Jack Hibbs shows us how evangelical leaders use the culture wars

A recent editorial at Christian Post (archive) featured a sermon about spiritual warfare from a pastor named Jack Hibbs. Hibbs leads a church named Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, California. And apparently Hibbs’ congregation enjoys hearing lies out of their pastor, because he certainly provides them with a solid stream of malarkey!

Today, let’s go over how he first achieved fame, and why he pushes as hard as he does on fearmongering nowadays.

(This post appeared on Patreon on 2/13/2024. Its audio cast lives there too!)

Everyone, meet Jack Hibbs: Lying for Jesus is his apparent job

We’ve talked about Jack Hibbs before. Back in July 2023, he was shaking his finger at evangelicals and warning them that the Endtimes were still something they needed to fear.

But like the entrance to a sewer tunnel, there is so much more to Hibbs than meets the eye (or nose).

Hibbs runs a megachurch in Chino Hills, California. Chino Hills is a sort of Los Angeles suburb. His church, Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, can be found near the very very easternmost edge of the city where Highway 142 meets 71. Hibbs started it in 1990 as a home Bible study group (archive). In turn, Hibb’s church is an offshoot of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, whose leaders ordained Hibbs into ministry.

Both churches belong to the Calvary Chapel movement, which is a very Pentecostal-flavored branch of evangelicalism. (Lots of evangelicals despise it for not being hardcore enough; archive. Meanwhile, outsiders often consider it extremist and alarming.) Chuck Smith began this movement in the late 1960s after becoming the pastor of the Costa Mesa church in 1965.

You might remember Chuck Smith from our recent discussion about the Jesus Movement. Smith helped to launch Lonnie Frisbee, a teenaged hippie who was a powerful influence on that movement. In addition, Smith pops up briefly in the Vineyard Movement and the Toronto Blessing. And, like Hibbs, Smith loved Endtimes fearmongering. A book he published in 1978, End Times, predicted the end of the world by 1981. 

Hibbs eventually figured out where the real money could be found in evangelicalism. Once he figured it out, he never looked back again.

A short history of Jack Hibbs, liar-for-Jesus

Jack Hibbs is almost hilariously overblown. He’s a caricature of evangelical megapastors. For years, he coasted along pulling in big bank from his church services. But he didn’t get a lot of attention doing it. He just quietly got rich in the 2000s, in particular, right as evangelicals hit their peak of power and membership.

But the decline must have been a very unpleasant waking-up call. In 2015, evangelicals got pecker-slapped in the face with proof of decline that even they couldn’t deny.

That’s about when we begin to see Jack Hibbs making waves.

In March 2016, he came to the nation’s attention when reporters found that his megachurch had been meddling in a local public school board’s squabble over forced prayers (archive). The board wanted to “pray and proselytize during its public meetings.” At least at the time, Hibbs served as the director of the fundagelical law firm the board hired to defend their outrageous decision. As that link reveals:

Hibbs has long encouraged the Chino Valley school board members to break down the barriers between church and state by sharing their faith during public school board meetings. He endorsed three of the current board members, all of whom attend his church, from the pulpit during his Sunday services — in violation of federal election rules that prohibit religious groups from directly participating in political campaigns.

In addition, Hibbs “mobilized his congregation,” whom he called “prayer warriors,” to “vote biblically” on the issue. Even Hibbs realized that prayer alone wouldn’t help his cause!

Politicization led to rapid growth in Jack Hibbs’ church

In the leadup to the 2016 elections, Hibbs ordered his congregation to vote for a particular candidate (archive; the citation video listed. You only get one guess regarding the name of that candidate! This exhortation outraged one Calvinist, though he’s no paragon of virtue himself—in 2014, this same guy wrote fulsome praise for a YouTube school-evangelism video, saying “Bringing God back into the public schools, one school at a time.”

