Tucker Carlson’s platforming of antisemitic social influencer Nick Fuentes, who proclaims “Christ is King,” evinces the reemergence of antisemitism in American Christianity. For the last 85 years, World War II and the Holocaust have made antisemitism publicly unacceptable in American Christianity, prior to which it was often acceptable.
For example, at the 1924 Methodist governing General Conference, the church’s prominent Prohibition chief, Clarence True Wilson, blamed the “filth” of films and theater on Jewish “degenerates, all of one race but of no religion, who have corrupted everything their filthy hands have touched for 2,000 years.” He warned: “No nation that has let them control its finances but has had to vomit them up, sometimes with bitter persecutions, to get the poison out of their system.” Wilson faulted German Jews for their “controlling interest in our liquor traffic.”
The audience for Wilson’s remarks included hundreds of Methodist leaders plus the church’s bishops. Yet there’s no record that his speech was controversial. Wilson continued as head of the denomination’s Washington, DC office on Capitol Hill for another eleven years. Methodism was then America’s biggest Protestant denomination. And its political influence was such that it was the main force responsible for persuading America to adopt Prohibition, with Wilson its chief advocate. So his anti-Jewish speech did not come from a marginal figure and likely represented the views of millions of Protestants, many of whom joined in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan resurgence, which made Jews with Catholics and blacks its chief targets.
American Christianity, and America, have been blessed that antisemitism across 85 years has mostly been taboo. But the memories of World War II and the Holocaust are fast fading. And revisionism about both, promoted by Carlson and Fuentes, among many others, is increasingly common. Human nature being what it is, demons once expelled often return and must again be exorcised.
Compounding the fading of historical memory, but not unrelated, is the emergence of post liberalism in American Christianity, and in wider intellectual life. The consensus about liberal democracy in which everyone has equality in law, with freedom of speech and freedom of religion, is retreating. Provocative commentators, once edgy but now increasingly mainstream, deride American’s founding traditions as passé or built on false premises from the start. Insisting on traditional American principles about equality for all is now commonly deemed archaic, “woke” or squishy. These bracing critics urge that society disavow these unnatural abstractions in favor of the “strong gods” that include religion and tribe.
Among these Christian post-liberals are Catholic integralists and Protestant confessional state advocates, who sometimes self-identify as “Christian nationalist,” who insist, as liberalism and religious freedom crumble from the weight of their own contradictions, an official Christian state must emerge. By definition, non-Christians, like Jews, would be less than fully equal in this imagined postliberal society.
Most of these postliberal Christian commentators would reject the zealotry and extremism of Fuentes. Some are friendlier to Carlson. Other postliberal Christians are friendly to Fuentes. Maybe some of them are only theatrically attention-getting, while others are more sincere. But even theatrically playing with antisemitism is dangerous and opens doors that should remain firmly shut.
Compounding this openness to antisemitism is the decline of American evangelical philosemitism often tied to Dispensationalist Christian Zionism. Neither philosemitism nor Christian Zionism depends on Dispensationalism, with its theories about the End Times. But Dispensationalism, whose influence perhaps peaked in the 1980s or 1990s, was a chief pillar for evangelical warmth towards Jews and Israel. As it fades, there are no clear successor pillars. And by definition, social polarization and increased tribalism are often unfriendly to minority “tribes,” likes Jews. The decline of universal values leaves every tribe to fend for itself, with the smallest tribes, unless protected by larger tribes, left vulnerable.
Further adding to the openly unfriendly stances towards Jews is the crumbling of institutional Christianity, with its transgenerational teachings and gatekeepers. American Christianity is now individualized and online. It no longer necessarily entails church participation. And while a local pastor may seem dull and phlegmatic, online zealots like Fuentes can seem boldly electrifying. The local pastor might be accountable to a denomination or at least a congregation. Online “Christian” firebrands are accountable to nobody except their online fans, whose stimulation demands constant outrage. These online “preachers” don’t demand repentance or self-denial, just rage against enemies, which is easier and more appealing.
