Writer and pastor Angela Denker investigates what's going on with young white men in America

Earlier this week, I shared my conversation with my friend Jeff Chu, whose book Good Soil is out today.

It’s a banner week for my writer/pastor friends, because Angela Denker, whose work I also refer to in The Exvangelicals, also has a new book out today: Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood. Our email conversation follows.

Sarah McCammon: Your book explores how white Christian boys and young men are being radicalized toward white supremacy and other extremist ideas - some of which are rooted in a far-right interpretation of Christianity. As you were talking with young men around the country, what patterns emerged in the ways they talked about themselves?

Angela Denker: One critical thing I want to point out is that radicalization sneaks up on them. Very rarely are these young men and boys seeking out white supremacist or violent content in explicit ways. Instead, they would often talk about watching people like Andrew Tate almost as a joke. They’d do it together in groups of friends and make fun of these hypermasculine influencers and other figures from the manosphere.

What happens, though, is that - as you know - so much of our current media landscape is driven by algorithms. Those algorithms don’t know that these young men are watching the videos as a joke. They just see the videos being watched over and over again, and so the algorithm keeps pushing more and more extreme, violent, right-wing content. I’ve witnessed this happen even firsthand with my own sons. And inevitably there comes a moment or a day when one of these boys is feeling down, left out, isolated. They don’t have their friends or family around them: maybe they just got cut from the team, made fun of by their friends, or experienced a relationship break up. What they do have in front of them is their phone, and suddenly these videos shift from something to be mocked to a source of identity and comfort and belonging.

We all - boys and young men included - have to work really hard in our current society to form community and lasting relationships. That’s especially true for boys and young men. But we still sort of teach that men don’t “need” relationships as much as girls and women do. So they’re left especially vulnerable to online radicalization.

SM: Did you find that radicalization is happening primarily online, in communities, or some combination? How do these spheres of influence intersect and interact with each other?

AD: Yeah, I’d say it is heavily weighted toward online. Because in-person interactions themselves weigh against extreme viewpoints and ideologies. For example, in the story I tell at the end of the book of a young man who was drawn into a white supremacist skinhead group, he left because of the in-person realities. He learned by hanging out with these young men that many of them were “going nowhere fast.” They were hanging around in dilapidated trailers, in and out of jail, heavily in debt, not successful in relationships with women. But online, influencers can fake wealth and popularity and image.

That being said, online presence absolutely influences in-person spheres of influence. Online success can translate into in-person success, especially in a church/Christian climate that’s rich with pastors and faith leaders who also function as social media influencers. Even sermons become packaged for online content. So most boys and young men see real-life examples of how an online life (especially for YouTubers) can translate into real-life success and popularity.

SM: You’re both a pastor and a journalist. How do you think churches contribute to radicalization, either directly or indirectly?

AD: Ooh, how long do you have for this one? So the bulk of my book is storytelling and qualitative interviewing with boys and young men around the country. And it begins with the story of white supremacist shooter Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black people at one of America’s most famous Black churches, Mother Emanuel, in Charleston, S.C. He killed them after spending an hour in Bible Study with them. It’s a horrific, horrific story that frames much of the problem I’m trying to tackle in this book.

But what a lot of people misunderstand about this story, is that they assume Roof was radicalized in a conservative Evangelical context (which, as you know, is certainly a place where a lot of young men are radicalized into patriarchal hierarchical ideologies). Instead, though, Roof was a member of an ELCA Lutheran congregation, which is the denomination where I have served as a pastor for the past 12 years. The ELCA is known for being progressive: we ordain women and LGBTQ pastors. A lot of progressive people think that their space and communities are immune from this kind of violence, white supremacist ideology, and radicalization. But we all know that’s not the case. Everyone has a story: a family member, a student, a member of their child’s sports team – someone who is experiencing this radicalization and violence. So part of the goal of my book is to help investigate the insidious ways that these ideas get into all sorts of communities, including progressive or mainline congregations.

A lot of it happens through, as I use in the title: “White Jesus.” Here’s a bit more about how I’m using that phrase:

… when I told people I was writing about boys and men and religion and radicalization, invariably, from New York City to the rural Midwest to Phoenix to South Carolina, they’d look at me with a little twinkle in their eye, and they’d ask: “Are you going to talk about White Jesus?”

As an ordained pastor with a master’s degree in divinity from a Christian seminary, talking about Jesus was kind of one of my specialties. But these folks weren’t asking me for a sermon, or for an explanation of a Bible verse, or even for a prayer. They wanted me to distinguish between the theological and historical brown-skinned Middle Eastern and Jewish Jesus, and the Jesus who is a creation of white American Christianity, a progenitor of the Christian industrial complex that brought us megachurches and celebrity preachers and New York Times bestsellers and the Prosperity Gospel and Donald Trump. White Jesus is to Jesus Christ as Instagram momfluencers and babies are to actual mothers and children. One is a brand meant to sell and control and influence and manipulate and create division and hierarchy. The other is complicated, humble, incarnate, vulnerable, persecuted, redeemed. …

So a lot of it has to do with how people are seeing God and Jesus in their churches, or, even if they’re not churchgoers and don’t consider themselves particularly religious - they’re still influenced by how God and Jesus are portrayed in popular American culture and politics. Overwhelmingly that depiction is of an authoritarian, hypermasculine, demanding, angry, kingly, white, God/Jesus.

