Tucker Carlson's Jihad

(and an interview with an Israeli Jewish pastor)

For years, Tucker Carlson described himself as an Episcopalian and infrequent church attender. That changed in 2023, when the superstar podcaster began prefacing much of his commentary with the declaration “as a Christian.” According to Tucker, he began to read the Bible all the way through for the first time in 2023, after he says he was “physically mauled” by a demon while in bed with his wife and four dogs.

I want to note up front that I followed Tucker’s work for years and enjoyed (and reviewed) his books for conservative publications. I agree with him on many issues, most notably his strong pro-life stance. I’ve met him before, and I found him warm and thoughtful—he even glanced at my press nametag to sign his book to me personally, which many famous figures wouldn’t think to do when talking to a nobody. But over the last few years, Tucker’s trajectory has changed.

Tucker now routinely insists that his views are fundamentally Christian views and implies that those who disagree with his perspective on Israel and other issues are heretical. Tucker is a brilliant communicator and debater, and he has an audience of tens of millions—and he now regularly exposits on theories ranging from deals between demons and the U.S. government to other spiritual claims.

There is one problem that makes Tucker Carlson very, very dangerous for the Christians who listen to him: He has become a conscious and deliberate liar. Tucker has not only lied about Christian persecution; he has lied about the Bible—and he has gone so far as to blasphemously accuse God of ordering genocide.

I want to emphasize here that I am not referring to any of Tucker’s political beliefs on “America First,” on economics, on the Middle East, or even his genuinely strange theories about demons (although I’ve got plenty of questions about those). I am referring to his calculated and deliberate exploitation and perversion of both the horrors of Christian persecution and the Bible in order to sell those political beliefs to his audience.

To make it clear: I am not making the case that Tucker is wrong about his stances on a range of issues—I am making the case that he is not a credible media figure, and that Christians should not consider him a reliable source of information. I would ask skeptical readers to carefully consider the following.

Tucker Carlson lies about the persecution of Christians

Over the past several years, Tucker has presented himself as a Christian who is deeply concerned about the persecution of Christians around the world. This posture has understandably proven deeply persuasive to many Christians who share these concerns.

But an examination of Tucker’s coverage of the subject reveals something very different: Carlson is not interested in the persecution of Christians globally. He is only very specifically interested in making the case that Israel, as a country, persecutes Christians. Since the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, Tucker has dedicated episode after episode to making this claim—but he is doing more than that.

Tucker has contrasted Israel with the surrounding Muslim nations to imply—and in some cases outright claim—that the Islamic world is kinder to Christians than Israel. In fact, Tucker specifically cited Jordan as a country that was better for Christians than Israel.

Do Tucker’s claims hold up? Here is how the Voice of the Martyrs describes the situation in Jordan: “Christian converts from Islam are persecuted, sometimes violently, by their families, tribes and communities. The Jordanian government restricts open evangelism and sometimes also Bible distribution activities.”

Open Doors, the most prominent global watchdog on Christian persecution, ranks Jordan as #49 on their World Watch list, and scores persecution in Jordan as “very high,” especially for converts from Islam to Christianity.

For context: Israel doesn’t appear on the list at all. Tucker knows this. He is a journalist. He is lying, and he is doing so deliberately. He is doing so in order to exploit the very real issue of the persecution of Christians for his own political agenda. Regardless of whether you are sympathetic to that agenda, that is a truly disgusting tactic.

Consider another example. On April 14, Tucker wrote: “The people in charge don’t want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres Him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes He performed miracles, and states that He will return to Earth to defeat the Antichrist.”

Tucker made that statement despite the fact that more than ten Muslim countries have the death penalty for those who convert to Christianity. Around twenty others have more moderate punishments for following Christ, including penalties such as imprisonment, flogging, loss of custody of children, or loss of inheritance or marriage rights. According to Open Doors’ 2026 report, Islamic extremism was the primary factor in the persecution of Christians in 40 of the top 50 most dangerous countries for Christians in the world.

But Tucker’s deliberate whitewashing of Christian-persecuting nations (while accusing Israel of being a primary persecutor) gets even worse. According to Open Doors, Nigeria ranks number 7 on the World Watch list, and “has been the most violent place in the world for followers of Jesus for several years.” Tens of thousands of Christians have been killed, over 3,000 in 2024-2025 alone, accounting for 72% of all faith-based murders worldwide.

In 2025, however, Tucker invited international human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam onto his podcast, describing Amsterdam as a man “defending Christians around the world” and “one of the people that I talk to most off camera about what is happening to the Christian population of the world.” During their discussion, Amsterdam then claimed that Nigerian Christians are, in fact, “not targeted as Christians,” and insisted the targeting, murder, and rape of Nigerian Christians is primarily about tribal differences and farmland squabbles.

Tucker actually made the claim that it was “weird” that “all of a sudden” Christians were concerned about persecution in Nigeria, and that the focus on Nigeria was “coordinated propaganda.” Open Doors, Christian missionaries, and other organizations that have focused on this issue for decades would be surprised to hear that they were engaged in “coordinated propaganda” intended to distract from the issues Tucker cares about.

What neither Amsterdam nor Tucker mentioned is that Amsterdam has served as an attorney for Nasir El-Rufai, a Nigerian politician who has been accused of being a persecutor of Christians, as highlighted by both Christian Concern International and Mediaite. Many Christian advocacy groups and Nigerian missionaries condemned the comments made by Amsterdam and Tucker. Tucker ignored them.

