antisemitism Christian again
‘TheoBros,’ conservative men obsessed with biblical exegesis, are gaining steam online
A few of the notable figures in the TheoBro ecosystem: Corey Mahler, Doug Wilson and Joel Webbon. Graphic by Mira Fox/screenshots/iStock
By Mira Fox August 11, 2025
“Satan is using the Hebrew language to undermine Christianity.”
This was the guiding argument of an episode I listened to from Stone Choir, a Christian theology podcast. The episode was ostensibly about different translations of the Bible — it was the first one I clicked on after seeing an article in a Christian outlet that referred to it as “the podcast no one is allowed to admit they listen to” and said it was sneaking Nazism into the church.
Though I’d never heard of Stone Choir, I found that, according to analytics site Listen Notes, Stone Choir is in the top .5% of podcasts globally.
The translation episode started off pretty niche, and I wasn’t sure what was going to be so controversial. The first hour or so was an exhaustive history of the Latin Vulgate bible, the first Latin bible; it’s the official bible of the Catholic church and has been around since the 4th century. The hosts, Corey J. Mahler and a man named Ryan Dumperth, who goes by Woe, debated the theological implications of the translation’s choices.
Mahler and Dumperth argued that the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the bible, was divinely inspired. But Jerome, a 4th century scholar canonized as a saint for his work translating the bible into Latin, had used a Hebrew version as his base, not the Greek. Stone Choir’s hosts said this was against God’s wishes.
It seemed maybe a little weird how much they seemed to dislike the choice to use Hebrew, but it was basically nerdy stuff, an internecine theological debate. But then one of the hosts made a passing reference to the Jewish sage Shlomo Yitzchaki, better known as Rashi, and stumbled over his last name.
“Or however you want to pronounce it with the appropriate amount of phlegm,” he corrected himself, chuckling. The phlegm comment was just the beginning; the remaining two hours of the episode turned out to be devoted to antisemitism. First, it was just a general atmosphere of negativity toward Jews — describing rabbis as “squabbling” over the Talmud, for example. Then they let loose.
They repeatedly described Jewish prayer as “against Christians, cursing Christians,” and described Judaism, at large, as “this wickedness, this pagan evil” and “the inverse of Christianity because it is hatred of God, hatred of his church, and hatred of his sheep.” They made repeated references to Jews practicing “black magic.” They accused the Talmud of undermining God.
Perhaps this sounds off-topic from the episode’s original premise of analyzing the impact of biblical translations. But the only reason they were discussing the topic of translation was to enumerate the ways they believed the church had been “Judaized” and thus corrupted. The entirety of the episode’s three hours was devoted to arguing that, due to its Jewishness, Hebrew is a wicked language and that any biblical translation that uses Hebrew as its base is wicked as well. (“Wicked” is a go-to descriptor for the Stone Choir community.)
“Learning Japanese isn’t going to endanger your soul,” they said. “In the case of Hebrew, the language itself is evil because it came from the pits of hell.”
The episode concluded that the Latin Vulgate Bible single-handedly corrupted the church thanks to Jerome’s use of Hebrew. As they put it: “You cannot imagine anything more evil than attempting to Jew God.”
Of course, Stone Choir is far from alone in having at least a modicum of animus toward Jews. The whole rejecting Jesus thing does make many — though far from all — Christians feel that Jews are lesser, or have done something wrong. But Stone Choir takes it much farther, all in a dry, academic tone that makes their antisemitism feel like an unassailable part of Christian belief.
There have always been antisemitic theologians in the church — Luther himself was an obsessive antisemite, as were several popes. The idea of a Judaized, and thus corrupted, church is nothing new. Yet this kind of scholarly theology is usually inaccessible, reserved for higher-ups in the church.
But Stone Choir has a rabid legion of fans, who hang upon every word as though it is the gospel itself. Why are so many people listening?
The TheoBro manosphere
There’s plenty of antisemitism online, whether in podcasts or YouTube series or social media posts. It’s not limited to the fringe anymore — Joe Rogan, perhaps the most popular podcast host in the country, has hosted antisemitic guests and encouraged them to share their arguments for Holocaust distortion or Jew-hatred under the guise of just trying to understand their views in order to better judge their legitimacy.
But the insidious thing about a podcast like Stone Choir is the way that it frames its antisemitism: as a belief so deeply grounded in Christian theology and text that any devout Christian not only should agree, but must.
The podcast’s tone is, at times, surprisingly matter-of-fact. The Stone Choir hosts may audibly spit with disgust when discussing the Talmud, and you can hear the sneer when they mention an eruv, which they call “the special little rope.” But their tone is calm when they refer to the idea that Jews are evil for rejecting Jesus; these are simply facts to them. (Even when they are very clearly not factual, such as in an episode called “The Big Lie” devoted to Holocaust denial, when the hosts repeatedly describe Jews as slaughtering thousands of Christians.)
