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The version of Spencer Pittman visible to the world on social media, at least until last month, was familiar to anyone who has lived in a very Christian part of the country. Pittman, on his Instagram account, posted photos of himself in a baseball uniform in high school and college, action shots on the diamond, and off-field photos of more casual moments with captions such as “God is good. Thankful for my teammates.” On X, he chronicled his college career as an outfielder for Coahoma Community College in western Mississippi, posting his game schedules, his personal records in the gym, and videos of his training captioned with scripture passages. With his gym clothes, cross necklace, floppy hair, and singular fixation on linking all of his efforts and successes to his faith, the 19-year-old Pittman looked like the archetype of the Southern Christian sports bro. In a note accompanying one video of batting practice from late 2024, he wrote: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Romans 12:18.”
But last week, Pittman confessed to burning down a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. It was an act of calculated and ambitious hate, targeting the Beth Israel Synagogue, Jackson’s oldest synagogue and a building that had been firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan back in 1967. Pittman, who was arrested Saturday night after his father contacted the FBI, told investigators he had targeted the “Synagogue of Satan” for its “Jewish ties.” Authorities also say he laughed when his father confronted him and bragged that he “finally got them.” (No one was hurt in the arson.)
The question of how Spencer Pittman was radicalized is, so far, a slightly confounding one. He does not look to be an isolated internet obsessive with overt ties to white nationalists. He appeared to have friends—or at least teammates. He seemed to be from a comfortable suburban background. His life appeared to be a largely offline one, with community in his world of athletics.
There are gaps in our understanding of how Pittman went from a baseball-obsessed teenager to a fanatical antisemite. But he left enough of his digital world visible to the public for us to piece together some clues. Pittman, it seems, had found himself highly active in a strange community on the internet—one of those bizarre new digital spaces where toxic forms of masculinity culture merge with fundamentalist Christianity. This Christian-bro gym culture offers many young men an intoxicating sense of purpose, one in which the pursuit of conventional masculinity is given a kind of divine backing. Depending on who you ask, this culture is part of the manosphere, right-wing purity culture, or reactionary religious politics. But however you categorize this subculture, it may provide some clues to understanding how a gym rat could encounter militant new ideas.
The clearest insight into Pittman’s version of this world came in early January, when he posted a link to a website for a lifestyle brand called “One Purpose.” The site, which according to Mississippi Today was registered to Pittman in December, advertised a kind of wellness subscription service with a mishmash of Gen Z buzzwords and Christian self-help: looksmaxxing (including mewing and “facial aesthetics”), testosterone optimization, scripture memorization, divine schedule optimization, A.I. food scanning, financial tracking, and Bible-based workouts. The brand appeared to take the Bible very literally in its inspiration, scattering Hebrew throughout and promising a diet based on biblical foods (as in those specifically mentioned in scripture, such as figs, olives, and barley) and a health plan that enabled the biblical patriarchs to live for centuries. (“Their secret? Biblical eating patterns, fasting, and walking with God.”) The latter was advertised as a “life-expectancy maxxing protocol.”
If you spend some time on the website, you’ll see signs of how Pittman saw this world—or at least how he was trying to sell it to others. One section of the website explains “Why the World’s Way Has Failed You,” noting that secular diet and workout plans will fail young men because they aren’t pushing them to be disciplined enough. (The site is geared exclusively toward men.) “God’s solution,” on the other hand, asks these men to “build their temple”—their bodies—“for His glory,” giving them proper motivation to hit the gym.
While it may seem baffling to many Christians and non-Christians alike, this kind of exercise-based faith expression is not uncommon among a certain category of young men, experts say. According to Mariel Barnes, a professor who researches gender and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, it offers the same appeal as other factions of the “manosphere”—incels, pickup artists, and male separatists, for example—by emphasizing the power of men and the importance of traditional gender roles.
According to the Rev. Angela Denker, a Lutheran pastor and the author of Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, that hyperfixation on masculinity is a common element of extreme right-wing Christianity. The vision of a kind of premodern, brutish masculinity provides a comfortingly simple guide for how a young man should act in a complex world—and the religious backing makes him feel more righteous in his belief.
