'No Hate Like Christian Love'; A Look at Efforts to Build a Christian Nationalist Community in Jackson County, Tennessee
Podcasters Andrew Isker and C.Jay Engel insist their calls to "remigrate" tens of millions of immigrants who came into the country legally is "love," not hate.
This post is part of a continuing series that explains how I began this unexpected journey into the world of hate. I hope you will find this publication to be part of an important conversation and will spread the word!
“There is no hate like Christian love.”
That adage came to mind recently as I was scrolling through the X timelines of Andrew Isker and C.Jay Engel, co-hosts of what Isker has described as the “Number One Christian Nationalist Podcast in the World.”
As my investigation first revealed, the two far-right figures moved to rural Jackson County, Tennessee, in late 2024 as part of a well-financed effort to establish an “aligned community” of people who look and think like them. The county seat of Gainesboro is located about 90 minutes northeast of Nashville.
"We're building a town, right? We're building a community there,” Isker declared.
Engel agreed.
“There's an imperative for like-minded Christians to gather and fight with us.”
By their own admissions, Isker and Engel want to turn back the clock — ”repeal the 20th century,” as they describe their vision — to a time when America was less brown, before the civil rights movement “ruined everything.”
All in the name of God.
Ironically, neither talks much about the red-letter words of Jesus.
Nor do they spend much time talking about the need for their Christian nation to feed the hungry, care for the sick, or provide refuge for the stranger.
Instead, in Isker’s words, they focus on their desire for the government to be “the sword” for “avenging wrath on those who do evil.”
Put simply, they want to use the power of government to impose their views about what it means to be a Christian upon the rest of America—even if that requires abandoning democracy as we know it.
As religious scholar Dr. Bradley Onishi recently told me, “When you start paying attention, something really weird starts to happen—and that is that Christian nationalists love to quote Paul against Jesus, and they love to quote the Hebrew Bible, especially the war books, the books of ancient law. So that could be Leviticus or Exodus or Deuteronomy. That could be Joshua.”
Onishi is the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next and the forthcoming book American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into A Monarchy. (You can watch my interview with Onishi in a future post.)
“There’s almost this sense of like, we’ve got to quote the Bible despite Jesus, because if we just quoted the Beatitudes, the entire Sermon on the Mount, the parables, we could not find the militaristic, xenophobic worldview that we want to uphold,” Onishi continued.
“And so quoting Jesus is often the last thing on their mind, except for when Jesus is like, turning over the tables in the temple or things like that.
Such notions, however, appear to be foreign to Isker and Engel who see themselves at the vanguard of an effort to push America to the far, far right.
“My job is to normalize dissident right-wing talking points to the normies,” Engel wrote in a post on X. “This is the function of the vanguard; this is the strategy of instilling a counter-revolutionary ethos into Middle America.
“We will tear off Liberal scales from their eyes and radicalize Main Street.”
Engel, for example, favors re-criminalizing homosexuality, celebrating centuries-old practices that proscribed castration as a punishment. Both would take away the right of women to vote. Isker would also take away the rights of Jews to vote and to hold office because “this country belongs to Jesus.”
Just as Adolf Hitler declared that “Germany is for Germans,” Engel fully embraces the notion that “America is for Americans.”
He defines “Heritage Americans” as people of white European descent, with an allowance for the descendants of slaves. Even then, it’s contingent on his demand that they should not “leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time.”
He declares that “the majority of blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards.” Likewise, he believes Jews “have largely operated at odds with the Old American way of life.” He declares Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, a US-born Indian-American, unfit to hold office in America. And he routinely calls for the “remigration”—a term originally popularized by European neo-Nazis—of tens of millions of immigrants who came into this country legally over the last 60 years.
“Just say you hate brown folk, CJ,” an anonymous account posted on X.
Engel responded, “It’s not hate that drives us, but love for our country.”
And, if you want to call him racist, Engel has a “sticks and stones” response.
“Calling things racist doesn’t work anymore dude,” he tweeted at Mehdi Hasan. “Westerners want their nations back, no matter the smear terms.”
Similarly, Isker repeatedly calls for “total remigration”—a term that was originally popularized by European neo-Nazis.
The Reformed pastor was also horrified when the father of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf told reporters that he forgave the Black teen, Karmelo Anthony, who stabbed his son to death in April 2025.
“You cannot ‘forgive’ someone who hasn’t asked for forgiveness,” Isker immediately tweeted in response to the father’s act of forgiveness. “To react this way after the life of your child — who was just about to embark upon manhood — was savagely snuffed out fills me with rage.”
In an Olympics-worthy act of interpretive gymnastics, Isker argues that Jesus’ act of forgiveness on the cross—”Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”—was actually NOT an act of forgiveness.
“Jesus did not forgive them or declare them forgiven. He asked for them to be forgiven,” Isker tweeted.
Yet, when Erika Kirk announced that she had forgiven the young, white man who assassinated Charlie Kirk, Isker was at first silent.
And when he did finally offer a response, the pastor was subdued in his tone.
“While it was uncouth and in very poor taste to criticize her at the time, … enough [time] has passed to admit it really was a huge mistake for her to publicly ‘forgive’ Tyler Robinson,” Isker eventually posted.
He was not, however, “filled with rage.”
Take a look at my original report
Much more to come on this later!
What do you think?
Always coming away with important things from these, thanks Phil.