Rather listen to 'clerics'
Nick Fuentes: Don't read the Bible
Nick Fuentes, self-anointed guardian of “real Catholicism,” just told his followers to stop reading the Bible because it leads to “transgender pastors” and to blindly obey clerics instead. This grifter doesn’t want Christians in the Scriptures, he wants obedient cultists who let political gatekeepers do their thinking for them.
Far-right activist and self-proclaimed Catholic Nick Fuentes sparked outrage on November 17, 2025, during a live stream on his platform "America First," where he explicitly advised followers against reading the Bible independently, claiming it has led to modern ills like "transgender ideology" and "transgender pastors." In the viral clip Fuentes argued that personal Bible study empowers "heretics" and dilutes traditional authority, stating: "Reading the Bible is how we got transgender ideology... We'd be better off getting instruction from the clerics. We need some Catholic gatekeepers."
This isn't Fuentes' first brush with anti-Biblical rhetoric, older clips from 2024 show him dismissing "Judeo-Christianity" as an "insult to our civilization" and praising Islam over Protestant Bible-reading traditions, but this statement marks his most direct call to avoid Scripture altogether, framing it as a tool for "modernist" errors rather than divine truth.
Christian critics, including evangelicals and Zionists, have labeled it "un-Christian" and a gateway to authoritarianism, with responses like "If you don’t like young men listening to Fuentes, you need better answers than his" highlighting fears of his influence on "Biblically uninformed" youth.
Fuentes has not retracted, but the backlash has amplified debates on his "Catholic nationalism" versus core Christian tenets.
What makes what makes the whole thing so jaw-dropping is that Fuentes has spent years branding himself as America’s most hardcore traditionalist Catholic commentator: daily rosary streams, Latin Mass stan, “Christ is King” in every other sentence, constant attacks on “Protestant Bible-only heresy,” etc. He built his entire audience (especially the 18–25-year-old “Groyper” crowd) on the promise that he’s the last defender of real, pre-Vatican II Catholicism against secularism, Judaism, and liberal Christianity.
So when the same guy turns around and says:“Don’t read the Bible… reading the Bible is how we got transgender pastors and gay marriage… we’d all be better off just listening to clerics and having Catholic gatekeepers tell us what it says”…it’s not just a random hot take. It’s a full-blown self-own that collapses his entire persona. He’s literally telling his followers to do the one thing historic Catholicism always condemned Protestantism for rejecting (personal engagement with Scripture) while doing the one thing Protestantism always accused Catholicism of doing (keeping the Bible away from the laity and replacing it with clerical authority).
In a single stream he managed to sound like both a 16th-century Dominican inquisitor and a modern progressive pastor who doesn’t want congregants “weaponizing” verses against him.That’s why the clip blew up so hard: it exposed the contradiction at the core of the Fuentes project. He’s not really a Christian commentator trying to bring people closer to Jesus or even to traditional Catholicism. He’s a political streamer who uses Catholic aesthetics as a tribal marker and a club to beat his enemies with, and the second the actual Bible threatens his talking points, he tells his followers to ignore it and just obey the clerics (meaning, ultimately, guys like him).