Mullin Bible Study Said the Jews Killed Jesus
Israel "executed the messiah," said Bible study sponsored by DHS nominee
To support my reporting and keep it free for everyone, you can become a paid subscriber. Thank you.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), the nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sponsored Bible studies as recently as last year teaching that the Jews killed Jesus.
The leader of these Senate Bible studies has also called Catholicism a “false religion.” In 2020, his ministry called it “shocking” when a Jewish author with a Catholic husband wrote about fundamentalist Christianity.
It’s not clear whether Mullin attended the antisemitic Bible study sessions, but his name appears as a sponsor on the lesson guides and he has continued to let his name be used by the same organization as recently as last week.
Accusing the Jewish people of deicide, killing Jesus, is the age-old smear that ignited centuries of antisemitism. It has been renounced by major religions.
If confirmed at DHS, Mullin would oversee a federal agency that Pres. Donald Trump has used to pursue false allegations of antisemitism based not on actual slander of or violence against Jews, but Palestinian advocacy or criticism of the current Israeli government.
The weekly Bible study is held on different days for senators, House members, and the White House cabinet. As I reported last year, current DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi are also sponsors of the White House sessions. So are Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
The weekly Senate Bible studies that Mullin sponsors are held, when the Senate is in session, on Tuesdays at 8am, rotating among the offices of participating senators.
I first reported Mullin’s involvement last year, listing him along with the other congressional sponsors. They’re all Republicans. The only Democrat known to attend is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) is the only Democrat known to participate in the House Bible study.
Mullin’s DHS nomination carries new implications for his sponsorship of the weekly Bible study generally, and specifically of the antisemitic study guides, which appear with Mullin’s name in both 2023 and 2025.
Mullin has supported criminalizing some forms of speech and protest advocating for Palestinian rights. Under Noem, the DHS has abducted and imprisoned people for exercising their rights to such speech.
The agency has not similarly targeted people who blame Jews for Jesus’s crucifixion, a common belief among some Christians, including some congressional Republicans. Nor has Mullin zeroed in on deicide as a form of antisemitism, let alone as its foundation.
Mullin hasn’t publicly addressed whether his DHS would continue to weaponize antisemitism to suppress speech critical of Israel while turning a blind eye to genuine antisemitism such as the myth of Jewish deicide. Mullin’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the Bible studies.
The preacher of Mullin’s Bible study is Ralph Drollinger. His group, Capitol Ministries, operates in at least 34 state capitals and many countries around the world, teaching political leaders his interpretations of the Bible.
Drollinger is not a theocrat, but does believe his biblical teachings should drive political decisions. He preaches divine condemnation of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.
He also says the Bible proves God wants different social sectors to address different issues. Things like taking care of the poor, Drollinger says, are the work of individuals and the church. Not government.
Related:
Drollinger is a steadfast supporter of Israel’s right-wing government and its military actions.
After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Drollinger revived a study guide on supporting Israel, and made it the next lesson.
Unlike some evangelicals, Drollinger does not believe that God abandoned Israel permanently. In Drollinger’s telling, America must stand by Israel because God’s covenant with Israel still stands. God merely “sidetracked” Israel for killing Jesus.
In the first of a two-week series in 2023, Drollinger posted an old study guide topped with a new intro calling the lesson “timely.” The guide, dated Oct. 16, 2023, reads:
“[T]he spiritual blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant accrue to the Church for a time (until God grafts Israel back in) due to the present apostasy of Israel, having executed the Messiah.”
That pamphlet lists Mullin as a sponsor. He had been sponsoring the Bible study as early as February 2023.
If anyone chastised Drollinger for that language in 2023, it doesn’t seem to have stuck. The following year, he told Business Insider that “when the Jews rejected their Messiah, God put them on a side track.”
After Israel began last year’s assault on Iran — and lobbied Trump to deploy the U.S. military — Drollinger revived the Israel study guide again, pushing the cabinet, Senate, and House to support Israel. Trump did, bombing nuclear targets.
And, again, that June 16, 2025, pamphlet repeated the slur of deicide against the Jewish people.
Drollinger even said it in a video, explaining that he would teach this lesson in his White House and congressional Bible lessons. “They crucified their messiah,” Drollinger said he’d teach his students in this June 17, 2025, video:
Later, Drollinger cited Billy Graham, the late evangelical leader who apologized for his own antisemitic remarks, after denying them, once the tapes became public.
The phrase in Drollinger’s June 14, 2025, Bible study pamphlet, about Israel executing the Messiah, appears in archived iterations as far back as one dated May 31, 2011, addressed “To Legislators.”