Of course, the collapse of Christian institutions and organized authorities, amid polarization and tribalism, and rejection of universal values, feeds conspiracy theories. What is ostensibly real is actually fabricated by discredited authorities, it is alleged. The real “facts” of the matter are exposed by online zealots who are not “afraid” to tell the “truth” about how innocent followers have been manipulated by devious elites.
Across centuries Jews naturally are the historically favorite target of conspiracy theories. They are few in number, the conspiracists allege, but powerful and controlling through their cunning. They are so devious that they can deceive and manipulate whole nations. It’s no accident that postliberal zealots often obsess over World War II revisionism. Churchill and Roosevelt were the real villains. Hitler did not want war. The Holocaust was not as bad as portrayed, etc.
The postliberal perspective that dabbles in if not fully embracing antisemitism often claims to be Christian. “Christ is King!” The enemies of Christ must be defeated. Christ’s reign must be enacted by the bold and the strong who will not weakly extend mercy to Christ’s ostensible foes.
Christianity’s traditional stress on mercy, compassion, forgiveness, self-denial, and love of enemy does not factor large in the Christian postliberal equation. Their preference for power, control, and vengeance, with obsessive disdain for minority groups like Jews, embodies what Christianity has typically warned against: the world, the flesh and the devil.
So, there’s nothing new about the upsurge in antisemitism among Christians and in society. It’s a very old evil, parcel to fallen humanity’s proclivity to fault others for the world’s ailments, when all of us as sinners are contributors. The lessons about antisemitism learned from the Holocaust will have to be relearned. Humanity has short memories. Affirming the dignity of all, intrinsic to Christianity, is not natural. It must be continuously retaught and incarnated.
Antisemitism, in subtle and blatant forms, likely will grow in American Christianity. Discerning American Christians must prepare to counter it. The argument against it is not complex and comes directly from our Savior: Love thy neighbor as thyself, without exceptions.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on November 2, 2025 at 10:45 pm
By its actions in Gaza, Israel has shown the world what it is. You can’t take off your Mister Rogers mask so that people see that it’s really Freddy Krueger under the mask and then try to put the mask back on and expect people to forget that Freddy Krueger lies beneath the mask.
Comment by Gary Bebop on November 2, 2025 at 11:04 pm
Don’t overlook the antisemitism that vaunts itself in doubletalk, euphemism, and hateful activities against Israel sanctioned by elite academia and woke Protestant ecclesiastics. The threat to Jews from the pro-Palestinian Christian Left is far more insidious and immediate than anything happening in the podcast fringe field.
Comment by Gary Bebop on November 3, 2025 at 12:29 am
Mark Tooley knows that caricatures of Israel as a murderous monster for defending its right to exist (especially after the Oct. 7th carnage) is but a guise for truculent antisemitism.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on November 3, 2025 at 12:42 am
Excuse me!
I forgot the real definition of antisemitism….”refusal to go along with the state of Israel’s acts of genocide.”
Thanks for setting me straight!
Comment by Gary Bebop on November 3, 2025 at 12:34 pm
Jews are under attack, and hatred for Israel is a dirty veil for hatred of Jews. An escalation of these episodes is happening in America in broad daylight. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-872607.
Comment by Wilson R. on November 3, 2025 at 1:14 pm
So… if you criticized the policies of the Biden administration, does that make you anti-American?
Comment by David on November 3, 2025 at 1:46 pm
The State of Israel owes its existence to antisemitism. The Balfour Declaration was written by a man who had laws passed to keep Jews fleeing persecution in Russia from settling in the UK. Likewise other countries did not want Jewish refugees after WWII including the US. Giving away land where Palestinians had lived for thousands of years to European Jews seemed an easy way to solve the problem.