These controversies may have fueled Calvary Chapel Chino Hills’ rapid growth. By July 2020, reporters marveled at how quickly it was growing despite the pandemic’s ravages (archive). Hibbs, of course, chose to flout pandemic rules by holding indoor services. And naturally, he claimed that Gavin Newsom, the governor who had banned indoor services a week or so earlier, was “clearly target[ing] the church” with persecution.

Some evangelicals just get a little frisson of titillated fear at the notion of being persecuted, I suppose. I can’t really blame Jack Hibbs for capitalizing on that fact. Dude knows exactly what sells to his target market.

A year later, Hibbs gave his warmest endorsement to a fellow politicized evangelical, Larry Elder, who sought to unseat Newsom. Alas again, Elder lost. Like, by a lot. Strange how Jesus’ hand-picked candidates do that, isn’t it?

Jack Hibbs leaps onto election fraud and the insurrection attempt

Alas, Jack Hibbs didn’t get his wish for a second Trump presidency. The day after the 2020 elections, Hibbs wept on camera (archive) at the mere thought of Joe Biden as President. After condemning Biden as a fakey-fake fake Christian for his Catholicism, Hibbs then quickly took up Trump’s false conspiracy theories about voter fraud. 

Knowing that, nobody should be surprised that he was present for the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt. Though he sorta-kinda condemned the violence that took place that day, he was extremely mealy-mouthed about it. The next day, Hibbs told the hardline fundagelical group Family Research Council (FRC; archive):

“This is what you get when you eject God from the courts and from the schools.”

Hibbs explicitly blamed the Capitol violence on evangelicals’ loss of cultural power. He probably thought he was on safe ground there. After all, the leader of FRC, Tony Perkins, had campaigned for state legislatures across America to reject any electors who would choose Joe Biden.

Afterward, Jack Hibbs turned his attention to anti-LGBT bigotry (archive). In July 2021, he declared that not only did the Theory of Evolution preclude homosexuality somehow, but that LGBT advances in general represented PROOF YES PROOF that the Endtimes were imminent. Yes. The existence of gay people PROVED that his god totes for realsies existed. This outburst earned him a coveted spot on Georgia Voice’s “Creep of the Week” list (archive).

Jack Hibbs understands evangelicals’ fears: Leaping onto the newest culture-war trend

In mid-2022, Wondering Eagle wrote about Jack Hibbs’ recent racism and fearmongering (archive). Eagle considered Hibbs an example of the “dark” side of evangelicalism. I particularly liked him calling Hibbs’ video about immigration “pure garbage” that “plays on people’s fears.”

Maybe part of that garbage involved plagiarism, because by September Charisma’s site complained (archive) about Hibbs being banned from YouTube. Their writer clearly considered the bannination as an example of persecution FER JUS’ BEIN’ KRISCHIN. I’m not sure when Hibbs returned to YouTube, but he’s got a channel there now. He publishes a surprisingly high number of videos per month. Many of those videos involve him shamelessly fearmongering his audience.

Despite that, Jack Hibbs complained last year (archive) about not getting enough attention and recognition for his alt-right, QAnon-addled bigotry. Poor guy! Out of a veritable ocean of identical voices screeching identical talking points about identical topics, he just couldn’t get the views that the popular kids always get! 

Maybe that’s why he embarked on the newest evangelical culture war against trans people (archive). Just a couple of months after his plaintive rant about not getting enough attention, Hibbs declared that “transgenderism is an anti-God, anti-Christ, plan of none other than Satan himself” and “a sexually perverted cult.” Get this: He also blames transgender people for evangelicals’ persecution against them.

“The question is being asked by people, ‘Why are Christians making such a big deal about the transgender issue?’” Hibbs said. “It’s the transgender community that’s made it a big deal. They’re the ones forcing it down people’s throats.” 

In response, an LGBTQ site delighted in pointing out just how many trans Christians there are in America (archive). And possibly in response in turn, Hibbs complained about churches becoming too “woke” to care about Jesusing correctly anymore (archive).

