‘Disciples of White Jesus,’ Disciples of Trump

For her new book Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood (Broadleaf Books, 2025), Denker again traversed the country. This time she was investigating the radicalization of white Christian American men and boys.

Her journey begins at Mother Emanuel, the African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 nine Black parishioners were shot and killed during a bible study. The shooter, a 21-year-old white supremacist, was on the member rolls of a local ELCA congregation (the same denomination as Denker), forcing Denker (and readers in turn) to reckon with the reality that the ideologies of the most radicalized white supremacists may be closer to home than they appear.

Denker spoke with Barn Raiser about her travels, her new book’s relevance in light of recent religious-political violence in her current hometown of Minneapolis, and what it means under the second Trump administration.

How did your in-depth field research—even the act of driving across rural parts of the country—contribute to your overall works?

Especially in Red State Christians, the travel was vital. But more important than travel is the fact that I live in a culture that is shaped by Trumpism and White Christian Nationalism. From 2019-2023, I was serving as solo pastor of an ELCA congregation in rural McLeod County, Minnesota. This meant that multiple times per week I was driving 60 miles west from my home in Minneapolis to a county where 66.8% of people voted for Trump in 2020. I was struck by the way that Trump signs did not come down after the 2020 election as they had in elections past.

Even since leaving that call in 2023, I have continued to present and preach in churches across the rural Midwest, including a large recent event in the Fargo-Moorhead area. These are communities that I love, are filled with people I love, and in many cases are the same communities where my grandparents and great-grandparents grew up.

There has been marked change in the overall mood of these communities from my initial research in 2018. I noted this time the lack of Trump signs, and also I became accustomed to the rhythm of farm life, from planting to harvest season, and the pressures on farmers, with Trump’s tariffs making life difficult for Midwestern soybean farmers. I also witnessed an increasing sense of unease and lack of safety in rural communities. I had a sense that people were increasingly on edge, scared, frustrated and sometimes despairing.

What do you think Trump initially offered to voters in rural communities that Democrats couldn’t in 2016 and again in 2024?

Trump appealed to a nihilistic voter by saying—in a racially coded way: “Everybody’s lying. Everybody’s corrupt. I’m at least gonna offer you to be part of my team, if you’re white.” He also appealed to this sense of wealth. For decades, he has represented wealth in America. When I was growing up, he was in the film “The Little Rascals” as the example of wealth. There’s this economic appeal, and also this appeal to who “a real American” is: “It’s you, if you are a white rural person.” Trump told them who they were, and that it was a good thing. And they didn’t have to examine themselves at all.

You deal with white supremacy in Disciples of White Jesus, both the overt kind you would find in a whites-only church in Murdock, Minnesota, and the more latent kind that can coexist with Midwestern niceness amongst liberals in urban places. How has the setting of the Midwest shaped white supremacy, both the overt kind and the latent kind?

For a long time, people here in Minnesota would say, “How could we be racist? We just don’t have any Black people here.”

Part of the reason you see this attraction to Trump is that rural areas in the Midwest are becoming less white for the first time in a long time_, with the influx of Hispanic Americans and East African immigrants. So people are thinking, “Well, wait a minute, we thought that this was ours.”

There is also so much disdain amongst educated, prominent, powerful, urban white folks towards other Americans. It’s prejudice, the sense that “Why won’t these idiots just get in line? Why don’t they just do what they’re supposed to do?”

There’s really a lack of listening to and understanding of one another. Those are the same people who are against any sort of reform in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has to be aware of the elements within it that seek to protect the powerful because it leads to a reaction against Democrats and pushes people into Trumpism, ironically.

Can you speak to the ideal of “white Jesus” in the book’s title and what this messianism means for the violent and machismo rhetoric we see in Christian Nationalism nowadays?

I really saw this in the transition from the first Trump administration to the second. The idol of white Christian Nationalism itself shifted from a general idolatry of America (lots of patriotic imagery, flags) to an idol that became increasingly gendered, tied to the idea of an authoritarian strongman and explicitly connected to violence and weapons.

We see this in a few key figures. There’s Trump himself, from the images that show him almost merging into Jesus in the courtroom to Trump’s increasingly Messianic language in the weeks following the 2024 assassination attempts.

There’s Pete Hegseth, who has Christian crusader tattoos and is obsessed with making the image of the military increasingly violent, masculine, white.

And there’s J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson, whose obsession with transgender people betrays the way in which they see God as increasingly represented by a specific kind of “masculine” white man.

In the book, you write about a young white man’s experience in the highly regimented culture and tradition of white masculine identity at Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. You write that amidst a global pandemic, rampant political polarization, broadening discourse on race, sexuality and gender, the military school is “offering certainty, which might seem compelling, like a life raft in the midst of a swirling sea.” Can you say more about this search for certainty?

