Antisemitism among young Christian men is becoming a real problem. Why?
A young evangelical Methodist in Las Vegas recently described this new antisemitism he is seeing, and he explained: “It’s essentially the woke mind virus on the Right.” These young men with whom he talks feel economically “disenfranchised,” they “look for an oppressor,” or in these right-wing circles, a “subversive group (i.e., Jews/Israel),” and they “blame them for foreign policy which leads to lack of prosperity.”
Many quickly respond that criticism of Israel does not equal antisemitism, which can be true. But the new antisemitism targets Israel and Jews more widely, obsessively critiquing Israel without interest in problems by other nations, while faulting Jews domestically for their own personal struggles or for what they see as larger economic or social problems. The Iran War almost certainly will exacerbate this trend.
There are several possible explanations, the chief of which is likely the online nature of young lives, especially young men. For obsessive young internet consumers, without the maturity or experience to be skeptical, and especially prone to what is outrageous, antisemitism is a natural attraction. Online provocateurs can pretend to be brave and naughty by attacking and weaving outlandish yarns about Jews. The young male viewer in front of his screen, unfiltered by a wider physical community, absorbs the outrageousness without filters, the wisdom of community, or the judgement of older, wiser heads.
Young male Christians may physically attend church but they, as many older Christians, find their main authorities online, which they self-collate, often from dark corners that would be unknown to their grandparents (although many older online viewers find their own disturbing online outlets). Pastors and traditional Christian gatekeepers are often inconsequential to young male Christians, who have their own independent spiritual ecosystem. Denominations are irrelevant.
It’s also true that young male Christians want their religion, with their other beliefs, to be very high octane, with clear boundaries, and uncompromising, which ostensibly evinces masculinity and boldness. For many of them, any collegiality with Jews implies a softening of Christianity. Some are hostile to the idea of “Judeo-Christian,” which supposedly dilutes Christianity. Christian leaders who highlight their ties to Jews appear to them weak and compromised. Strong Christians “stand up” to Jews, and their fellow travelers from this perspective.
Another trend enabling hostility to Jews by young Christians is the decline of Dispensationalism and philo Semitism that once were paramount among American evangelicals. The 19th century theological system that placed Jews and Israel at the center of the final events leading to Christ’s return has been in decline for at least twenty years and is increasingly uncommon among young Christians. Young anti-Jewish Catholics now identify “Christian Zionism,” which they conflate with Dispensationalism, as a “heresy,” intrinsically at odds with Catholic teaching. Even the old adage about God blessing those who bless Abraham’s descendants has faded from favor. For many perhaps most young Christians, Jews have no further role in God’s plans. This perspective has sometimes been derided as “Replacement Theology,” but probably few young Christiani men are even familiar with this phrase or theologically thought through their reasons. Reliance on TikTok videos does not foster deep theological reflection.
Many young Christian men are attracted to their brand of Christianity for political reasons. To be Christian is to be anti-woke. From this view, Christian faith becomes a political and tribal marker as much as or even more important than personal faith. The church, as they define it, chiefly through self-selected online sources, is the shelter against wokeness that will affirm their manhood and succor if not platform their grievances.
Some young male Christians politicize their faith further by embracing premodern theories of Christendom. Catholic Integralists want a society where Roman Catholicism is legally dominant. Calvinist Christian Nationalists want a confessional state that bans or restricts other religious expressions. Neither project is plausible in America, or anywhere else. But both projects aspire to confine Jews to their own spheres and make them second class citizens, which amplifies anti-Jewish sentiment.
Jews are only two percent of the U.S. population and a much smaller percentage of the world population. But antisemitism is an enduring ideology that appeals to conspiracy, fear, resentment, and grievance. In this mindset, Jews are successful and have power at the expense of everybody else. They are always convenient scapegoats.
Antisemitism is not just a threat to Jews themselves but to democracy and ordered liberty for all people. It denies the core Christian and Jewish insight that all are equally created in the image of God and in civil society should have equal rights and dignity. The new antisemitism is part of the new authoritarianism that is impatient of democracy and rights and prefers a bracing vision of control and coercion by the “right” people.
