‘It’s a Christian phrase’: Rev. Johnnie Moore ur…

Nearly a year ago this month, the phrase “Christ is King” became a source of division among Evangelicals and Christians in general following remarks from two staffers at the conservative news site The Daily Wire.

Now, almost one year to the day, another Daily Wire figure is among the authors of a new report warning that “extremist actors have co-opted Christian language” — specifically the phrase “Christ is King” — to advance what researchers say are “exclusionary ideologies.”

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a columnist and podcaster for Daily Wire, and the Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, released a 21-page report Thursday from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University, which warns that individual social media users and bot networks are co-opting a phrase the study’s authors acknowledge has been “central to the Christian faith for centuries” and is being manipulated online “by Neo-Nazi and other extremists to promote various forms of hatred, especially targeting Jews.”

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With a primary focus on Elon Musk’s social platform X, “Thy Name in Vain: How Online Extremists Hijacked ‘Christ is King’” documents what researchers say is a five-fold spike in mentions of “Christ is King” from 2021 through 2024, when, in March of that year, Daily Wire podcaster Andrew Klavan said the phrase was being used as an antisemitic attack in the wake of the outlet’s firing of commentator Candace Owens.

Acknowledging “Christ is King” has “deep theological roots in the Christian, but especially, Catholic tradition, deriving from various New Testament sources,” the report warns “extremists in America” have weaponized the phrase to “destabilize” the nation and “encourage hatred towards minorities.”

The report identifies a number of controversial — and some say antisemitic — social media influencers like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Jake Shields as serving to amplify “Christ is King,” in comparison with more benign use of the same phrase by podcaster and former U.S. Navy intel officer Jack Posobiec, Republican Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and conservative Christian influencer Mark Lutchman.

According to the report, nearly half of all X posts using the phrase “Christ is King” are “driven by figures promoting hateful — and especially antisemitic — narratives,” a conclusion which appears to link the intent of the phrase with the identity of the user rather than the language itself. Engagement with posts using the phrase soared around Easter 2024, with roughly 17% of all mentions “linked to hateful rhetoric,” the report found.

Using a customized large language model trained to “detect implicit hate speech against a variety of groups,” researchers say they found that in addition to the spike in use around Easter 2024, the overall semantic context in which “Christ is King” is employed “has become increasingly hateful” since at least 2021, with the monthly proportion of “hateful tweets reaching a historic maximum of 17.3% in May 2024,” the report states.

The findings are based on data analysis from researchers at NCRI, which used cutting-edge social media analysis and AI-driven language modeling to trace how the phrase “Christ is King” has been “systematically weaponized” online, according to the report.

As president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, Moore says the group’s interest in religious freedom issues drove their partnership with Rutgers University and NCRI after alarming trends were identified, prompting them to “join the effort to basically notify the Christian community that this is something to pay attention to.”

While deferring to the report’s statisticians for technical details, Moore told CP on Friday the research team used AI “in order to not only identify when something is harmful or not […] but also whether it’s artificial, whether it’s authentic or inauthentic.” This technology helped distinguish real from manipulative content, a distinction Moore calls critical in a “changing digital environment.”

Inauthentic speech, such as bot activity, can skew public discourse, Moore added, pointing to online reactions to the report. “There was an avalanche of antisemitic content,” with “at an absolute minimum 20 percent of the responses […] from a bot network or a series of bot networks,” he said. These bots, added Moore, had previously targeted figures like Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, indicating a broader pattern of interference.

Moore praised NCRI’s prior work identifying pro-Hamas content on TikTok following the October 7 attacks on Israel, as well as NCRI’s work uncovering links between “CCP affiliated organizations and some of the funding that was going toward the pro-Hamas protests on our college campuses,” which Moore said showcased their ability to trace digital trends and their sources.

But when it comes to questions about how many members of either the report’s research team or NCRI are professing Christians, Moore said he believes it’s “not relevant” to the validity of the report’s finding.

“To say that in order for research to be legitimate, in order to legitimately criticize Christians or Jews or anybody else, or Muslims, it has to be written by or researched by their respective faith group […],” said Moore. “I’m not saying that everybody that says that is, you know, is a bigot, but it’s sort of like, the fact that we even are asking those questions […].” 

Moore said there was very little interaction between himself and the NCRI research team. “Most of the researchers on the front of the report I didn’t interact with at all,” he said. “They’re just quietly laboring behind the scenes, crunching numbers, looking at data.”

The question of whether Christians were involved in the report’s findings is “not relevant from my point of view,” he added. Several of the report’s authors, noted Moore, are Jewish, a fact which Moore says has resulted in backlash on social media. 

“There’s several people online that, reading [the report authors’] last names, you would, you know, believe that they were Jewish by their last name and people [are] just attacking them because they’re Jewish,” he said. “It just sort of proved everything that we were saying, and I hope it fires up Christians to say, ‘We don’t want our faith used in this in this way, and especially now with this historic rise of antisemitism.’”

Above all else, Moore clarified that, in his view, the phrase “Christ is King” is not hateful.

“I certainly don’t believe that it’s antisemitic to say Christ is King or Jesus is Lord,” he said. “It’s a Christian phrase, but like all phrases, it can be used by people who hate others in a hateful way, and unfortunately, some very, very prominent figures chose to do that in the last year.”

In the run-up to Resurrection Sunday, the highest holy day on the Christian calendar, Moore encouraged believers to proclaim the truth of the “King of Kings” without reservation.

My whole call to action was my hope that many, many millions of Christians would actually say Christ is king … more than ever … as a means of, in effect, taking back the phrase from a small group of people that want to use it in a way that is targeting Jews,” he said. “I do hope that Catholics and Evangelicals this Easter post either Christ is King or Jesus is Lord … so loud and so frequent and so sincerely that these threats of hate become irrelevant.”