Tucker claims that Bible-believing Christians who disagree with him are heretics

Because Tucker claims that he holds his political views “as a Christian,” he also condemns those who disagree with him as heretics. By his own account, he scarcely attends church, and he stated that “one of the reasons that I have a lot of trouble going to church is [because] all these Christian leaders are so flawed and obviously fake. I can’t deal with it. It freaks me out.” Why are they “flawed and obviously fake”? Because they disagree with him.

In fact, Tucker has described Protestants who support the Jewish state as his enemies. In a conversation with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and open admirer of Hitler, Tucker said that “Christian Zionists” are “self-described Christians,” and that “I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody, because it’s Christian heresy and I’m offended by that as a Christian.” Completely without irony, he described those who disagree with him as being infected by a “brain virus.” (He later gave a halfhearted apology in response to backlash.)

I am not going to mock someone reading the Bible for the first time a few years ago. That is an objectively good thing. But it is worth noting that Tucker, a man who only read the Bible for the first time three years ago despite having presented himself as a Christian for years (in July of 2023 he said he was about “halfway through”), is not the man to be judging which views are or are not Christian heresies—especially through the lens of his specific political project. Tucker is not equipped to do that—and, once again, he is a bad faith interpreter, as is abundantly clear based on my next point.

Tucker deliberately twists the Scriptures to his own ends

Just as Tucker has cynically exploited the persecution of Christians worldwide to gain support for his own propaganda war against Israel, he has done the same thing with his newfound interest in Scripture. Earlier this year, for example, he gave this summary of the Book of Esther, in which he gets precisely wrong—probably deliberately—the story of God’s providential care for the Jewish people.

Instead, Tucker inverted the story, claiming that the story of a planned genocide of the Jews was actually the story of Jews perpetrating a genocide:

It’s the story, among other things, of a genocide of Persians, 75,000 Persians! Not just people who had committed crimes, but people who were Persian, and that’s why they were killed. It’s in the Book of Esther, which you should read because it’s interesting.

The theme of the Book of Esther, of course, is about a planned total destruction of the Jews, spearheaded by Haman, an “Agagite” or Amalekite, who is serving as a Persian official. The plan backfired after Esther the Jewish queen advocated for her people, and Jews were given permission to defend themselves against their enemies. The king’s decree could not be repealed, but a counter-edict permitting self-defense against their attackers was signed.

The Bible actually emphasizes that this was self-defense against those that “hated” them (Esther 9:1) and states that the Jews gathered to fight “such as sought their hurt” (Esther 9:2) and records that they were assisted by all of the Persian officials (v. 3), while emphasizing that they did not touch any of the plunder (vs. 16). Tucker either did not read the Book of Esther at all or is deliberately misrepresenting what it tells us. Either way, he is lying—and about the Bible, which is a very dangerous thing to do.

To summarize: What Tucker calls a genocide perpetrated by the Jews against Persians was actually Jews defending themselves against a genocidal edict provoked by one of their ancient enemies. The deliberate inversion of the biblical account—which is held by nobody from any denomination—is almost too ironic and currently relevant to invent. Tucker is reinventing the Bible to suit his agenda. Christians should be angered by this.

Tucker accused God of genocide

Tucker not only accuses the Jews of genocide; he also, blasphemously, accuses God of the same. In an interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Carlson cited 1 Samuel 15, in which God commands the Israelites to completely wipe out the Amalekites. “That is genocide,” Tucker stated. “God is calling for the genocide of the Amalekites.” To be clear, “genocide” translates directly to “race murder.”

Tucker is accusing God of ordering the Israelites to commit murder in the Old Testament. This is a direct attack on the divine attributes of God and cannot be read any other way. God cannot be guilty of murder. God is God. In my university days, the New Atheists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris—were famous for accusing God of commanding genocide as a way of claiming that if Christianity were true, it was immoral.

I never thought I would hear the same accusation made by a podcaster posing as a public Christian—and for the purposes of attacking the Jewish state.

Tucker is lying about Christian persecution in Israel

The allegation that Israel is either apathetic to or actively endorses the persecution of Christians is a vile echo of medieval blood libel. To make these claims, you must deliberately ignore the fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that legally guarantees religious freedom as well as the only country where the Christian population has steadily grown, from 34,000 in 1948 to 180,000 today. About 80% are Arab Christians. In the rest of the Middle East, the Christian population has dropped from about 13% a century ago to 5% today.

Conclusion

Regardless of your views on Israel or current events in the Middle East, it is, in fact, the safest place for Christians in the regions. This is confirmed by the top global watchdogs on Christian persecution. Israel has its flaws, no doubt. You may agree with Tucker on many issues related to Israel. Those discussions, however, can be had without deliberately lying about what is happening in Israel—but Tucker does it because his intended audience is Christians, and he knows that they care about the issue of persecution. He is exploiting the horrors Christians face around the world. He is perverting and inverting Scripture.

And in his eagerness to target Israel, he even dares to accuse God.

In this new digital age, when many influencers present their views as Christians, we must be extraordinarily careful about who we watch, and who we trust. Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson has betrayed that trust.

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For those interested in what life in Israel is like for Christians, listen to this interview by Rev. David Zadok, a Jewish Israeli Christian pastor. He grew up in Iran, left the country when the Islamic revolution broke out in 1979, attended Westminister Seminary, and now pastors a congregation in Israel. We discussed his story, Tucker’s claims, and more:

As always, follow the podcast wherever you get your content: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Rumble, or YouTube. You can get a copy of my book How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, or at The Bridgehead, where you can also find other columns (and books!) if you’re interested.