Post-Zionist Christian Nationalism

“They’re encouraging the lawless and the lawbreakers,” said a clearly exasperated Joe Rigney on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s breakout YouTube show earlier this year. Rigney, an influential American evangelical author and pastor, was brought on the show, to discuss the events in icy Minneapolis directly after Carlson explained that the racist and anti-immigrant Great Replacement Theory is real.

Rigney may be unfamiliar to many Americans, but he’s an increasingly influential voice amongst evangelical Christians and their clergy leadership. And while he matches some of the more authoritarian tendencies offered by much of the Christian Right, he steps beyond them in his explicit Christian nationalism and his condemnation of empathy for the oppressed. 

But what separates him even further, and what likely brought him to Carlson’s attention, is that he strays from the Christian Zionism so often subscribed to by American evangelicals, instead offering his own brand of far-right theocracy as a model for a Republican base rapidly turning to conspiracy theories, abandoning their previous obsessions with Israel, and more willing to see Jews as just as alien as they now see non-white immigrants. 

For two months, Minneapolis neighborhoods faced a flood of ICE agents, now numbering several times the total count of police in the Twin Cities, which resulted in the executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and galvanized a grassroots movement against deportations. 

On January 18, in one of the hundreds of protest actions, activists entered Rigney’s former congregation, the Cities Church in St. Paul, during its Sunday service. Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the “four Black women activists and organizers,” who led the protest, told the congregation:

David Easterwood is a pastor here. He is also the director of the field office for ICE in St. Paul. So, someone who claims to worship God, teaching people in this church about God, is out there overseeing ICE agents.

Dozens of activists then marched through the pews chanting “ICE out!” while the pastor, Jonathan Parnell, yelled “shame on you” from the stage.

“Encouraging this kind of conduct rather than being, as the Bible says they ought to be, a terror to evil conduct,” said Rigney, returning to his theological convictions on punishment. “There is a deep sickness in our culture...it is spiritual in nature.”

Compassion is Sinful

An authoritarian Christian nationalist, Rigney is best known for his 2025 book, The Sin of Empathy, which contends that well-meaning Christians have been led astray out of their desire to connect with the pain of others. Should anyone fail to get the point, the cover features a childlike cloud embracing a bomb, the fuse already lit.

Rigney teaches that empathy is not itself a sign of moral uprightness, but a volatile human (read: fallible) impulse that bypasses reason and moral law, which makes it susceptible to manipulation. Due to its inherent flaws, empathy makes a person selective as, for example, when these activists acted out of concern for immigrants being arrested and deported by ICE rather than for the law-abiding, civilized parishioners of his former congregation. This is how he explains the rise of ‘wokeness’ in American public life, and the church, a psychological disturbance that allows your feelings to override God's ethical call and something he publicly derided in his former role as president of St. Paul’s Bethlehem College. 

According to Rigney, empathy has replaced God's sovereign authority in America; God tells you what’s right, not your bleeding heart. He believes that hierarchy and order have collapsed, God has left our hearts, and society has wandered into fornication, “feminization,” and moral rot. Rigney's answer is what he calls "Biblical love," a combination of tough love parenting and the strict enforcement of moral codes. 

This love is built on the healing power of pain, exclusion, and suffering, a holy condition modeled by Jesus. In Rigney’s formulation the empathy driving the activism in Minneapolis undermines borders, just as empathy for LGBTQ people has destroyed the American family. Such arguments, made by Rigney and others, offer conservative Christians, some of whom were not fully on board with a draconian immigration policy, a biblical justification for denying immigrants empathy just as they’re being hunted down, kidnapped, abused, detained, and deported.

Rigney’s book has been incredibly influential with evangelical leadership and he’s become a celebrity to a patriarchal Christian world desperately seeking biblical justification for political cruelty. Rigney was the President of the Bethlehem College and Seminary, which is a flagship institution for Reformed evangelicalism, one of the more conservative branches. Rigney was ultimately removed from the school out of what appears to be fear that his Christian nationalist politics (which the Baptist News Service called it, “[the] eventual Christianization of all of society, including the civil government”) and beliefs on infant baptism were threatening to the school’s direction.