Before we get into divine right, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Jews are all Canaanites in origin by DNA. Jews did not come marching out of Egypt and Palestinians did not come marching out of Arabia. Both groups are native to Canaan until they were pushed to the hill country from the coast by the Philistines, an Aegean population. While the Romans expelled urban populations from Judea into slavery in Italy, rural farmers were allowed to remain and were the ancestors of modern Palestinians who converted to Christianity in the Byzantine era and then to Islam. European Jews are often about 40% Northern Italian. While what Hamas did on Oct. 7 is evil, what Israel has done to the Palestinians since 1948 is worse. It is time for American Jews to give up their golden calf of Israel.
Comment by Mark on November 3, 2025 at 1:54 pm
I think part of the reason we’re seeing a resurgence of antisemitism on the right now is that evangelicals never truly confronted supersessionism in any meaningful way, unlike the Catholics and mainline Protestants. Dispensationalism gave them an excuse to avoid these harder conversations while still appearing to renounce antisemitism, but it was a renunciation based solely on an eschatological theory rather than true repentence and reconciliation.
Comment by Richard Bell on November 3, 2025 at 4:14 pm
Christians should love Jews. Christians should love members of any ethnic group. Indeed, Christians should love even their enemies. That is, Christians should act in the best interest of anyone according to God’s will.
As for Judaism, Christians should be tolerant of the erroneous belief while attempting to correct the people who are in error.
Regarding God’s command that Christians love their neighbors as they love themselves, our Savior taught that these neighbors are people like the Good Samaritan, not like the Jewish priest or the Jewish Levite.
Comment by Robert Benne on November 3, 2025 at 4:22 pm
Great job, Mark. I might have more sympathy with the post-liberals wish for a more coherent society based on a now shaky Christian culture than you seem, though I agree with you that their analysis of American liberalism is faulty. The founders knew citizens must have virtue and they thought that came from religion….hardly a libertarian empty liberalism. But, wow, the antisemitism that you awakened is a bit scary. They seem supportive of those who want to wipe out Israel and whatever Jews they can kill.
Comment by James Turner on November 3, 2025 at 4:40 pm
As a Christian, my strongest arguments against Anti-Semitism come from the Bible itself. You cannot say you love Jesus, but hate the Jews. Jesus was Jewish I his incarnation. He was the fulfillment of God’s promise to King David at 2d Samuel 10-16. He was of the tribe of Judah and the House of David born in the town of David’s birth, Bethlehem. He was raised in a good Jewish family with a Jewish mother, dedicated to God in the Temple in Jerusalem and even taught the scribes there at about age 12. His Apostles were all Jewish, including the late in time Pharisee Saul, aka Paul. Israel is the reconstituted Jewish state. It has continually exercised nothing more than the national right of self defense that is not contradicted by the Bible. It is surrounded by those who certainly act as if they are in the service of the Anti-Christ all the time. They are Islamic States and Terror groups that do not worship God, and their actions ever since Mohammed are the greatest revelation of that fact. The Jews decided after WWII that Never Again would they allow themselves to be subject to genocide. If you hate them for what they’ve done in Gaza, you really have no idea what you’re talking about, just media generated propaganda and Anti-Semitism and maybe you’re Anti-Semitic.
Comment by Gary Bebop on November 3, 2025 at 4:46 pm
I’m holding my nose. Many commenters found themselves excited to bloviate here against the Jews. All these words are on the record. And “out of the heart the mouth speaks.”
Comment by Jeffrey Gordon on November 3, 2025 at 6:17 pm
Christ is King! He is also Jewish.
Comment by David on November 3, 2025 at 6:18 pm
Here is another gem from a New Jersey Methodist minister.
“We find, we have racial problems. The Jew, through thirty centuries, from ancient Egypt to modern America had been an international problem. We criticize Hitler, but we should go to Germany to find out first, certain facts if our criticism, is to have any basis of justice. Without a land of his own, the Jew has given to the world some of its noblest men and women, yet his peculiar genius, if given supremacy, would profoundly change, if not destroy the civilization of any nation in which he lives.
