Bob Smietana | RELIGION NEWS SERVICE | September 25, 2026
(RNS) — Michael Spangler does not look like a white supremacist and antisemite.
He has no visible tattoos, no shaven head, no black overcoat or jackboots. No hood, no Confederate flag and no Nazi images appear in the background as he sits in front of a screen for a recent Zoom interview.
Instead, the soft-spoken Christian school teacher and pastor of Piedmont Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, was dressed in a charcoal suit and sat in front of a fish tank that seemed straight off the set of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo.”
Then he began talking about Jews. And a broad smile broke across his face.
“You’re asking if I oppose the Jews who murdered Christ?” said Spangler as he paraphrased a verse from the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, which he says labels Jews as “the enemies of God and all men.”
“We need to consider them and treat them accordingly.”
A segregationist and “race realist” whose start-up church, which has a handful of families, bars Black people out of fear of “harmful race-mixing,” Spangler is one of a small but growing group of pastors and internet influencers who openly embrace racist and antisemitic views, casting them as true Christian ideas.
This group, many of whom fit the Reformed Christian theobro typology — known for their distinctive beards, suits and penchant for exegeting over whiskey — has wedded old-school segregationist theology from the Jim Crow-era South with the hypermasculinity of the manosphere and the savvy of the attention economy to preach white supremacy, antisemitism and patriarchy, mostly to disillusioned young men on the internet.
And along the way, they are turning outrage into cash.
Selling white supremacy
In May of 2026, Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and self-described Christian nationalist with more than 100,000 followers on X, launched On the Nose Media LLC, a new for-profit media company.
Joel Webbon. (RNS illustration/Chaz Russo)
The company, which does business as NXR Studios — short for “New Christian Right” — bought the YouTube channel formerly run by Right Response Ministries, a nonprofit founded by Webbon in 2019. Along with the channel came more than 180,000 subscribers and a library of videos with more than 20 million views.
The new company, which lists Webbon among its principals in documents filed with the state of Texas, has turned the channel into a bullhorn for Christian nationalism, antisemitism and white supremacy. One of the first videos for the new NXR channel was an interview with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist influencer whom Webbon called “the most significant man in America.” (Fuentes was paid for his appearance, the company’s CFO recently disclosed.)
Along with subscriptions, which range from $9.99 a month for premium content and $19.99 for VIP access, the company sells a “Christian Nationalist Starter Pack” of books for $99.99 with titles like “White Genocide” and T-shirts emblazoned with “It’s Ok to be White” and “I’ll Take the Christian, Hold the Judeo,” among other slogans. (The group also sells pro-nicotine T-shirts, part of their pro-smoking message.) Subscribers can listen to an audiobook version of Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” as well.
Webbon’s company also hosts conferences and sells ads, offering “millions of impressions each month across high-engagement content, connecting your brand with a loyal and values-driven audience.”
The mix of extreme views and commerce can be jarring.
During a recent episode, Webbon, whose church boasted of having about 200 members back in 2023, jumped from dissing Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks and extolling the virtues of the Patriot Front, a white nationalist group, to a pitch for affordable “grass-fed, pasture-raised beef” sold by Wild Pastures, a meat subscription service.
“Try it for yourself, get 20% off,” he said, then hopped back into praising the “physically fit, well-behaved, disciplined” members of the Patriot Front.
YouTube influencer Joshua Haymes is even more enthusiastic. Once a ponytailed hipster church planter with a soul-patch in the early days of COVID-19, Haymes has defended slavery using the Bible, and claims Hitler — who he calls “the mustache man” — was misunderstood.
Joshua Haymes
“It is not inherently evil to own another human being,” he said about slavery in a late December episode on his Reformation Red Pill YouTube channel, adding that “it is very important that every Christian affirm what I just said.”
“Christians in America have been led astray on this issue,” he said, saying the Bible defends slavery. Then Haymes, who often sports a brown blazer, tie and pipe, launched into an energetic pitch for Beam Dream Sleep Powder.
“It’s literally like a hot chocolate before bed, and it tastes really good,” he said. “So guys, go get some Beam Dream Sleep Powder and use my code RRP for up to 35% off.”