Drollinger refers more obliquely to Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion elsewhere in his study guides (bolding and italics are Drollinger’s):
“In God’s big plan, He has temporarily sidetracked His chosen people. He did this right after they did not recognize (to say it politely) their Messiah…”
“Speaking further about the hardened hearts of Israel, a people having previously rejected Jesus, there remains much hope.”
“During this period of biblical history, the time in which we live, Israel’s heart is, for the most part, hardened toward their Messiah.”
“Yes, presently Israel is a Gospel-rejecter, but for the sake of the fathers (the great OT saints, like Abraham) God will honor Israel at a future time when they too will come to Christ en masse...”
“No one will enter the Kingdom of God apart from faith in Christ. In the End Times a person will not go to heaven just because they are Jewish, it is not as if there is a second pathway to heaven that circumvents the way of the cross…”
In his video for part 2 of the Israel study guide, Drollinger says,
“Since Paul’s a Jew, he doesn’t want his audience to know, well, what happens to the Jews; because they for by and large rejected the messiah. They’ve been sidetracked…
“In other words, Israel has stumbled. They’re on the side track of God’s plan as He grafts in the gentiles into His kingdom. And they’ve been sidetracked because they crucified their messiah…
“…and then we know, later on, from Revelation, Chapter 7, that He brings them back on track, relative to, right before the second coming of the messiah.”
Drollinger then confirms that this is the Bible study “that I’ll be teaching this week in DC to our Senate, House, and White House members.”
Other than accusing the Jews of killing Jesus in the past, rejecting Jesus today, and being bound for Hell in the future, Drollinger has nothing but kind words. He even says that antisemitism may be the reason some other Christians claim God permanently rejected the Jews and transferred his covenant to Christians.
But Drollinger’s Israel study guides traffic in antisemitic tropes couched as praise. Drollinger calls Israel smart, and good with money, saying:
“Israel’s smart. Much scientific and technological advancements have been achieved by Israel. Financial management and information processing make them a world leader.”
Drollinger also claims that Israel has shed its “socialistic economic tendencies” in favor of the free market, even though Israel has universal health coverage and caps college tuition at around $3,000.
Drollinger’s history includes derogatory language about other religions, too.
In 2004, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) kicked Drollinger out of gubernatorial offices for calling Catholicism one of the “primary false religions.” Women, Drollinger also said, shouldn’t be lawmakers if they had kids at home.
In 2008, Drollinger wrote that he was “disgusted” with some legislators. “I have visited with a Jewish legislator, a Catholic legislator and a liberal Protestant legislator — all of whom reject the Jesus of Scripture.”
In 2020, Drollinger’s organization, Capitol Ministries, responded to author Katherine Stewart’s critiques by invoking her religion and her husband’s:
“It is shocking that Stewart, who is Jewish and married to a Catholic, presumes to tell fundamental Christians what they really believe and what their true motivations are.”
Drollinger’s White House Bible study went remote during the administration of Pres. Joe Biden. After Trump returned to the White House, though, it was revived in person by two Trump insiders last year.
One was new Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. The other was Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought.
Vought’s Center for Renewing America listed “Christian nationalism” as a priority in a document prepared between Trump’s two terms.
Drollinger has discussed publicly how influential he is with his students. When then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Bible to justify separating immigrant families, Drollinger said Sessions will “go out the same day I teach him something and he’ll do it on camera. And I just think, man, these guys are faithful, available, and teachable.”
In a Jan. 30, 2026, Bible study, Drollinger quoted Proverbs 3:5-6. The next day, Mullin posted the same verses, albeit from a different translation, on social media.
According to Drollinger, however, even his own students don’t understand the Bible’s teachings about Israel.
“I’m speaking, in Bible studies in DC, to a predisposed audience, but because of biblical ignorance, many people that are in office … don’t necessarily understand the biblical case for being pro-Israel. They just have it in their DNA as something that, as a conservative politician, or of a political party, they tend to be pro-Israel, but they’re not sure biblically why that is. …A lot of our members that I teach the Bible to have a pragmatic reason for being pro-Israel, and it’s, uh, it’s cool to be pro-Israel…”
In fact, Drollinger suggests his mostly Republican students aren’t very smart.
“I have to kind of put the cookies on the lower shelf … usually when I use a big word, at least in DC, I try to define what I mean by that.
“They’ll come to Bible study to get a cookie, but if you’re putting like a filet mignon up there on the top shelf, they might not be able to digest that.”