But seminary students also said that Rigney’s ideas about empathy shifted the school’s response to things like claims of abuse and discussions of racism, and multiple pastors who were often seen as particularly compassionate resigned in short order as debates over the appropriate role of empathy became the heart of the conflict within the school. Rigney’s language about “untethered empathy” quickly became the language for how issues of social justice were defused in church circles, with claims of unchecked empathy becoming the Biblically sound version tarnishing allegations as simple “wokeness.” Rigney also courted controversy due to his relationship with Doug Wilson, a far-right pastor known for racist and homophobic views, but it has also brought him into Wilson's network of emerging pastors that are seeding congregations around the country. 

Rigney's The Sin of Empathy became one of the most discussed Christian texts of the year and has been cited frequently as in line with what many Christian pastors believe, and are preaching from the pulpit. His criticism of empathy has begun to sprout up around the Christian podcast and blogosphere, an idea he had been discussing at conferences and Christian gatherings, not to mention in their school system, for years before the book was finally published. And Rigney's influence is also measurable by the backlash he has wrought, where concern over donors, debates between denominations, and rebuttals from pastors make an impact. 

Evangelicalism After Christian Zionism

Part of what has allowed Rigney to gain this sphere of influence is that he presents himself as a polite and cordial poster boy for a new kind of congregation, one that has little interest in feeding the hungry, welcoming diverse communities, or letting Israel guide their foreign policy. Rigney has offered the increasingly volatile Christian American family a permission structure that validates excluding queer family members and beating antiracist protesters as the only option for moral certitude.   Spare the rod, spoil the child.

But part of why Rigney has a prime role, and why he was likely invited to appear on Carlson’s show, is that he’s a perfect fit for congregations increasingly conflicted about the State of Israel. In the United States, evangelical Christians have matched American Jews in feelings of support for Israel, and the largest Zionist organizations in the country are Christian Zionist groups like Christians United For Israel (CUFI). But this has changed as “America First” nationalism undermines international alliances and antisemitic conspiracy theories, popularized in the very online world of MAGA politics, having repositioned Jewish collectivities as inherently malevolent and corrosive to Christian interests. This is happening at a moment when very legitimate questions are being asked about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a reality that fits better in the conspiratorial worldview offered by Carlson and Candace Owens than the historically hawkish foreign policy of figures like Ted Cruz.

As a true supersessionist Rigney believes that the church has theologically replaced Israel (i.e. the Jewish people) as the keepers of God's covenant and that Jews need to seek Christ's salvation. Recently, in a heated exchange he tweeted that I “should become a true Jew by trusting in Jesus.” In 2024 Rigney participated in a grossly antisemitic panel on “Jewish Influence in our politics,” during which Jews are described as usurers and pornographers, “modern Jewish culture” is labeled “wicked” and “evil,” and that a powerful Zionist lobby embeds its ideas into Christian culture. Within that setting, Rigney makes clear that he does not side with Christian Zionist eschatology and asserts that “the promises to Abraham are ours.” For Rigney, Christians are the true Israel, putting him at odds with the pro-Israel consensus amongst previous Republican leadership.

For an evangelical world looking to abandon the ecumenism that has for so long modulated their theological response to Jews and who now have a profoundly myopic American nationalist politics forced to justify the brutal ICE raids that are reshaping the country, Rigney’s theology of cruelty has created a common language that will pay dividends as they try to shred the remaining sentimentality from religious life and reframe all non-Christians as spiritual vagabonds.

Rigney went to X to call the city’s leadership communists who use Christians as “human shields,” a tactic meant to demonize opponents and use his anti-empathy polemics as a permission structure to treat leftist protesters as Amalek, the historic enemy of the Israelite people he now believes evangelical Christians are the descendants of.

“Of course, for people who abort their children in utero and trans their kids in adolescence, it’s no surprise that they would hide behind them in order to keep political power,” says Rigney. And, from the string of statements coming from the White House and the federal government, it looks like our country’s leadership agrees.