Many young Christians are drawn to this ostensibly masculine society where enemies are repressed and imprisoned, perhaps even tortured are killed. It’s the same sadism that motivates extremist young men at their worst everywhere, whether in Iran in 1979, Germany in the early 1930s, or Moscow in 1917, or China in 1949, among many other times and places. In contrast, democracy and human rights require self-restraint, patience, forbearance, and respect even for adversaries.
How can the new antisemitism and new authoritarianism popular among some Christian young men be countered? There are no silver bullets. These trends appeal to the darker impulses always present throughout humanity. Democracy and mutual respect appeal to higher aspirations, ultimately based on God’s goodness, mercy, and grace, while also admitting our limited capacities as finite and sinful humans. If God is God, and we are only human, only He can judge and condemn. In our humility, we treat others as we hope they will treat us.
Articulating these principles might be more of a vocation for laity than clergy, especially for online laity who are effective and entertaining communicators.
So there are no easy remedies for Christian antisemitism or authoritarianism. We can only appeal to the common grace that covers our fallen world, pointing out that all humans ultimately benefit from controlling our resentments and living peaceably together. Even zealous young men by God’s grace can listen and understand.
More from IRD:
Catholic Integralism Replacing Evangelicals?
Comment by Wilson R. on April 1, 2026 at 10:28 am
I think Christians can do much more than “appeal to common grace.” Not enough mainstream Christians—and, it appears, almost none among the younger people described in the piece above—have been taught that their religion is essentially the religion of Jesus. They never hear that Jesus taught from the Law and the Prophets. They’ve never been taught that everything Jesus taught about proper relations between people and the moral ordering of society comes from Judaism. They don’t get reminded that Jesus did not teach that Judaism was a religious dead end or that he said he came to fulfill the Law rather than abolish it. He said that “salvation comes from the Jews.” They never are taught that Jesus never stopped being a Jew and never told anyone else to stop being a Jew. They don’t understand that even the resurrection was a common Jewish belief in the early first century (as Martha shows in John 11). They tend to think that Judaism is nothing but rules and are often surprised to learn that what Jesus teaches as the two greatest commandments come from Torah.
The best thing that mainstream Christians can do is to reassert the Jewishness of Jesus.
Comment by John on April 1, 2026 at 11:19 am
‘These young men with whom he talks feel economically “disenfranchised,” they “look for an oppressor,” or in these right-wing circles, a “subversive group (i.e., Jews/Israel),” and they “blame them for foreign policy which leads to lack of prosperity.”’
“It’s also true that young male Christians want their religion, with their other beliefs, to be very high octane, with clear boundaries, and uncompromising, which ostensibly evinces masculinity and boldness.”
You’ve made some very good points and insights here into the current manosphere and alt-right circles poisoning young men today. I wish you hadn’t waited until now to make these observations though.
Anti-Semitism is clearly a big red flag in the IRD (as it should be), but Jews are just the latest of many scapegoats touted by these hyper-masculine voices on the right. Virtually all of what they’re saying about Jews now they been saying about immigrants, women, Muslims, and non-whites long before now. Where was your witness then?
Maybe if you had been more vocal about the dangers of this hyper-masculine form of Christianity when it was in its infancy, we wouldn’t be in this situation today. Even now you’re still treating the symptoms rather than the disease, waiting for figures like Owens and Carlson to pick up that red flag before you confront them. Where were you when Carlson was promoting the idea of “white genocide”? We would all do well to remember the words of the German theologian Martin Niemoller.
Comment by Wilson R. on April 1, 2026 at 12:10 pm
Amen to what John said. And, really: What people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the juvenile trolls in the manosphere represent is not a particular form of Christianity. It is something alien and oppositional to Christianity that happens to falsely present itself as Christian. We need to be brutally honest about that. The real war against Christianity is being waged by these people, not the secularists who don’t want to see Christianity promoted as the national religion in public life.
Comment by Salvatore Anthony Luiso on April 1, 2026 at 1:06 pm
Thank you for this thoughtful article about a very important subject. I agree with other commenters that the rise in antisemitism among young men is related to the rise of misogyny, racism, and other hateful beliefs and attitudes. This rise is a symptom of the fact that many American young men have serious problems.