The Negro, brought here and enslaved, later liberated and clothed with the responsibilities of citizenship, was almost as unjustly treated in the second instance as in the first. He is essentially a child and to require him to discharge the responsibilities of manhood and womanhood as the white man does is unjust. With kindness. and patience, he must be guided.”—Rev. H. P. Fox
Comment by Riley Case on November 3, 2025 at 7:40 pm
Brilliant, Mark. I agree with your analysis 100%. Keep up the good work. Riley Case
Comment by Wilson R. on November 4, 2025 at 1:55 pm
Gary:
You seem to miss the forest for the trees here.
While there surely are anti-semites among those criticizing the actions of the Israeli government, criticism alone does not make you anti-semitic—any more than criticism of the Biden adminstration by conservatives, or criticism of the Trump administration by liberals, would make them anti-American.
Bear in mind that many of those students who have protested Israel’s disproportionate response to the Oct. 7 massacre are Jews themselves.
Meanwhile, people like Nick Fuentes represent an existential threat to Jews everywhere. He’s one of those who marched in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” He’s an actual neo-Nazi, and I have seen actual neo-Nazis throwing anti-semitic leaflets in my neighborhood and terrifying my Jewish neighbors outside the synagogue that is just four blocks from my home. I’ve seen them march with swastika banners through my downtown and accost black children (one of the Nazis is currently in jail for that).
You’re not likely to convince me that actual Nazis are less anti-semitic than people who are finding legitimate reasons to protest the deliberate starvation of innocent civilians in Gaza. And you can denounce the utter evil of Hamas and still call out the immorality of the willful killing of civilians who just happen to be in the way.
By the way, it has been widely publicized in Israel that the Netanyahu government pursued a strategy to keep Hamas in power in the years before the Oct. 7 massacre. Don’t they bear any responsibility for that? Don’t Jews have a right to be outraged that the Israeli government would do that?
Comment by Alan Hawk on November 4, 2025 at 8:31 pm
Several people commented on alleged Israeli ‘genocide’ in Gaza as a justification for anti-Semitism. Apparently 69,236 Palestinians have been killed in the two years of war, it is unclear how many were combatants, how many killed by fratricide or how many died of causes unrelated to the war.
As a basis of comparison is Rwanda in 1994 (url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide). Over a span of 100 days, between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi men were killed by Hutu militia wielding machetes. Before the reader responds with an insipid quote about the foolishness of comparing two different events (genocide Olympics), consider how Israel with its access to sophisticated weapons: high explosive artillery, bombs dropped from aircraft, machine guns, and grenades, managed kill ten times fewer people in over 500 more days.
If Israel wanted to kill 600,000 Gazans, they could have easily done so.
Comment by Alan Hawk on November 4, 2025 at 9:35 pm
Tucker Carlson lost me when he became a pacifist. He is an isolationist who seems to believe U.S. intervention has caused more harm than good. But like most pacifists, he values peace over individual rights. He blames the U.S. for supporting Ukraine’s desire to be independent of Russia resulting in the current war, with the possibility of a nuclear war. His antisemitism comes from his belief that the U.S. created Israel, which got it involved in the middle east. He, like every pacifist, at the end of the day, always supports the aggressor.
Comment by Thomas on November 5, 2025 at 9:26 am
Anti-semitism has no place in Christianity. We can`t confuse Jews with the state of Israel.
Comment by Thomas on November 5, 2025 at 9:55 am
I could point that Nick Fuentes is much worst than shown here. I know Wikipedia isn`t always the best source but you can read about his beliefs there. He almost makes Douglas Wilson look like a moderate. He wants United States to become a Catholic theocracy, despite the fact that most Americans aren`t even Catholic. He also opposes democracy. He is clearly a far-right extremist and its really perplexing how can Tucker Carlson wants to give him a plataform to speak. Carlson used to be better than that.
