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The rise of the Jim Crow theobros
(RNS) — A group of Reformed pastors and influencers has wedded old-school segregationist theology with the hypermasculinity of the manosphere and the savvy of the attention economy to preach and sell white supremacy, antisemitism and patriarchy to angry young men. Its audience is small but growing, and their movement has ties to powerful religious and political figures.
The rise of the Jim Crow theobros
Bob Smietana
September 24, 2026 at 2:19 p.m. ET

(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.

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.

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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.”

It is not inherently evil to own another human being.
YouTube influencer Joshua Haymes

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.

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