The target audience for Stone Choir is a growing movement that I’d been calling theology bros for years, thanks to their overlap in tone with a certain kind of mansplain-y guy online. I thought I’d coined this phrase, but a piece from Mother Jones last December called them “TheoBros,” which seems to be in relatively wide use. It makes sense that I wasn’t the only one to land on this term; looking at the TheoBros, they’re bound together as much by a certain masculine aesthetic — beards, flannels, grilled meat — as they are by their conservative beliefs.
The TheoBros are not an official movement so much as an online ecosphere of podcasts, YouTube videos, long posts on X and diatribes published in the Christian journal American Reformer. Members of this milieu are mostly millennial, entirely men, and all very online. They’re also Christian nationalists. Perhaps for that reason, there is a huge overlap between these nerdy theology guys and antisemitism.
The style of TheoBro content is akin to that of debate team nerds, except they’re also all really into talking about masculinity and lifting weights. Even if you stay below Stone Choir’s level of extremism, there are Christian podcasts that rant about how Taylor Swift is a feminist plant to corrupt Christian families, argue against “multiculturalism” and discuss the failure of the “post-war consensus.” (The latter phrase pops up a lot in Christian nationalist circles and, while it is rarely defined, is usually used to gesture at the fact that, in the wake of World War II, the world generally agreed that fascism, Nazism and Hitler were bad and that, as a society, we should avoid ethnic hatreds like antisemitism. When it comes up in Christian nationalist circles, it is invariably to decry that consensus.)
Joel Webbon, a pastor who now runs the influential online church Right Response Ministries — after being ejected from another church in San Diego for a variety of issues including “engaging in fornication” with a parishioner — has made numerous antisemitic comments on social media and in his podcast episodes. Most recently, in a YouTube podcast episode, he praised Nick Fuentes, an open Holocaust denier outspoken antisemite and leader of the alt-right groyper movement, for his bold leadership among young men and his rejection of “woke” culture; though Webbon did not mention Fuentes’ antisemitism, it was a clear subtext. (Fuentes is Catholic, not Reformed, which was the only part of his appeal that seemed to truly worry Webbon.)
Others — Eric Conn, Thomas Achord, Andrew Isker, Stephen Wolfe — have similar ministries of hate, and spend their time on podcasts, on social media and in blog posts arguing for the godly roots of “kinism” (a preference for your racial and ethnic kin, perhaps better known as racism), spreading antisemitism ranging from calling Jews blasphemers to conspiracy theories about Jews running the porn industry, and endorsing various misogynistic ideas about women, such as ending women’s suffrage due to insufficient intellectualism.
The TheoBros represent a major shift in American Christianity. For decades, the dominant trend, particularly among evangelicals, was to be “seeker-friendly,” which is to say approachable to people who might not regularly attend church or are new to the religion; seeker-friendly churches strive to use less jargon and emphasize moral teachings, also often placing an emphasis on emotional, experiential religion — personal prophetic revelations, speaking in tongues, spiritual encounters.
But the TheoBros are the opposite; they believe the Bible is absolute, and truth comes from studying text, not spiritual experiences. Their bent is toward literalism, not an evolving set of teachings from a charismatic preacher. And they often — though not always — label themselves as “Reformed,” a tip of the hat to Calvinist teachings.
The power of nerdy Christianity
To be clear, that dominant brand of charismatic Christianity isn’t dying out; it includes adherents of the ascendant New Apostolic Reformation movement, a powerful loose affiliation of Christians who influenced Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term. But some Christians found this movement too loosey-goosey, and so the reactionary TheoBro revolution began.
I spoke with Kristin Du Mez, a professor at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne, a book on how Christianity moved away from an idea of a gentle Jesus and came to embrace a militaristic, forceful masculinity. Du Mez said that the roots of this intellectual Christianity have been around since the birth of New Calvinism, also known as the “Young, Restless and Reformed” movement, which gained prominence in the 2000s and whose adherents, such as megachurch Mars Hill’s founder, Mark Driscoll, “prided themselves in a more rigorous theological and intellectual approach than the average Evangelical was known for.”
The movement “positioned itself as a more robust, vigorous Christianity that was going to rescue a softer Evangelicalism that didn’t have the intellectual moorings that were needed,” Du Mez explained. “It was a bit of a reaction against the kind of seeker-friendly ministry and a more experiential understanding of religion.”
But the TheoBro Reformed identity is not simply Calvinist — Du Mez herself is a Calvinist, but said she does not draw the same conclusions from the text and tradition as the TheoBros. She sees the Reformed identity as part of a larger culture war within Christianity, and the U.S. more broadly, to counter feminism, erase multiculturalism and bring back a white, Christian America.
