Old prejudice

Pastor Joel Ellis spent the night wide-eyed, feeling sick to his stomach. Early the next morning, he sat down at his computer and wrote a long email to a man he had only recently met, a newcomer at his church, Reformation Presbyterian Church in Apache Junction, Ariz.

The man, Will Spencer, ran a podcast on cultural and masculinity topics. Spencer, who is Jewish, was baptized into the Christian faith in 2020. Since then, he’s been “heading at high speed to a redeemed life,” he notes on his website.

But he was also headed down a road a growing number of highly online Christian men are taking—the road to anti-­Semitism.

Spencer had recently invited on his podcast two of the most outspoken proponents of Jewish hatred in Christian circles: Corey Mahler and Ryan Dumperth. The duo have a podcast of their own, Stone Choir, that espouses a “theological lens to the world.” Under the guise of Christian nationalism, the hosts have promoted Holocaust revisionism and other anti-Semitic and racist messages. Mahler and Dumperth, who goes by the nickname “Woe,” say they are confessional Lutherans. But their former denomination has disavowed them. Dumperth claims he was pushed out of his Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod congregation. Mahler’s church excommunicated him in 2023.

When Ellis learned Spencer planned to air his interview with the Stone Choir hosts, he decided he couldn’t stay silent. In his email to Spencer, sent that morning in July 2024, Ellis warned he was making a serious error. Ellis chided Spencer for platforming and legitimizing an apostate and “men who are glad to embrace an identity as neo-Nazis.” He also warned Spencer in the email that he could inadvertently lure more young men to confound fidelity to Christ with explicit support of the Third Reich as a Christian regime, Hitler as a Christian prince, or persecuting fellow Christians for holding a different theology regarding the state of Israel and Jewish people. Ellis attached 25 screenshots of posts from Mahler’s public Telegram page to support his assertions—statements such as, “Adolf Hitler was a good man,” or “The Holocaust is literally incredible,” or “With only exceedingly rare exceptions, saying Jesus was a Jew is blasphemous.”

After getting his pastor’s email, Spencer immediately pulled the podcast episode and issued an apology. He called the Stone Choir debacle “one of the most humbling and sanctifying episodes of my life and career.” Spencer claimed he would not have featured Mahler and Dumperth had he known the extent of what they believed. But he admitted he’d become desensitized to their destructive ideology.

Spencer’s about-face caused immediate backlash among his social media followers. The Stone Choir hosts trashed him. Mahler denounced Spencer for his “incurable nature.”

“There’s no such thing as a repentant Jew,” Dumperth posted. He also shared screenshots of Spencer’s supportive ­private messages only months prior, including this: “The best strategy is to attack the Holocaust head on.”

Nearly a year later, in June 2025, Spencer attempted to articulate in a lengthy essay for the theological blog Christ Over All how he and so many other young men in conservative Christian circles are getting swept up in the anti-Semitic ­narrative. What pushed him—and them—over the edge?

It’s a question that has plagued Ellis, too. He says he meets at least twice a week with young men (and sometimes their wives) who are professing Christians but have adopted some form of Jewish hatred, an un-Biblical “harboring of malice and resentment … justification for something that they know fundamentally is not Christian.” Ellis expected his pastoral duties to include sleepless nights—but not dismantling anti-Semitic ideology on a regular basis.

Ellis is part of a small but growing contingent of Protestant pastors and leaders who are confronting strains of Jewish hatred that have quietly seeped into churches and subsets of the Christian culture, driven by young, conservative men who are angry, disillusioned, and hyper-online. In recent years, political violence, foreign wars, racial and societal fracturing, and theological differences over Israel and the Jews have provided fertile soil for anti-Semitism to grow.

ANTI-SEMITISM, or hostility toward Jewish people, including notions of an overarching conspiratorial “Jewish problem,” has persisted on the political extremes for centuries. But since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, anti-Semitic incidents have surged to unprecedented levels, and a growing number of adults worldwide harbor anti-Jewish attitudes.

Seth Dillon, CEO of the conservative Christian satire site Babylon Bee, argues that after the Oct. 7 attacks, “a line was drawn in the sand.”

“It was astonishing how many people were taking the side of terrorists … how many people treated the attack as justified and provoked,” he said. More than two years later, “it seems like every day, people are hammering home about how evil Israel is, how the Jews are the world’s greatest problem,” Dillon added.