And of course I cover the greatest hits of Christian leaders who teach really strict gender roles: Mark Driscoll, whose church I visit, John Piper, Doug Wilson, Sean Feucht, John Eldredge … sort of the greatest hits of the Christian manosphere: much of the groundwork laid of course for this work by Kristin Du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne …

SM: What do you say to religious leaders who feel uncomfortable speaking about issues from the pulpit that they may fear will be polarizing or generate controversy within their congregations?

AD: I think we have to stop talking about polarization as though polarization and “division” are the scariest and most dangerous things we’re facing right now. I would also remind people of Jesus’ words from Matthew 10:34-39:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

I understand that’s a tough calling; believe me, as someone who has many people in my own family who have been longtime Trump supporters. I will say though that it’s important to see Jesus’ true example in this sense, and our call as pastors is not to comfort or complacency but instead to defend the gospel and preach the truth.

I will also say that I have spent the majority of my career in politically conservative congregations and contexts. People appreciate honesty and authenticity. Even if they disagree with you, they don’t want to hear platitudes or have you cover up your true feelings. They want to be trusted with the truth, and they want you to lead with the words of Jesus. You will likely upset some people – but also I always find that there are many quiet people who are immensely grateful you’re speaking up for them. It’s those quiet people, people who have been hurt often by right-wing policies that harm the vulnerable, who drift away when we fail to preach justice-based sermons and lead with a mind toward telling the truth.

Much has been made of the fact that women are making tremendous gains in education, the workplace, and coming closer to closing the income gap - even as women still lag behind men in many top leadership positions. How much do you think the rapidly changing societal expectations for men and women have contributed to some young men feeling depressed and aimless, and perhaps becoming susceptible to extremist ideas?

Yeah, I definitely see this with my own sons and their experiences in public school - and I saw it in my book research and especially conversations with educators and faith leaders as well. I notice even as I begin speaking more about this book that we have a tendency in more progressive spaces to be really hesitant to talk about white men and boys at all. And as a feminist - I get it! They’ve had their turn, as you say … and at the same time this inability to even talk about what’s happening among white men and boys has created this vacuum space, where the place they then go for resources and community and belonging is the right-wing manosphere, right-wing Christian extremism and fundamentalism, even white supremacist spaces.

We are lagging behind when it comes to teaching a new and evolved masculinity alongside a new and evolved femininity. We do need, as Richard Reeves writes about in Of Boys and Men, a focus on bringing men in to caring professions. We need to continually teach boys that empathy is a strength for them. There’s no shame in emotions. That’s huge. But ultimately I don’t think we really change this with policy; I think it happens most often in relationships, in families, at a really critical level, in faith communities, too.

SM: You, like me, are a mother of boys. You write that your proximity to young white men, including your sons, is one of the reasons you wanted to explore the ways they’re being influenced by radical ideas, particularly online. There’s a lot to worry about, but you think about the future for young men like our sons, what gives you hope?

AD: I mean, honestly, my sons give me hope - and hearing from other parents and grandparents about the young men and boys in their lives gives me hope as well. My husband gives me hope! We met when I was 19, and he grew up in Missouri in a very conservative environment. As an engineer, he works in a male-dominated field. And in recent years, he has experienced a lot of tragedy and death in his family. In processing those emotions, instead of shutting off or being ashamed - he has really taken these huge steps to address his own emotions and get comfortable in them. Not that it has been easy, but I see our boys watching him do that - and watching him acknowledge the messages he has internalized that have done him a disservice, like believing that having empathy is weak. I watch him instead trying to embrace his own empathetic side: even in the workplace in mentoring young engineers, in coaching basketball for our kids - and in being willing to listen when I point out family dynamics that lift up a gender hierarchy that isn’t helpful for anyone.

Ultimately too I’m a Lutheran pastor from the Upper Midwest, and so I root my hope in the grief and death of the theology of the cross: that often when things seem the most difficult and unrelenting, that’s when grace breaks through and hope is born anew. So I carry that hope, burnished on the cross, into this really perilous moment in America, and I cling onto it when it comes to my boys, too.

Rev. Angela Denker is an ELCA Lutheran pastor and veteran journalist. Her first book, Red State Christians, was the 2019 Silver Foreword Indies award-winner for political and social sciences. She is a columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune and has written for many publications, including Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, and FORTUNE magazine, and has appeared on CNN, BBC, SkyNews, and NPR to share her research on politics and Christian Nationalism in the U.S. Pastor Angela lives with her husband, Ben, and two sons in Minneapolis, where she is a sought-after speaker on Christian Nationalism and its theological and cultural roots. She also serves Lake Nokomis Lutheran Church in Minneapolis as Pastor of Visitation and Public Theology. You can read more of her work on Christian Nationalism, American culture, social issues, journalism, and parenting on her Substack, I'm Listening.

Pastor Angela's new book, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, is out on March 25, 2025 and available here.