“Particularly now, some of the conservative pastors who are looking back to 16th, 17th century writings, I think what they’re finding attractive there is not just an intellectual and theological rigor,” Du Mez said, “but a premodern worldview. One that is not necessarily compatible with liberal democracy — one that is quite hierarchical, and patriarchal.”
A key part of the TheoBro genre is the scholarly tone, which has the effect of making its arguments seem unassailable. When you add religion to a scholarly argument, it gains even more force than the average debate strategy. It’s not simply about proving the argument from the text, it’s about morality and identity. There’s an inherent challenge: Are you, or are you not, a true Christian?
“They can bolster their claims today as ‘this is just historic Christianity.’ And if it goes against democracy, well, do you have a problem with church history?” Du Mez said. “They’re able to sound very sophisticated.”
The intellectually stringent, ideologically conservative rhetoric that characterizes the TheoBros is borne out in podcasts, YouTube channels and Substacks, where thought leaders like Joel Webbon or Andrew Isker speak extensively about nitty gritty details from biblical texts. The hours-long, rambling episodes are at home in a right-wing ecosystem where Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate reign. They’re not quite in the manosphere, but culturally, they attract a similar set of disaffected young men attracted to lengthy, conversational podcasts and videos that give you the sense that you’re hanging around with the boys, sharing ideas you wouldn’t say in polite company. (The manosphere overlap is strengthened, beyond the locker room vibes, by some problematic ideas about women’s subservience.)
Take the episodes of Stone Choir that deal with biblical translations. The hosts spend hours detailing the work of different Christian scholars throughout the centuries, examining their writings and talking about the history of each era. But mixed in are startlingly violent statements.
One episode goes into great detail about Christian scholar Johann Reuchlin, who studied Hebrew with a rabbi and published a translation of kabbalistic texts in the 16th century. Reuchlin was a controversial figure who isn’t unheard of, but he’s far from mainstream, and deploying him as an example confers a sense of learnedness to the podcast.
“Reuchlin was invigorated by learning about Kabbalah. He felt that this unlocked the secrets of Christianity,” one host explained. “Unfortunately, Reuchlin was not burned at the stake as the heretic that he was. A Christian ruler, a truly Christian ruler, would have ended Reuchlin’s life on the spot for publishing that.”
Calling for the death of another Christian scholar simply because he read and translated some Jewish books? Is there no room for forgiveness, nuance or curiosity, especially from our modern vantage point?
But this, Du Mez said, is the point.
“What Reformed tends to mean in these spaces is a kind of embrace of a God of judgment and of Hell,” she said. “This is a movement that poses God as sovereign and as a God of wrath.”
Excommunicating antisemites
Though this scholarly bent may sound niche, Stone Choir co-host Corey Mahler is an influential, if divisive, figure in the Reformed Christian world. A lawyer, he has worked for white supremacists and was slated to speak at the Unite the Right II rally — a planned successor to the famously violent white supremacist Charlottesville rally — before it was canceled.
A member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, he was dramatically excommunicated from the LCMS in 2023; his church called the police when he attempted to attend Ash Wednesday services, which was caught on video.
The hubbub was seemingly in response to a site called Machaira Action publishing an exposé on Mahler and his movement, which they termed “Lutefash,” or Lutheran fascism. The exposé detailed Mahler’s statements on the need for a Hitler-like figure to inspire young men to return to the church, and his success spreading his ideology via Telegram chats, podcasts and blogs.
In an interview in Rolling Stone about his excommunication, Mahler “balked” at being labeled a neo-Nazi, but admitted he believes that it is God’s will for the U.S. to be a white ethnostate. (Stone Choir also has a whole 3-hour episode on denying the Holocaust in which they call Nazi Germany a “wonderland” — “No one can argue with that,” Mahler quips in the episode — and asserting, repeatedly, that Hitler went to heaven. So do with that what you will.)
Though the LCMS is one of the largest — and most vehemently conservative — churches in America, the fact that its leaders felt the need to make a public statement against “alt-right” views infiltrating the church the day after the exposé on Mahler indicates that he wields serious clout, and that his views are extreme.
But Mahler is far from the only TheoBro leader, and his excommunication did little to curtail his influence. In fact, this world is growing; other Reformed influencers who previously had promoted more mainstream conservative views — mostly keeping their advocacy to topics like women’s leadership in the church, LGBTQ+ rights and Christian influence in government — became increasingly emboldened to push antisemitism as a biblical belief, to compliment Hitler and to advocate for a white America.
So in 2024, a conglomeration of pastors, calling themselves “Reformed, Lutheran and Evangelical believers” issued another statement against “racial ideologies threatening the church” called the Antioch Declaration. Hundreds of people signed the declaration. Hundreds more furiously rejected it as unbiblical.