This was shortly after Republicans tried and failed to pass a bill directing the Education Department to treat support for Palestinian rights as antisemitic.
But it also would have codified deicide, as Drollinger preaches it, into U.S. law as antisemitic. And some Republicans weren’t having that.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act
Some House Republicans objected to the Antisemitism Awareness Act because it would have established the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as U.S. law. That definition includes blaming the Jewish people — not just 2,000 years ago, but today — for killing Jesus.
At least one, unidentified, Republican senator reportedly pushed behind the scenes to exempt deicide from the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Mullin was publicly a supporter of the bill but didn’t sponsor it.
He offered no amendments and didn’t show up for a committee hearing on alleged campus antisemitism to question witnesses from both sides of the aisle. Mullin only showed up in the final minutes of an April 2025 committee hearing on the bill. And he wasn’t one of the senators thanked by the chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), for helping with the bill.
The bill itself never got a committee vote.
The following month, Mullin did co-sponsor a resolution against campus antisemitism. It didn’t include deicide.
Meanwhile, the DHS last year began screening social media of non-citizens for antisemitic activity including Islamic “terrorist sympathizers,” but made no mention of seeking out Christians who say that Jews killed Jesus.
DHS relied on exaggerated claims — by an anonymous website that supports Israel’s hard-line government — to identify Palestinian advocates who were then abducted and imprisoned. But there’s no indication that DHS has relied similarly on any of the established organizations that track accusations of deicide or other genuine antisemitism.
And Drollinger’s operation isn’t the only organization with antisemitic history that Mullin’s been affiliated with.
The National Prayer Breakfast
In 2016, according to records I obtained, Mullin invited two guests to the National Prayer Breakfast, run by the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family.
The Fellowship Foundation has sponsored congressional travel for a variety of right-wing causes. Recently, that’s included Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) and his support for Uganda’s LGBTQ+ death penalty.
In May 2017, The Fellowship paid for Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) to visit with an alleged Holocaust denier, a prayer breakfast veteran.
Members of Congress can invite guests to the breakfast. In 2016, Mullin invited two pastors; one of them his, one of them controversial.
Mullin is an adherent of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal Christian denomination. His family is associated with First Assembly of God in Coweta, OK, and that church’s pastor, the Rev. Steve Lee, got a 2016 invite. So did Bill Ledbetter.
Ledbetter is senior pastor at Fairview Baptist Church in Durant, OK. When Mullin invited him to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast, Ledbetter was already notorious.
In 2012, Ledbetter drew criticism for claiming — while delivering an opening prayer for the Oklahoma state Senate — that 9/11 was the work of God. “God removed his hand and gave us in the hands of plunderers, people of an evil heart. Is it not true that God spoke to us on Sept. 11, 2001?”
Ledbetter blamed secularism. Abortion and LGBTQ+ rights were part of it, too.
In 2018, two years after Mullin’s invitation, Ledbetter was still blaming God for bad things. Now it was school shootings and hurricanes. All to punish America for political correctness and for not imposing Ledbetter’s religious beliefs on people.
That time, Ledbetter’s remarks to the Oklahoma state Senate were sponsored by Josh Brecheen, who later replaced Mullin in the U.S. House of Representatives and now sponsors Drollinger’s House Bible studies.
Brecheen voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Bill precisely because it condemned blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.
“This statement is not antisemitic; it is a biblical and historical fact, as Jesus was a Jew,” Brecheen said.
(At some point after hobnobbing with Fellowship Foundation guests as Mullin’s guest at the National Prayer Breakfast, Ledbetter became a member of the Council on National Policy. The right-wing organization’s executive director is former Rep. Bob McEwen (R-OH), a longtime Fellowship insider.)
While Mullin has accused the left of wanting to destroy the family, he says his own isn’t his top priority. His campaign site identified him as a Christian first.
Earlier this month, Mullin discussed his top three priorities. “It’s God,” he reportedly said. “It’s family, and then everything else. And they come in that order.”
Related Stories:
.jpg){kind=link}
I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.
What is needed is weekly US Constitution study.
Thank you. Jonathan. While reading this, I had an epiphany... God created the world, all the plants and animals, then people in his likeness to enjoy this paradise. As part of his plan, he made some people as fucking asshats who would wreak havoc, kill others, cheat & steal and cause wars, etc. as a way to test the good ones. God knew that eventually the dickheads would triumph and then He would destroy everything and just take the good ones to live with Him in Heaven.
It all makes perfect fucking sense now.