Comment by Wilson R. on November 5, 2025 at 2:14 pm
Alan Hawk:
I have struggled over whether genocide is the right term to describe what Israel has been doing in Gaza. It’s hard to know how many civilians vs. Hamas combatants Israel has killed, though I have seen estimates. Suffice it say they have killed a lot from both categories.
It’s also true that Hamas bears some responsibility for civilian deaths. They unforgivably use ordinary Palestinians as human shields. They operate from tunnels under hospitals and apartment buildings. (Let’s be sure to give Netanyahu some credit for that as well, since he allowed the flow of money into Gaza, knowing what Hamas was doing with it.)
A substantial number of Israelis, if not the majority, now support the removal of Palestinians from Gaza (and the West Bank). Forced removal of populations is one type of genocide. But whether or not that’s an appropriate word here, I think it’s fair to say that Israel has been guilty of willful indifference to civilian deaths in Gaza. They blame Hamas for putting bunkers under hospitals, but they’re still bombing hospitals with the knowledge that civilians will pay the biggest price. They halt food deliveries into Gaza, using Hamas as an excuse, knowing that people are starving.
Things for which they cannot use Hamas as an excuse:
• Deliberately shooting civilians who were on their way to approved food distribution points (lots of documented incidences)
• Deliberately shooting journalists–little doubt it was deliberate–to prevent reporting from Gaza
• Deliberately attacking aid workers, like World Food Kitchen, and then claiming it was a mistake.
I don’t think of Tucker Carlson as a pacifist. He is a Russian asset, as evidenced by his glowing reports last year on how wonderful everything is in Russia. He’s pushing for peace in Ukraine because it serves Russia’s interests right now.
Tucker principles are highly malleable. Lest we forget, he was once a regular on MSNBC.
Comment by Alan Hawk on November 5, 2025 at 4:27 pm
Wilson R. I appreciate your comments. Thank you.
Response – The right word for what Israel is doing is war. I have served in the military. I was deployed to Afghanistan, although I was behind the wire the whole time. Context is everything. What is obvious to you and me, or even to the people involved after the fact, is NOT always obvious in the heat of the moment when you have seconds to make a decision resond to a situation that could kill or wound you and your buddies. Given that i don’t have all of the facts, I cannot second guess soldiers in the heat of battle when I cannot read their minds as it was happening. There is such a thing as a fog of war.
Comment by Jeffrey T Olah on November 6, 2025 at 7:25 am
You can’t imagine the amount of people I speak with that believe the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people.
Comment by Gayle Ataceri on November 7, 2025 at 9:40 am
@ Jeffrey T Olah All of humanity who embrace Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and their Lord and Savior, are God’s chosen people; those who call themselves Jews and from every tribe and nation. “Know then that it is those who are of faith who are the sons of Abraham” Paul, writing by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, could not be any clearer (Galatians 3)
Comment by Frederick W. A. Collins on November 11, 2025 at 12:59 pm
I find it hard to believe that what is in broad daylight can be represented as if it is unclear or untrue. For those who still claim to be ignorant, there is enough information in the public domain to establish that a) Israelis spit at Christians b) their religious book is the Talmud which contains blasphemy against Jesus Christ, c) they are not the descendants of the children of Israel and they have banned genetic tests because the tests are showing that, d) the only Christians who say that blessing Israel is required of them are those who don’t understand what they read in the bible if they have ever read it. God was adddressing Abraham, not Jews. They were not yet invented. Anyone who can pretend to not understand the history of the occupation of the land with the lie that it was empty is deliberately blinding his eyes. My final comment is a recommendation that these brothers (if they are indeed brothers and not masqueraders) is to read Isaiah 5 about those who call good evil and evil good. I think this is my last visit to this website. By the way I am very proud of my Methodist brothers and sisters’ position. Sorry some find it offensive. I am a Caribbean Methodist.