TheoBros, TechBros, & Trump

Read this before you vote

To understand what’s happening in America today and what’s on the ballot this November, you need to pay attention to shifting coalitions. What we’re seeing right now is a strengthening and expanding coalition between Christian nationalists, tech billionaires, and Trump’s inner circle.

A few months back, I wrote a post on the “Thickening Webs on the Christian Right.” Having tracked these shifting coalitions for years, I was alarmed to observe tightening connections between Christian nationalist pastors and powerful political operatives. Since then, things have only gotten worse.

Buckle up—I’m going to take you on a whirlwind tour of these coalescing networks with the help of three excellent articles that you should read in their entirety. In some ways it’s a relief to see the mainstream media start to pick up on these dynamics, but it may be too late. The repercussions are chilling.

The first is from Kiera Butler at Mother Jones: “To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the ‘TheoBros.’”

Butler’s Mother Jones article is well-timed, as several of the “TheoBros” she’s covering also feature prominently in my new film For Our Daughters.

This is why we didn’t shy away from the political framing of the film. The very men preaching a militant patriarchy inside evangelical churches have set their sights on seizing power in order to impose their understanding of “God’s law” on the rest of us. They’re not shy about saying so and it’s time we take them at their word.

Butler’s piece lays out connections between these “TheoBros” and J.D. Vance:

…For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed….

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix….

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving….Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

There’s much more in the article—read the whole thing to get a sense for who some of the key actors are right now hoping to use a second Trump administration to achieve their Christian nationalist goals.

Over at The New Republic, Alex Shephard has an important piece on J.D. Vance’s violent foreword to Kevin Roberts’ new book. If that name rings a bell, it’s because Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025.

If you’d like to read Roberts’s new book, you’ll have to wait—the publisher has delayed its release in light of the backlash against Project 2025. It turns out the agenda put forward is wildly unpopular with the American people and damaging to the Trump campaign. Having the VP candidate endorse the architects book is presumably a bad look.

Here’s Shepherd:

Donald Trump has been desperate lately to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s radical plan to remake the federal government under his presidency. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he said in early July about the plan, which would replace thousands of federal workers with partisan loyalists, ban abortion, and disband the Department of Education. A couple of weeks later, he said of the people behind Project 2025, “They are extreme, they’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it.”

But between those two denials, on July 15, Trump made a decision that undercuts his claim to have no knowledge of Project 2025: He picked Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book, which is scheduled to be published on September 24, was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.

But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)

…Vance’s foreword is also, notably, a call for revolution. “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems,” he writes. “We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.” That is where the muskets come in:

As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

The third article I want to point you to is from Ava Kofman at ProPublica: “A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.”

In “what’s old is new again,” we have right-wing Texas oilmen funding efforts to “take back” the country:

Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group….

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025….

Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) Instead, like most Christian nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.

Exactly what this reclamation would look like is up for debate. Some Christian nationalists advocate for more religious iconography in public life, while others harbor grander visions of Christianizing America’s political institutions. Those on the extreme end of this spectrum are sometimes called Dominionists, after the passage in Genesis in which man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has extensively reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks and believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. Zachary Maxwell, a Republican activist who knows the Wilks family personally and used to work for Texas Scorecard, a media group associated with Dunn and Wilks, agrees. “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)

Wilks did not respond to detailed lists of questions. In an email, Dunn directed me to his previous public statements. In one of them, he explained that every Christian should avoid the label “Christian Nationalist” because “it makes ‘Christian’ an adjective — in other words, subjugated to something else.” A self-proclaimed proponent of limited government, he has also rejected the way in which the label, a “smear,” suggests that Christians would replace “God as King with earthly kings who claimed God’s authority.”

…Many of their ideas have been shaped by David Barton, a former teacher in Aledo, Texas, and the closest the Christian nationalist movement has to an in-house intellectual. Barton has been advancing the same revisionist thesis for decades: The founders intended for the barrier between church and state to protect Christianity from the government, not vice versa. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” explains the website for WallBuilders, Barton’s advocacy group, to which Wilks has donated more than $3 million.

This view, dismissed by historians but increasingly common among white evangelicals, has been encouraged by recent Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting the establishment clause and embraced by prominent Republicans, most notably the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Johnson lauded Barton at a 2021 WallBuilders event, citing his “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” The day after Johnson was elected speaker, Barton said on a podcast, “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time.”

With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right megadonors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks. Several of the lawmakers they’ve funded have introduced bills linked to Project Blitz, a coalition of religious groups, including Barton’s WallBuilders, that drafted model legislation to advance Christianity’s role in civic life. One bill directs educators to hang posters of the Ten Commandments “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” Another, now law, requires schools to display “In God We Trust” placards.

“You can look here to see what’s coming to other states soon,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. After Texas passed a law allowing the work of licensed mental health counselors in public schools to be done by unlicensed chaplains — representatives of “God in government,” one of the bill’s sponsors called them — a dozen other states introduced similar bills. That includes Louisiana, which became the first state to sign a bill into law this June requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. (Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.”)

This is just a sampling.

What we are witnessing right now is an ever widening network—not just the TheoBros and Trump’s inner circle, but both of these networks now interlinked with the power of tech billionaires. That means we’ve got old-school oil money flowing together with 21st-century tech money, a nearly bottomless source of funds on hand to advance this agenda.

What do TechBros and TheoBros have in common with Trump and his inner circle? All think their respective causes will be better served by ending American democracy. They want a strongman at top—their strongman. To hell with democracy, and with the rest of us.