Evangelicals shaken after synagogue shooting highlights their role in spreading white Christian nationalism

John Earnest, the shooter who targeted a synagogue in Poway, California, over Passover, was a devout Christian. He belonged to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and his dad was an elder.

In his Manifesto, Earnest said he wanted to kill Jews because it "would glorify God."

The Washington Post reports that some evangelical leaders are trying to figure out whether they've done enough to make it clear that violence against other religious groups is not acceptable.

“It certainly calls for a good amount of soul-searching,” Rev. Mika Edmondson, a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, told the Post.

Rev. Edmondson forced himself to read the Manifesto in the hopes of understanding what inspired him to commit the gruesome act.

“We can’t pretend as though we didn’t have some responsibility for him — he was radicalized into white nationalism from within the very midst of our church,” Edmondson told the Post.

Another Evangelical leader interviewed by the Post also called for a soul-searching, especially in regards to Islamophobia.

"When there’s an act of ‘radical Islamic terror’ — somebody claiming they’re motivated by their Islamic faith — if we’re going to call upon moderates in Muslim communities to condemn those things, we should do the same. I wholeheartedly, full stop, condemn white nationalism,” Chad Woolf, an evangelical pastor in Fort Myers, Fla., told the Post.

“We should recognize that somebody could grow up in an evangelical church, whose father was a leader, and could somehow conflate the teachings of Christianity and white nationalism. We should be very concerned about that.”

In response to the Post's reporting, the progressive religious platform Religion Dispatches urged Evangelicals to take action to condemn White Christian nationalism.

"Over the past few months, several of us at Religion Dispatches have tried to spark a conversation about the threat of white Christian nationalism, and why discussions about white nationalism must include its religious roots," Religion Dispatches writes.

Religion Dispatches notes that the shooter in the latest synagogue attack explicitly refers to Christian nationalism to justify his murderous attack.

"While some Christian leaders have pushed back on this, others are finally coming around to this reality, particularly in the wake of the synagogue attack last week in which a woman was killed by a white Christian nationalist who opened fire during Passover service," they write.

"As the Washington Post reported, the shooter, John Earnest appears to have written a seven-page letter spelling out his core beliefs: that Jewish people, guilty in his view of faults ranging from killing Jesus to controlling the media, deserved to die. That his intention to kill Jews would 'glorify God.'"

They point out that Earnest's delusional manifesto is hardly the first to reference some grand religious crusade.

RD calls on Evangelical leaders to accept responsibility and act accordingly.

"Taking ownership of an ideology that has spawned—and will continue to spawn—extremist groups or lone wolves might be the best to way to eradicate it," Religion Dispatches writes.

"Otherwise, white Christian leaders will continue to exist in denial about the way their racial and religious identities have contributed to an ideology bent on preserving privilege through violence."