Haymes is also a big fan, at least on his channel, of a Christian protein powder and teriyaki beef sticks from a sponsor.
Ramping up
Podcaster Will Spencer, who runs a podcast focused on Christianity and men’s issues, said pro-white supremacist pastors have mastered some of the lessons of other internet influencers. Spencer, who grew up in a Jewish family and later converted to Christianity after meeting a church group at the Burning Man festival, has warned of the dangers of neo-Nazi ideas invading churches by targeting young men.
Spencer, who faced backlash last year after disowning an interview he’d done with influencer Corey Mahler after finding out about Mahler’s neo-Nazi views, said extreme views can be a proven strategy for building an audience online. He said in general, women share and engage with social media content more than men do.
“But there is an exception to that. If you could tap into a segment of young, angry, disaffected men with disposable income — they are hyper-tribal, hyper-loyal, they share and engage consistently — you become their guy — you can circumvent the way social media usually works,” he said.
But that strategy requires a constant stream of outrage.
“The problem,” he said, is that “you have to keep shoveling them increasing red bits of meat — it is a one-way trip.”
Dale Partridge
For Dale Partridge, an Arizona pastor and another member of the New Christian Right channel, that one-way trip has included significant transformation.
A decade ago, Partridge was a lifestyle blogger and social justice evangelical entrepreneur who had been “saved from success.” In 2015, he gave a TEDx talk called “How to Value People over Profits” based on his book of the same title. His most controversial view was that yoga pants are sinful.
In recent years, Partridge, who has more than 300,000 social media followers and more than 40,000 on YouTube, has rebranded himself as a chain-smoking, hardcore Christian nationalist, claiming women should not be allowed to vote, Black Americans should not be citizens and Jews were ruining Germany before the Nazis took over.
“So this Nazi or National Socialist movement terrified the Jews because it represented a powerful form of Christian nationalism,” he said in a video clip posted on social media.
Partridge, who did not respond to a request for an interview, also runs “Manhood.org,” which offers a get-rich program based on his past business experience for $200 a month or $2,200 a year.
At his church, King’s Way Reformed Church, Partridge recently preached a series of sermons on the curse of Ham — a reference to an obscure Old Testament story historically used to justify slavery and segregation. He advocated for a return to “European Christian colonization of African nations.”
Elsewhere, Partridge has argued for America to become 90% white again, as it was in the 1960s, and called for the deportation of 100 million immigrants.
Partridge and King’s Way Reformed Church, which has about 100 members and is located in Prescott, Arizona, were featured this year in the New York Times for the congregations’ embrace of biblical patriarchy and household voting, the idea that every household gets one vote and the husband casts it.
Many of these pastors, including Partridge, Webbon and Spangler, have brick-and-mortar churches, but while their congregations are small, their online audiences run in the hundreds of thousands.
No longer taboo
Partridge and Webbon, along with Calvin Robinson, a British cleric who lost his ministerial credentials for making a Nazi-like salute at an event, recently took part in a long YouTube discussion on what to do about “the Black problem.”
Along with arguing for mass deportations, the panelists claimed the Civil Rights Act has held Black Americans back, that Black Americans are less intelligent than white Americans and that interracial marriage, while not banned by the Bible, is ill-advised, and minorities should know their place.
George Yancey, a professor of sociology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, believes the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have created space for these kinds of racist ideas to thrive.
“When Trump was elected, and the way Trump talks about race, that created a permission structure for people to talk about race,” he said. “Some people had these racist ideas, but they were afraid to say it before Trump.”
Yancey also wonders if the George Floyd-era discussions about racism have played a role as well. In those discussions, the definition of racism was expanded beyond what he called “no-doubt about it” hateful forms of racism to include disagreements on how best to address racial disparities.
“I really want to reserve that term for people who engage in the sort of hateful racism that I grew up seeing,” Yancey said.
Webbon, who declined a request for an interview, recently sat down in a wood-paneled studio with Thomas Rousseau, founder of the Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization. After a promo for the NXR’s upcoming fall conference, “Christ is King: America After Trump,” which offered deep discounts for families, they discussed, among other things, whether Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is Black, should be deported to Africa along with other Black Americans.