Makes one wonder just how many starving people Hibbs could have fed with all the energy and time he’s pouring into persecuting his tribal enemies.

In the middle of that fight, someone noticed Jack Hibbs’ historical revisionism (archive). Yes, in addition to all his other repulsive qualities, Hibbs is a history denier too. And he’s still trying to force his religion and his political views down the throats of public schoolchildren (archive).

The Jack Hibbs timeline reveals exactly where evangelicals’ hearts are

Historians studying the Renaissance and Middle Ages often make use of what’s called a microhistory. A microhistory is a deep dive into one person’s life as revealed by the documents and artifacts they’ve left behind. Taken alone, microhistories aren’t a definitive statement about that person’s situation or the overall history of that person’s time/era/place. But they can be used to establish patterns for study and to add detail to other topics that we don’t have a lot of information on yet.

(One of my favorites is The Merchant of Prato, about a Florentine merchant named Francesco Datini. He lived in the 14th century. In his lifetime, he generated tons of archives that have somehow survived: letters, ledgers, you name it. Dude kept busy!)

In a similar way, Jack Hibbs’ timeline shows us a lot about how one evangelical leader arose, gained power, and now seeks to ride the money train to its inevitable end. It is a microhistory that we can examine and then stack against information about other evangelical leaders.

Jack Hibbs garnered attention by sticking his nose into the evangelical culture wars. Without the culture wars, nobody would know who he is. He simply isn’t noteworthy, otherwise.

QAnon and its impact on evangelical culture warriors (like Jack Hibbs)

However, those who live by the culture wars die by them, too.

Once QAnon solidified its hold on evangelicals’ minds, Jack Hibbs’ popularity sank. Suddenly, he was just a holdover from the Satanic Panic/Endtimes conspiracy theory. QAnon’s wild claims completely lapped those frowsy, dusty, old-school conspiracy theories about demons infesting D&D books and the Rapture happening Any Day Now™.

Clinging to his new idol Donald Trump didn’t help at all. QAnon had long idolized Trump. Accusing his flocks of stupidity for not voting for Trump only annoyed other evangelicals.

By the time Hibbs retuned his approach with extra anti-LGBT bigotry and the funniest attempted zinger about evolution that I have ever heard, he had already become just another fish in a very crowded pond. Adding revisionism about America’s past didn’t help. By now, historical revisionism is so very 2010s.

Attacking trans people might also be all the rage in evangelicalism these days, but it doesn’t actually raise the attacker’s visibility much. They’re all doing that.

What a sad life: Living and dying by the culture wars

To get even a taste of his former 2010s notoriety, Hibbs must come up with wilder and wilder antics. Even then, he struggles to shout louder than all the other evangelicals seeking attention.

Making matters worse for him and his endless quest for attention, the evangelical audience he already has is extremely skittish. They may bolt if he alters his message too much. He has to keep them appeased while also layering in new claims and stunts to attract new fans.

As I survey the wreckage this guy’s left strewn in his wake, I can’t help but wonder what happened to the earnest-sounding Bible study leader who started Calvary Chapel Chino Hills. Was it always about getting him fame and fortune? Or did he get that first sip of wild success and become completely addicted forevermore? Or does he view fighting the culture wars as just about survival in the cutthroat world of evangelical politics?

I suppose it hardly matters. He’s a joke, nothing more—just another example of exactly why evangelicals lost their cultural power—and why they deserved to lose it.

Next time we meet up, we’ll be checking out his exhortations to evangelicals about 2024. As an artifact of the late-stage evangelical culture wars, his listicle really stands out for its sheer abrasive control-lust. This guy’s big mad about evangelicals losing their cultural power—or at least, he acts like he is.

Either way, his fans get to feel that little frisson of titillated fear about their coming persecution FER JUS’ BEIN’ KRISCHINS. No other entertainment scratches that itch quite like this.

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