Until recently, Big Tech largely suppressed white nationalist activists led by Nick Fuentes, a prominent Holocaust denier and Catholic who became the figurehead of the America First movement, a form of nationalist populism. Fuentes’ followers participated in the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where protesters chanted, “The Jews will not replace us.”

After billionaire Elon Musk purchased X in 2022, he reversed the site’s censorship policies, a move cheered by free speech advocates. But removing those limits had consequences. “It allowed those people who hold anti-Semitic views to come out of the shadows and start growing their platforms more openly,” Dillon said.

Dillon says the anti-Semitic narratives circulating on the right hinge on questioning the so-called post–World War II consensus, a widespread rejection of nationalism, fascism, and authoritarian regimes, along with the advancement of liberalism and the creation of the state of Israel as a safeguard against Jewish genocide. The narrative is rooted in a perceived notion that this “never again” ethos ushered in “all this moral degeneracy, this inability to fight back against the bad things the Jews are bringing into the world,” Dillon said. “It’s leading young people to see the world through a lens where the Jews and Israel are always the scapegoat. … the Jews are the real villains.”

Those claims have circulated for a long time. In 1903, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion compiled many Jewish prejudices into one document. Published in a newspaper in the Russian empire, the document claimed to belong to a secret body of Jews set out to control the world and destroy Christianity and all other world religions. By the early 1920s, The Times in London proved the document was falsified, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Still, over the course of decades, the document has continued to resurface, fueling neo-Nazi propaganda and Jewish hatred.

More recent editions blame the Jews for the 9/11 attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the FBI released the uncensored Protocols on its website as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. That same year, as the world shut down due to the pandemic, Will Spencer noticed a shift in the male-dominated online forums he was a part of. Previously, jokes and memes about a “Jewish plot” were commonplace. But coming out of the pandemic, “the jokes started to turn serious,” he said. “It became the worldview of more than just a few fringe guys on the internet.” He thinks the pandemic had something to do with it. “Everyone was looking around and saw deception and lies at the highest level.” This so-called awakening quickly turned into the belief that “everything is a lie,” he said.

In a 2023 episode of Stone Choir titled “The Big Lie,” Mahler and Dumperth placed Jews at the center of what the hosts described as an overarching plot enacted methodically since the 1800s to destroy Christendom and slaughter Christians. Mahler repeatedly linked Holocaust revisionism and the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re telling you things no one else will tell you,” he often interjected. In another Stone Choir episode, the hosts equate Jews as blood enemies of white Christians, blaming them for everything from the sexualization of mass culture, including the porn industry, to child ritual sacrifice.

On Nov. 7, 2025, Stone Choir aired its last episode. Dumperth said he and Mahler had accomplished their goals for the show. “There’s no new information,” he said. “Some of the things that we said in the first year that almost nobody else was saying, stuff that seemed edgy and controversial, today it’s becoming normal … a lot of those things, everybody is saying it.”

WILL SPENCER STUMBLED upon Stone Choir in early 2024 when an acquaintance described it as the podcast “no one was allowed to admit they listened to.” Stone Choir’s appeal has to do with white, male-centric online communities, often referred to as the “manosphere,” a movement Spencer was already a part of. He described this online world as filling the void left by the lack of close relationship with his father and a misunderstanding of manhood. Spencer began spending time on 4chan, an image-based internet forum where chronically online users hide behind anonymous accounts. In Spencer’s experience, it was largely men railing against woke progressivism and being “red-pilled” by feminism and liberalism. Jews are almost always the culprits of these social ills. Ecosystems of memes and conspiracy theories promoted Holocaust minimization or other neo-Nazi rhetoric, he said.

Among Christians, those ideas began gaining traction in Reformed circles.

Spencer believes the “red pill world” collided with Reformed circles because of the appeal of distinct theological stances on engaging politics and culture. But Reformed beliefs about Israel’s role in the end times also play a significant role.

The ongoing Israel-Hamas War sparked widespread debate over American evangelical eschatology pertaining to Christian Zionism and dispensationalism, which holds that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies. Reformed Christians largely disagree, believing that Old Testament Israel and the church together constitute the people of God across redemptive history.

Some even subscribe to a form of maximal supersessionism, the belief that the Christian church is the new Israel and replaces ethnic Israel in God’s redemptive plan. Under this belief, Judaism and the Jewish people, unless they convert to Christianity, have no special place in God’s eschatological plan.

WITHIN REFORMED TRADITIONS, Pastor Joel Ellis says the widespread rejection of dispensationalism—he describes it as a “bifurcation of Israel and the church and its idea for a future national political hope for Israel”—renders some “more susceptible to take the next step and say, ‘It’s even more sinister than you realize.’”