In an excerpt of the interview, posted online by Nashville investigative journalist Phil Williams, Rousseau said yes, in his version of America, Thomas could not be an American. Webbon said no, adding that Thomas is one of the few Black people who should be allowed to vote. Both said the United States should not be a multi-racial country.
Webbon, dressed in his uniform of a dark sport coat and khaki pants, assured Rousseau that he doesn’t find his claim that Black people cannot be Americans racist.
“I just want you to know, and I hope you know this. Like, I don’t hear that and say, ‘You dirty racist. Okay, that’s terrible, or I can’t believe that,’” Webbon said. “I perfectly understand the position.”
Webbon, a former aspiring musician and one-time Vineyard church planter, has not always held such extreme views on race. As recently as 2024, he posted a video saying if his daughter brought home a Black Christian man “who loved the Lord,” Webbon said, “I want to say, praise God, marry my daughter.”
Webbon’s change in views grieves Samuel Sey, a conservative Black Christian blogger who was once on friendly terms with the Texas pastor, even speaking on a panel together at a church conference in 2022.
He believes Webbon and pastors like him chose ambition and controversy over preaching Christianity. To quote the Bible, he said in a reference to a New Testament passage, they want to gain the world but are losing their souls.
Sey, who was born in Ghana and immigrated in childhood to Canada, worries that all the language of white supremacy will lead to violence.
“You can’t keep saying all these things, and therefore there not to be a violent consequence at some point,” he said.
Michael Spangler. (Video screen grab)
Reconstructing racism
Spangler, who has been a pastor since 2018 and was expelled from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 2024 for his views, also went through an extreme transformation. He grew up attending services at Lloyd Presbyterian Church, a historic African American congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) where his mother was pastor.
Things started to change when he was a student at Davidson College. At the time, Spangler, an aspiring minister, was engaged to another aspiring minister.
“My fiancé and I were going to be pastors together in the PCUSA,” he said in an interview.
Spangler said he had a conversion experience while reading a sermon on the New Testament book of Ephesians and came to believe women should obey men.
That did not go over with his wife-to-be. In Spangler’s retelling, she ended up dumping both him and Jesus, becoming a lesbian and Jewish. Spangler, who in the past has said America needs a Protestant Hitler, said his views on feminism later changed how he views matters of race.
“Just as God did not make the sexes equal, he did not make races equal,” Spangler told RNS.
Spangler and his friend, the Rev. Samuel Ketcham, who was defrocked by the Reformed Presbyterian Church for his racist views earlier this year, have started their own denomination, known as the Southern Presbytery.
That name is telling. Southern Presbyterians during the Civil War era were zealous proponents of the righteousness of slavery and racism, said R. Ward Holder, director for the Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Holder said during the Civil War, Presbyterians, like the Baptists, split between the North and the South. Theologians like James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney, in what was known as the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, believed the Bible supported slavery and their way of life.
Holder sees a parallel in pastors and influencers like Spangler, for whom the racism and sexism of America’s past are not sins to be overcome but an essential part of the Christian America they want to build.
They are features, not bugs, for pastors like Spangler.
“If you’re a true believer, that’s not going to bother you,” said Holder.
True believers?
Jemar Tisby, the New York Times bestselling author of “The Color of Compromise,” compared the return of racist ideas to the Redemption era, which followed Reconstruction. In that era, Southern Blacks lost much of the social standing and political influence they’d gained after the Civil War.
“Redemption is a Bible word that means restoring a people to right relationship with God,” he said. “But in the hands of white supremacists, redemption meant taking back the country for white people. That’s essentially what this resurgence of racism is about.”
Tisby said the ideas promoted by pastors like Spangler and Webbon are gaining attention but are unlikely to convince large numbers of people.
“There are some people who always believed it who are now being more vocal about it,” he said. “But I don’t know that they’re being effective evangelists of their ideology.”
Hunter Baker, senior fellow for civic renewal and religious liberty at the First Liberty Institute, said for pastors like Partridge or Webbon, creating outrage is “almost like a fun activity.”
Some of the nationalist influencers, Baker said, seem to have adopted a “pre-Christian identity” and have rejected teachings of Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount.
“Jesus is not front and center with these guys,” he said.
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