‘It’s a Christian phrase’: Rev. Johnnie Moore urges the Church to reclaim ‘Christ is King’ ahead of Easter Sunday

March 17, 2025

For the better part of the past year, the phrase “Christ is King” has been a source of division between Evangelicals and other Christians, following remarks from two staffers of the conservative Daily Wire news site.

The Christian Post reports that the Rev. Johnnie Moore and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson have just released a 21-page report warning that “extremist actors have co-opted Christian language” and are advancing “extremist ideologies.”

The report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University warns that bot networks and social media users are co-opting a phrase that has been “central to the Christian faith for centuries.”

Though the phrase “Christ is King” has deep theological roots in the Christian tradition, the report claims that “extremists in America” are weaponizing the phrase to “encourage hatred towards minorities.”

Researchers for the report used cutting-edge social media analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) performing language-modeling to trace how the phrase has become weaponized on large platforms like X, formerly Twitter.

Moore stated that inauthentic speech, such as bot activity, can be used to skew public discourse, noting that when the report was first released, negative online reactions were “at an absolute minimum 20 percent of the responses […] from a bot network or a series of bot networks.”

Moore also clarified that, in his opinion, the phrase “Christ is King” is not inherently hateful, explaining, “I certainly don’t believe that it’s antisemitic to say Christ is King or Jesus is Lord, It’s a Christian phrase, but like all phrases, it can be used by people who hate others in a hateful way, and unfortunately, some very, very prominent figures chose to do that in the last year.”

Moore added, “I do hope that Catholics and Evangelicals this Easter post either Christ is King or Jesus is Lord … so loud and so frequent and so sincerely that these threats of hate become irrelevant.”

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