Christian nationalist Joel Webbon, the racist, antisemitic, and deeply misogynistic theocratic fascist pastor who runs Right Response Ministries, used a recent episode of his podcast to urge his fellow right-wing Christians to use the word "faggot" in their battle against LGBTQ rights.
"Homosexuality is degenerate," Webbon said. "It is bad for the populace. It's bad for society. It's been incredibly harmful. We've seen a full court press against our own children as the sacrificial lamb in order to appease older gay men and make them feel better about themselves. It's wicked. It's predatory. And I think it is appropriate for us to be able to call it what it is and say, 'Wait a second, this is perverse, it's wicked, it's faggotry, and it needs to stop.'"
"Yes, you can use that word on occasion, as I just did, to say, 'No, we're not going to tolerate faggotry with our children. Cut it out. Stop it. Say Christ is Lord,'" he continued. "I don't think that it's a sin to say faggot in its proper context. I think you can be a Christian who fears the Lord and say, 'Enough is enough.'"
"You've got the San Francisco Gay Choir a couple years ago writing songs—and it was not a joke—[singing,] 'We'll convert your children,'" Webbon added. "No, stop it, faggots. No, you will not convert my children. You're degenerates, you're predators, and you're evil. In the name of Jesus Christ, stop it. Back into the shadows."
"Every society will have a closet and there will either be Christian children hiding in that closet with their parents, ostracized from society, or you will have sexual degenerates in that closet," he said. "Call me a radical [but] I think the sexual degenerates are the ones, the members of society, that should be in the closet, not Christian families and their children."
The fact that Webbon holds such views is not a surprise given that he is a theocratic fascist who believes that the American people are too degenerate, stupid, and cowardly to abide by the Constitution and must therefore be governed by a Christian dictator. This dictator, Webbon believes, must “rule with an iron fist” and force everyone to, at the very least, “pretend to be Christian.”
Under his preferred form of Christian nationalist theocracy, Webbon wants to see the Apostles’ Creed added to the Constitution; abortion, pornography, no-fault divorce, in vitro fertilization, and birth control outlawed; non-Christians kept out of his neighborhood and out of public office; Catholics relegated to second-class citizenship; immigrants shot for trying to enter the country; adulterers put to death; and women banned from voting and publicly executed for making false claims of sexual assault.
In 2023, Webbon was among the contributors to a document called “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel.” Drafted by Christian nationalists like Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, former Trump administration official William Wolfe, and others, the document declared that the United States must formally “acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in all its laws, “abolish abortion,” outlaw marriage equality, and “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities who present a grave threat to civilization.” Wolfe is a close associate of OMB Director Russ Vought, a proponent of Christian nationalism who openly declared his intention to put federal bureaucrats "in trauma."
In addition to serving as pastor at Covenant Bible Church in Texas, Webbon is also the founder of Right Response Ministries, through which he organizes events like the upcoming “Christ Is King: How To Defeat Trashworld” conference that is scheduled to feature a variety of far-right Christian nationalist activists like Deevers, Steve Deace, Stephen Wolfe, Auron MacIntyre, Andrew Isker, and others.