The question of how he got from there to extreme antisemitism is murky. But experts in masculinity and right-wing Christianity noted that the different ideas that fed into this subculture encourage rigid ideology and bold action.
Take, for example, the website’s offer of a “Biblical longevity protocol based on Noah, Moses, and Caleb’s lifespans”—a prominent feature on the page. It sounds like nonsense, but it’s new internet framing of an older idea. The term “life-expectancy maxxing” appears to be original, but some Christians have occasionally claimed that the Bible offers a kind of code to the ideal form of bodily existence. According to Heidi Campbell, a Texas A&M University professor who researches technology, religion, and digital culture, in the 1990s, the era of fad dieting, the country saw a revival in biblical dieting, in which people looked through Levitical laws for instruction on nutrition and fasting.
But it’s internet culture that allowed Pittman to package this as a kind of Christian answer to Silicon Valley’s anti-aging movement, in which you can hack your way to a long life with the right interactive tech tool, plus God. There’s nothing hate-oriented about that. Still, it calls on young men to cast off their old interests and influences and remake their lives by embracing a collection of extreme worldviews—in this case, tech’s optimization culture, fundamentalist Christianity, and the manosphere’s aesthetic self-improvement culture. When that level of single-minded intensity is brought to reforming the physical body, Campbell said, it can set the conditions for other kinds of extremism.
“There can be a lot of overlap with different people who tend toward more extremist ideas and behaviors,” Campbell said. “That jump in an extreme in how you treat bodies to an extreme in how you treat culture—that idea of purification—can be twisted to justify certain logic.”
“It’s not just being healthy but resisting anything ‘polluting’ to your body, to your mind, to the culture,” she added.
Pittman clearly saw these things—body, mind, culture—as connected. On Instagram, Pittman posted about what he perceived as the true threats to the world: “How to destroy society: Make discipline cringe. Make truth offensive. Make masculinity shameful.”
These ideas are often articulated in conservative Christian spaces as about being a “warrior” for Christ. The Christian warrior defends society against secular, feminist groups that want to eradicate family values and spread moral confusion. He is not afraid to be strong and fight for what he knows to be Biblical truth.
Usually, pastors advocating for young men to be warriors for Christ don’t mention Judaism. But on the internet, it doesn’t take a lot of searching to find men proclaiming themselves to be devoted Christians who will argue that Jews are behind society’s adoption of feminist and secular values. Pittman was clearly immersed in internet culture. And he appears to have bought into the idea, spread by so many on the Christian right, that it was his duty to stand up against Christianity’s “enemies.”
“It’s a theology of power, of power and dominance, and that does lend itself to antisemitism,” Denker said.
It’s possible that Pittman had become, in some way, confused. We don’t know his mental state before the crime. In December, after years of anodyne baseball photos, he started posting about money and cars. He posted selfies meant to show off his physique, a photo of bloodied knuckles, and videos of him driving at 160 miles per hour. He blasted money as the source of all evil while simultaneously bragging about his sports car and “escaping modern slavery” through stock trading. Finally, the night of the crime, he posted a clip from the Comedy Central show Drawn Together in which an antisemitic character panics about “a Jew in my backyard,” confronting an ugly, yellow-skinned cartoon character with a large nose and money bags. This was a hard swerve from Pittman’s inoffensive baseball posting from just a few weeks before.
It will remain hard to piece together Pittman’s path there because he, like every young man on the internet, could have constructed it from any number of sources. He didn’t need a single pastor or priest or denomination to tell him his views; he could have turned to podcasters, influencers, meme pages, YouTube pastors, and any other number of figures for inspiration. Some observers have been quick to point out that Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes have used the phrase “Synagogue of Satan.” But Pittman just as easily could have picked it up from any antisemite: The phrase, used in the Bible to refer to persecutors, has a long history of misuse, including by the KKK, Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, the televangelist Billy Graham, and various modern Christian white supremacist groups. Until he tells us where he learned it, we can’t know what his inspiration was.
But what we do know is that for young men like Pittman, the internet is awash in groups ready to prey on their confusion and insecurities and tell them that if they only remake themselves to be strong enough, masculine enough, driven enough, powerful enough, they’ll get the approval they want—whether it’s from women, society, or God.