I was thinking about this search for certainty in the stories coming out of the Annunciation shooting [in August when a 23-year-old opened fire on parish school students attending mass at the Catholic church in Minneapolis]. One of the first pieces of news to come out was that the shooter’s parents had signed a name change, so I saw a lot of evangelical Christian responses after the shooting with a very simplistic narrative: “This person, this shooter needed traditional parents who were grounded in the Bible, and none of this woke ideology.”

However, as more reporting came out—including the Star Tribune article about the family—it became clear that the parents were both very conservative Catholics. And it seems that the shooter had recanted their identity as transgender in the years before the shooting. Their most recent employers knew them as using he/him pronouns and the shooter wrote that they were glad that they could connect with their dad and brothers about guns.

So this family seems to represent everything that evangelical megachurches said would save people. In the wake of this shooting, I saw so many people I knew who would consider themselves conservative Christians saying, “Okay, I’m going to raise my children according to their gender they were born in. And this is going to protect my family somehow.”

And it’s just not true. It’s lies. But this messaging—for churches, for Internet personalities—is what people think is going to either make them money or gain them more followers. They don’t really care about the truth, clearly. Because they don’t take responsibility when it’s wrong.

Disciples of White Jesus came out in March 2025 and since its publication there have been multiple acts of political violence in Minneapolis involving Christianity in different and complicated ways. After researching and writing about political and religious radicalization for Disciples of White Jesus, do you see themes from the book echoed in these recent instances of violence?

In the Melissa Hortman shooting [in which the alleged 58-year-old male gunman killed Hortman, the speaker emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives and her husband Mark Hortman, and attempted to murder Minnesota State Sen. John Hoffman, his wife and their daughter], we have a clear instance of evangelical charismatic Christianity, with some overlap with the Seven Mountains Mandate, [which calls on Christians to “take dominion,” over the seven key areas of culture: religion, family, education, government, media, business and the arts].

And then in this Annunciation shooting, we see an overlap with traditional Catholicism. The Star Tribune article has a photo of the shooter’s mom at an abortion protest with her child carrying a very large crucifix. In both cases, we see the effects of a version of masculinity depicted in churches as being very violent. And we see the response from shooters—both of whom were raised as white Christian boys in America.

High school classmates of the Annunciation shooter said in interviews that when the shooter began identifying as female, there was more openness, there was more friendship, there was less of the odd behavior.

That was really sad to read, because there had been so much turmoil in the shooter’s life—and such a seeming lack of identity—that when that identity seemed to be something that brought some positive relationships, that didn’t seem to last. And we don’t know why.

What is the role of the Internet, where white nationalist and Christian nationalist ideologies are allowed to fester unchecked? What is the role of established religious communities in relation to this?

Certainly you have to look at the profit motive for large social media and tech companies to foment the unchecked spread of extremist, white nationalist and Christian nationalist ideas online. Many studies have shown that people are increasingly funneled into extreme corners of the internet, and a majority of those extreme corners are right-wing.

For social media and tech companies, there isn’t necessarily an ideological motivation here, although the white men leading these companies have been spreading ideas that are increasingly Christian Nationalist and white nationalist [see this article on Peter Thiel and this one on the rise of right-wing Christianity in Silicon Valley].

Instead, the main motivation for these social media companies and algorithm writers is to make money. And the way they do that is by keeping people on social media platforms for longer and longer amounts of time. The best way to do that is to funnel them into addictive and radicalized, far-right content. There’s also an important component here to look at with the rise of AI and the way that young men in particular are turning to AI chat bots to address real mental health and identity questions, longing for relationship and connection. The case of Adam Raine in particular is a tragic example. [His parents are suing Open AI, charging that the company’s AI program, Chat GPT, helped their 16-year-old son commit suicide by hanging.]

The way that you address this problem within established religious communities and tight-knit communities is by prioritizing the role of real, human relationships. This means inviting young people out to grab a coffee. Make space for real conversations and time to connect.

I learned this when I was teaching confirmation at a rural congregation. I really needed to make space for unstructured conversation time and relationship building. Once they learned to trust each other, that’s when we could really work on building faith together. When people have strong real-life relationships and connections, the role of the Internet and social media becomes much less central to their identity.

You mentioned that in both recent Minneapolis shootings, the perpetrators were raised as white Christian men and boys. A major theme of Disciples of White Jesus is reckoning with the reality that white Christian men and boys are at once dangerous and hurting. How did your research lead you to that?

In the column I wrote after the Annunciation shooting, I went back to the quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about the spiral of violence:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that.

What’s the other option?

I saw state legislators from Minnesota sharing things like, “Oh, well, we just need to like, pray more.”

They’re using the language of prayer, but it’s inauthentic. I don’t believe that every night they’re sitting there praying for the victims of the shooting. Because if they were praying, they would also be listening to God. And God is very clear about condemning deadly weapons and the spilling of blood.

When those in power don’t take action to preserve human life, they’re both not doing anything, and they’re making a mockery of prayer, because they’re not really praying.

Betsy FroilandMore by this author →

Betsy Froiland is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer. Her work focuses on rural faith communities and is featured in the Daily Yonder.