THE LINE IS DRAWN: Joel Tenney on Christian Nationalism, Race, and the War for White Identity

I grew up in a very large family.

I have 16 brothers and sisters.

We grew up in the Greek Catholic Church, specifically in the Ruthenian Rite.

And my desire was to be a priest at a young age.

I never wanted to get married and never wanted to have children.

But life had other plans for me.

So, long story short, I began to study for the priesthood at a young age.

In my early teens, I began to read a lot.

I was homeschooled, and so there was a desire for learning, I think, that was present because of my circumstances, because I was not forced to sit at a desk for eight hours a day, five days a week.

I always had this hunger and thirst for knowledge, and I loved that about being homeschooled, having that freedom and independence which cultivated this desire to learn, this eagerness to consume information.

About the age of 13, 14, I began to read books like The House of Morgan, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, and then read Mein Kampf.

And I really wanted to understand exactly how we got to where we are as a country and as a civilization today.

It seemed that before 1919, even 1914, the world was a very different place.

And steadily, and quite rapidly I will say, things began to shift.

sociologically, economically, in innovation.

And I always wondered why.

And so that sent me down this path of pursuit, you could say.

The pursuit was simply to understand how we've arrived where we are.

When I got older, I didn't end up entering into the seminary.

I got married and went to a Bible college in North Carolina.

And I did so because my desire was to still be in some sort of service to the Lord.

Although at this point, I did not find myself to be a Catholic.

I more identified as a non-denominational Christian, but more in the Pentecostal or charismatic flair.

And my wife and I attended this Bible college for a short time.

I realized it wasn't for me, and I left that and started to study at the Brick Masons, Stone Masons Union School in Iowa.