But one of the loudest and most recognizable Reformed voices rejects anti-Semitism as anti-Christian. On numerous occasions, Doug Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist author and pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, has acknowledged the lure of anti-Semitism among adherents of Christian nationalism and a “radical fringe” that has emerged. In November 2024, Wilson joined a handful of prominent pastors and theologians to pen the Antioch Declaration, a 1,900-word document that “opposes the ideas of some contemporary leaders and influencers seeking to introduce anti-gospel racial categories into the church.” Among its claims are denials that world affairs are governed by conspiring Jews or that it’s possible to “harmonize racial and anti-Semitic theories of Adolf Hitler and neo-pagan doctrines of the Nazi cult with the gospel and Scriptural teaching.”

The declaration identifies young Christian men as especially at risk of “being led astray by wolves clothed as shepherds.” Wilson told WORLD the declaration was an effort to “take responsibility to police our own ranks on the right, to keep people from going down a dark path.”

Reaction revealed a much bigger problem than the declaration’s authors realized. “We had seen some bubbling anti-­Semitism in certain quarters … then the eruption happened,” Wilson said. “We thought, ‘Okay, it was good we did this. This needed to happen.’”

The eruption involved several Reformed pastors who disagreed over the declaration’s language and the severity of the problem. Two months earlier, Wilson and other Antioch Declaration collaborators got into a public dispute with Joel Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church, a Reformed Baptist congregation outside Austin, Texas, and founder of Right Response Ministries. One of Webbon’s church members had shared Holocaust denial content, including a pro-Nazi meme, with a former pastor. Wilson and others addressed the dispute publicly and took Webbon to task for his permissiveness in dealing with the young male congregant.

Webbon said he believed the young man’s beliefs failed to necessitate church discipline. And he claimed the pastors who publicized the situation “needed an example to substantiate” their claims of rising anti-Semitism in Reformed churches.

Since the Antioch Declaration came out, Webbon seems to have doubled down on anti-Semitic rhetoric. In August, in a guest appearance on Holocaust denier Elijah Schaffer’s show, RiftTV, Webbon stated, “A decent degree of anti-Semitism is related to Jewish behavior.” (The show also contained crass sexual joking and foul language.) Webbon has also defended Nick Fuentes and made statements on X such as, “the Bible is anti-Semitic.” In September, he admonished his 60,000 followers to “righteously despise Israel.” “They are a wicked nation that America must be free of,” he said.

Webbon is not the only Reformed pastor called out for anti-Semitic statements. Michael Spangler, a Presbyterian pastor and school administrator in North Carolina, has drawn attention for embracing race realism, also referred to as kinism, the belief that insurmountable and innate differences between races, including ethnic Jews, justify at least some measure of discrimination and segregation.

In April 2024, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church divested Spangler without censure on administrative grounds. The shepherding committee recommending his divestiture noted his “provocative immaturity,” in part for promoting Stone Choir and for statements on social media such as, “Christian, don’t be mistaken on this: Jews are your enemies. The Bible says this. You should believe it, and not be afraid to affirm it publicly.”

He later posted on X that he supports Mahler and Dumperth and “encourage my fellow Reformed Christians to do the same.”

A cadre of online critics regularly pushes back on anti-­Semitic rhetoric on the right. One man, who declined to provide his name, uses the pseudonym “Hitler Hated Christ” on X. “I have a lot of lunatics I interact with,” he said. The man is a member of a Presbyterian Church of America congregation in Texas. He began posting to refute Holocaust revisionism and other anti-Semitic rhetoric after watching several conservative friends embrace Jewish hatred.

Joel Ellis sees the problem as primarily pastoral.

He is not on social media and spends little time online. But most of the men he meets with “are getting what they think they know about the Holocaust, about Israel’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy, from X or YouTube,” he said. These men cherry-pick from church fathers, such as Martin Luther’s later-in-life anti-Semitic writings, and from what they hear, and listen to conspiratorial voices “that seek to deflect responsibility and accountability for their own lives,” Ellis said.

Jewish hatred, like any other form of hatred toward people and ethnic groups, “is a cancer that only grows,” he notes.

“It’s going to require loving, personal, relational, but relentlessly Biblical confrontation to continue to try to inoculate people against these ideas.”

—with reporting by Emma Freire

Editor's note: This story has been updated to note that Corey Mahler’s congregation voted to excommunicate him.