I would add:
1. To counter this rise in antisemitism etc., we should address those serious problems among American young men.
2. It is common among young men to try to be brave and daring by being transgressive: for example, for believing and saying things which their elders forbid. That’s a factor here.
3. The example and influence of Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Tucker Carlson.
It is an obvious fact that since Trump ran for president in 2015, many Americans have felt freer to say transgressive things, e.g. racist things, misogynist things, and antisemitic things. (This is not to say that Trump himself is antisemitic–although since 2015 he has said and done things publicly which look and sound antisemitic, whether or not he was aware of it.)
This was both predictable and predicted. As certain American evangelicals liked to say when they opposed Bill Clinton in the 1990s: “character matters”. (Note that when Trump ran for president in 2016, that slogan was renounced and essentially replaced with “Policy is the only thing that matters”.
4. A lack of good living examples for young men to follow.
5. A reaction to political correctness, and a confusion of political correctness with common decency, wherein one can think one is defying political correctness when in fact one is defying common decency.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on April 2, 2026 at 12:04 am
But is it genuine antisemitism?
No.
It is simply that the chickens have finally come home to roost.
And none of the screeds from increasingly irrelevant Evangelicalism (on both the right and the left) will be able to change the profound shift that’s taking place.
Comment by Wilson R. on April 2, 2026 at 11:29 am
Glenn, I would agree that opposing the leadership of Israel is not antisemitic (unless you count the Old Testament prophets as antisemites). But for some of these guys I think it goes much deeper than that.
Comment by Gary Bebop on April 2, 2026 at 12:21 pm
Mainline Christianity (of which Mark Tooley is a worthy adherent) did not teach Christ with a straight face. There was always a compromised message, an asterisk alongside the truth, a trendy plasticity instead of historical tradition. Mainline wobble sanctioned the unrecognizable church we have now, well before the evangelicals began their wiggle-waggle. The saving Person of the gospel is gone from the conversation, replaced by collaboration with many strange cats. It’s a head shaker.
Comment by Corvus Corax on April 2, 2026 at 1:42 pm
I think this is reasonable analysis, although it seems to whistle past the fundamental rivalry between atavistic, identity-driven reaction and liberal, multicultural, international systems. In this drama “the Jews” are stand-ins for liberal internationalism and so forth. Unfortunately it is difficult to deny the substantial contributions of Jewish intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries to these systems.
It is also easy to observe the sharp ethno-nationalism of the Jewish state. Therefore the Jewish people garner critics from both left and right. In such an environment it’s easy for both sides to wind one another up into a feeding frenzy of rank antisemitism. The manner in which the left and the right would ordinarily check one another’s worst impulses is significantly diminished.
Personally I have no issue with “the Jews” as a people, although I tend to look askance at much of the product put forth by Jewish artists, critics, and intellectuals. The same holds for other pluralistic minority sects. But there’s no sense throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even the Unitarians (John C. Calhoun) and the Quakers (Nathanael Greene, Richard Nixon) have yielded some first-rate patriots.
Comment by John on April 2, 2026 at 4:06 pm
Glenn Wheeler,
It is authentic anti-Semitism, not merely criticism of Israel that is growing among certain segment of the young American population. Owens and Fuentes have repeated every evil Jew myth from the blood libel to The Protocols of Zion. Both also deny the Holocaust. Christian nationalist voices like Joel Webbon and Stephen Wolfe have openly called for Jews to be excluded from American government and citizenship. Professed ultra-catholic figures like Carrie Prejean Boller have started referring to all Jews as “Christ-killers” again. What would it take for you to classify something as “genuine anti-Semitism”?
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on April 2, 2026 at 9:10 pm
John,
When your president stops murderous remote-control bombings, done from afar by cowards, in a country that has never attacked the United States and in fact has no capability of attacking the United States, cowardly bombings that are killing and maiming human beings who are every bit as precious in God’s sight as you and the inhabitants of Israel are, and when your country stops enabling the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and when your country stops its obsession with forever wars where it has lost count of the millions of deaths it has perpetrated, then perhaps we could have a conversation about antisemitism.