The Antioch Declaration makes a point of affirming the reality of the Holocaust and criticizing Hitler. One bullet point says that Hitler was not a true Christian. Another denies that Jews are “more dangerous than other false religions” and disavows the idea that “world affairs are governed by conspiring Jews or that there is a global Jewish conspiracy to corrupt and destroy Western society.”
Still, the Antioch Declaration is far from a moderate document. Some of its bullet points make odd, sweeping criticisms of an unspecified “neo-pagan secular project” and even create space for criticism of Jews; if it had not made room for some racism, it would have been rejected out of hand by exactly the population it was attempting to speak to.
“We deny that our rejection of antisemitism requires us to ignore or minimize the destructive impact that various God-hating individual Jews have had in human history,” it says, adding that “Jews are as all other men — alienated from God and in need of the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.”
Infiltrating the mainstream
Despite the attempts to ferret out the neo-Nazi elements in the TheoBro world, they’re not just persisting, but growing in reach and influence. And the older generation — leaders who might not have been considered mainstream just a few years ago, but whose views now seem tame — are legitimizing the TheoBros via collaborations on podcasts, debates on YouTube and even interviews on local news networks.
Doug Wilson, who is something of an unofficial paterfamilias in the TheoBro movement, helped write the Antioch Declaration, along with another older Reformed pastor, James White. Both have wide influence, including with current government officials. Pete Hegseth attends a church under Wilson’s auspices and has taken part in book clubs studying his writing. JD Vance has spoken on stages with Wilson at the National Conservatism conference. (Vance also shares the TheoBro orientation toward academic-sounding biblical interpretation.) Wilson also spoke alongside various conservative luminaries at the Turning Point USA conference in 2024.
This older generation of pastors have openly chastised the antisemitic, racist TheoBro podcasters. But these more mainstream figures also continue to platform and boost the most dangerous of the TheoBros.
White debated Corey Mahler, the Hitler-loving Stone Choir host, on the topic of whether both white and Black Christians can be sanctified, allowing Mahler to air numerous racist views on, for example, the idea that Black people are not intelligent enough to understand the gospels. Other pastors in his church, Apologia, have also endorsed antisemitic beliefs.
For Wilson’s part, his publishing imprint still markets The Case for Christian Nationalism, a book by another TheoBro influencer, Stephen Wolfe, which argues for a white America, though Wilson has distanced himself from Wolfe. And until recently, Wilson regularly did podcasts with Joel Webbon, the pastor-podcaster who complimented Nick Fuentes last week; Webbon’s current pinned post on X says that he believes “those of Jewish descent are generally marked by subversion, deceit, and greed.” In another post, he advised his followers to listen to Mahler and Dumperth, the Stone Choir hosts. Wilson also lent a positive blurb to a book on Christian nationalism by antisemitic alt-right social media Gab founder Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker, who also graduated from a ministry program affiliated with Wilson’s church.
This shouldn’t be particularly surprising; Wilson has spoken openly about wanting to make his beliefs more palatable to the wider American public, because he believes that this will lead to a greater likelihood for Christian nationalism to succeed. But he has also long endorsed racist ideas himself, such as the idea that during slavery in the U.S., there were “benevolent masters” and that slaves led “a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes and good medical care.” (He has since attempted to revise his statements, admitting that there were also “abuses” against slaves.)
It’s easy to trace the lines from the more genteel, older faces of the movement to the new, openly racist podcasters. They already share the framework and tone, an intellectual-sounding justification for their beliefs, with a heavy dose of biblical quotes. Wilson is connected to Webbon, Webbon to Mahler and Dumperth and Fuentes. Once you’re in the TheoBro ecosystem, however politely you couch your beliefs, you’re already awfully close to the open Nazism and racism of Stone Choir.
As Du Mez, the professor of Reformed theology, put it, “For people who share some of the core commitments, the question is how much of this bleeds over.”
In a video two years ago featuring the elder Doug Wilson, and Joel Webbon, then a young upstart who had yet to voice his most racist views, Webbon hypothesized that Wilson’s edgiest views on Christian nationalism, race and religion would soon appear moderate. At the time, Wilson still appeared to be well outside the mainstream; while he was well-known on the conservative talk-show circuit, his adherents were not yet in office.
“I think the Overton window is moving,” Webbon predicted. “If this continues to happen I think that you have a real potential as being viewed as a moderate. You could be viewed as a reasonable evangelical in 5 to 10 years!” (“This is what makes me wake up screaming,” Wilson replied, laughing.)
Now, ahead of schedule, the prediction has come true. In comparison to Webbon’s increasingly open antisemitism, Wilson appears to be mainstream; at the very least, he is aligned with Trump’s government in his ideas about Christian nationalism.
If things continue at this pace, Stone Choir will seem moderate in just a few more.
