Pastor Joel Webbon is a Texas-based Christian nationalist pastor and online influencer. He tends to court controversy, previously claiming women’s suffrage “stole” half of his voting power, that only Christians should be able to hold public office in the U.S., and that physical abuse is not a biblically justifiable reason for divorce.
His latest controversy?
Webbon says despite the fact that the Bible praises celibacy and even considers it more righteous than marriage, he’d like to see the church starve older, unmarried women if they fall on hard times.
Webbon released a video of himself talking about older women who have never married or had kids. In the clip he imagines a woman “who is elderly, but she chose by her own volition because she hates the patriarchy and she hates Christ and she hates traditional marriage and all these different things. She chose never to marry. She’s 65 years old with blue or purple hair. She has no children not because she couldn’t conceive, but because she was on SSRIs and birth control and all these things her entire life. And of her own volition, she hated children, refused to have them.” He says if this woman falls on hard times and there are no longer government programs to help the poor, something he predicts will happen, then the response of the church should be ruthless indifference, or even glee.
He says, “The church needs to be able to look at her and say, ‘You starve. You starve. Glory be to God. You starve.’”
Webbon is the senior pastor of Covenant Bible Church in the Austin area and runs Right Response Ministries, a large online platform. He frames the whole thing as a test of whether women lived up to his standard: married, subservient, and having children, and says the church should withhold help from those who didn’t.
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