But when your own country has a long history of committing terrorist acts against and slaughtering whatever people it chooses, perhaps you should heed the admonition of Jesus to get the log out of your own eye before you worry about the speck of dust in someone else’s eye.
Comment by John on April 3, 2026 at 10:19 am
Glenn Wheeler,
I’m against the Iran War. I’m in favor of a two-state solution in the Holy Land. I’ve publicly criticized Israeli actions in Gaza and West Bank (the later of which had nothing to do with the October 6, but is still being slowly forced out by illegal settlers). I’m not going to let you dismiss attacks and slanders against Jews everywhere just by pointing to Israel. It may have escaped your notice, but many American Jews have been critical of Israel too. You seem to think if America just turns its back on Israel, then all this anti-Semitism will just go away. I don’t believe that, having read some of the statements of the people mentioned above more closely than you. It’s clear to me that their hatred goes beyond the State of Israel and pertains to Jews and Judaism in general. I believe they’re using Israel as a gateway to radicalize young men.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on April 3, 2026 at 11:45 am
John,
I repeat….get the log out of your own eye before you try to get the speck of dust out of someone else’s eye. As long as you are a citizen of a terrorist country, you have no standing to criticize anyone for anything. You have no—absolutely no—moral standing on anything.
Comment by John on April 3, 2026 at 1:50 pm
Glenn Wheeler,
I never said I was an American, but since you feel compelled to make ad hoc attacks on others on the basis of their nationality rather than the merit of their argument, I think it’s only fair you disclose your own nationality. Otherwise how can we know you’re not just using the anonymity of the internet to hide your own hypocrisy? Show me your log if you’re going to point and stare at mine.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on April 4, 2026 at 12:10 am
John,
You cannot escape culpability. The fact is that your nation is a terrorist nation, and the blood of millions is on your hands. You may be able, in your own mind, to deny it, but the world knows. And God knows.
And your brand of religion–evangelicalism–is what has enabled the state of Israel in its numerous murderous rampages, most recently the genocide in Gaza and the demonic murder they are committing now in Lebanon.
There’s a lot of blood on your hands.
And you can’t get out of it by saying, “I don’t support the war in Iran”…….
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on April 4, 2026 at 12:30 am
By the way, John, I am from a society that tried, long ago, to free you from that which controls you and which is now destroying you.
Comment by John on April 4, 2026 at 8:04 pm
Glenn Wheeler,
And what society would that be?
Comment by Thomas on April 5, 2026 at 2:03 pm
We can just wonder how History would have been different if the State of Palestine was already a reality by now. If Palestine was an independent country by now, like it was stipulated in the Oslo Accords in 1993, would this tragedy be happening in the Middle East? I have many doubts about it.
Comment by Wilson R. on April 6, 2026 at 3:03 pm
Glenn Wheeler wrote:
You cannot escape culpability. The fact is that your nation is a terrorist nation, and the blood of millions is on your hands. You may be able, in your own mind, to deny it, but the world knows. And God knows.
And your brand of religion–evangelicalism–is what has enabled the state of Israel in its numerous murderous rampages, most recently the genocide in Gaza and the demonic murder they are committing now in Lebanon.
There’s a lot of blood on your hands.
And you can’t get out of it by saying, “I don’t support the war in Iran”…….
I think this comment deserves serious reflection. While it is fair to ask, “What can I, as just one person, do?” it is also not enough to say, “I don’t support the war in Iran” or other government actions that make a mockery of any claims that America is a Christian nation. The voices of the OT prophets should remind us that entire nations reap the consequences for their leaders’ actions.
One of the ways that history seems to be rhyming is how Americans are responding to an undeclared war, the bombing of civilians, the abducting of people following the rules and whisked to brutal concentration camps without due process, and assaults on democratic freedoms. People here who are not directly affected are mostly going on with their daily lives, as if society were not out of joint. Ordinary Germans did the same. When people say we have become like that, we shouldn’t simply become defensive and dismiss it.