In Donald Trump’s USA, male hybrid religious communities of parishes and the internet have a catalytic effect on political life. In internet slang, they are called by wordplays with the second component “bro” from brother, which denotes the male groups that develop in the androspheres of the internet, promoting a pompous culture of hyper-manliness. If the “tech-bros” are the macho tycoons of technology, the most influential are the “Theobros”: these are influencers from mainly evangelical churches, often pastors who use online platforms to defend a conservative nationalist Christianity.
However, the most emblematic proponent of the ideas of the god-bros is a Roman Catholic, the US Vice President JD Vance. The connections of the Theobros with Roman Catholics, while relatively atrophic at the low level of the “grassroots” movements in vestries and the Internet, are significant at the high level of funding and political connections.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the data management company Palantir, who was Vance’s ideological mentor and funded his 2012 Senate campaign with more than $10 million, is considered a key intermediary. Vance expresses the Theobros’ ideal of an America that belongs to Christians, preferably whites. After all, his best-selling biography “Hillbilly Song” extensively describes the ideal of a patriarchal America. Vance, a bearded man in nice suits, as the Theobros often are, is considered by them to be a Christian prince who can rule America. The Theobros also fondly remember that Vance had an online “beef” with Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Papa Leo, on the issue of immigrants. While, as a typical Theobro, Vance had argued that we love strangers only after we have first loved our family and nation, the pope had sought to explain this as a different understanding of Christian love of neighbor. Vance thus gained points among evangelicals who see him as a possible successor to Trump for a nationalist version of Catholicism.
Some Theobros advocate an updated form of millenarianism according to which the war against the alleged excesses of liberalism will hasten the return of Jesus. This line of thought is called “accelerationism” in the sense that both the excess of evil and its counteraction will bring the end closer. Steven Wolf’s work “The Case for Christian Nationalism” (2022) has been influential, which argues that the idea of a rooted American nation that is not a melting pot of cultures. A fundamental demand is “Christian masculinity” and “biblical airmanship”. According to Theobros, God created men to be leaders, aggressive and dangerous in order to protect families and advance the nation with their God-given testosterone. Women are always defined as the opposite of men.
“the man penetrates, the woman surrenders”
“The sexual act is not an equalizing pleasure. The man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, sows. The woman surrenders and accepts.” we read in Douglas Wilson’s emblematic work Fidelity: How to Be a One Woman Man” (2012). To the same YouTuber we owe the word “lesbian” for women – elders of progressive Protestant denominations as well as the idea of having “household votes” i.e. votes of children controlled by their parents, in order to promote polygamy, a concept that Vance finds interesting. Podcaster Joel Web-Bond owns the term “trash world” for liberal democracy, while YouTubers such as Adrio Iske and Brian Sauve criticize single women as cat moms because they supposedly prefer walking and loving animals to procreation.
The glue between Theobros and Techbros is a hatred of liberal democracy, which is seen as no longer serving the purposes of the United States. Even the homogeneity of the nation-state is not seen as an end in itself, as the creation of Christian Enclaves within American territory is promoted as a model of Christian society. The New Founding seeks to rebuild America by transforming lands in Appalachia into isolated Christian communities of “simple faith, crime-free countryside, and rainbow flags.”
