The White Supremacist Pastor in Jake Lang’s Shadow
Minneapolis, MN — On Aug. 22, far-right provocateur Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang arrived in front of Minneapolis City Hall in the bed of a black Honda Ridgeline followed by a white SUV occupied by private security guards Lang hired for display.
Lang, who was accompanied by six others in the back of the truck, was here for his “N-word march” – spelled out in whole on the event’s flyer – protesting against the verdict reached weeks earlier against Rochester resident Shiloh Hendrix for calling an 8-year-old boy the slur at a playground last year.
As the crowd of counter-protesters surrounded the truck to drown out whatever Lang planned on shouting into his megaphone, a man in a camouflage balaclava and sunglasses whipped out his phone and began recording. Moments later, a man dressed as Spider-Man climbed over the cab of the truck and lunged at Lang, striking him several times in the face.
Matthew Oduguwa, one of Lang’s security guards, was busy pepper spraying peaceful protesters and press when he noticed this, turning back to the truck to grab at Spider-Man, wrenching him off of Lang and dragging him over the top of the balaclava-wearing man, who fell overboard head-first onto the sidewalk below.
The man, whose real identity was pastor Joel Tenney of Tiffin, Iowa, quickly scurried away through the cloud of noxious chemicals that Oduguwa and another security guard named Steve Major hosed the crowd down with, disappearing somewhere behind the white SUV.
“Bear spray hits different,” Tenney posted to his Instagram story later with a selfie across the street from City Hall, the balaclava peeled back to reveal ruby-red skin and a stream of snot running from his nose, coating his upper-lip. “At least I took down gay spiderman when he started throwing hands at Jake, busted my nose throwing him to the concrete tho [sic].”
Tenney, who runs Alpha Pneuma Ministries, was not among the seven people arrested by police later in the day, apparently not accompanying Lang and the others as they fled the scene.
Hennepin County at first charged the seven with probable cause riot, only to renege on the charges after it was revealed that the n-word march was coordinated with the Minneapolis Police Department in advance – something that was very obvious to those at the scene watching the police work hand in hand with the hired security.
After a few days over the weekend and 36 hours of probable cause hold, the jail released all but Lang, who was awaiting extradition to Texas after the arrest violated his bond in the Lone Star State. Like the initial charges, that fell through as well, and Lang was ultimately released with zero consequences.
Of all of the men who accompanied Lang on his racial slur-themed event, Tenney has one of the largest national profiles. Like Lang, the Armenia-obsessed MAGA pastor from Iowa is an unabashed white supremacist – a term Tenney cloaks with euphemisms – and dedicates much of his public activism to transforming the United States into a Christian theocracy.
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, in December 2023, Tenney led an Iowa Trump rally in prayer as an official speaker. Before praying over the ravenous multitude, he made the case that re-electing “President Trump for the third time” would result in punishment for people who promote “evil” in the country.
“This election is part of a spiritual battle,” Tenney said. “There are demonic forces at play. But judgement is coming.”
This is not such an extreme jump for Tenney, who has directly compared Trump to Jesus Christ in the past by referring to the president as “God’s anointed man.”
Tenney appeared on a small podcast in July, where the hosts thanked him for connecting them with Lang for an episode that appears to be missing from their uploads.
“I’ve known Jake for a while,” Tenney said. “I’ve done some different activities with him. First in Frisco, Texas, I believe. And then we went to Tennessee, and then after that I think we came to California for the Black Entertainment Television awards.”
Tenney outlined multiple occasions where he traveled the country with Lang, first appearing with him in Frisco, Texas, to protest the construction of a mosque. After that he went to Tennessee with Lang, where a judge held Lang in contempt of court for interrupting the trial of Dalton Eatherly, otherwise known online as “Chud the Builder.” After Tennessee, Tenney accompanied Lang to the Black Entertainment Television awards in Los Angeles, where Lang appeared carrying a sign reading “black parents are failures.”
“While I don’t agree with him on everything,” Tennet said, “I say ultimately he is doing what white Christian American heritage men need to be doing, and that’s rising up and standing up for their country.”
The podcast was ultimately an occasion for Tenney to outline his white nationalist worldview, such as the genetic superiority of white people and not wanting to live next to or raise his children around non-white people.
“I’m not a racist,” Tenney said. “I’m a white preservationist, a white continuationist, and I love white pride.”
While he protests being labeled as a racist, he prefers when the United States was “white and racist,” talking at length about how the founding fathers intended the country to be white and Christian and how that all started to change in the 1960s.
“We were white and racist for the longest time,” Tenney said. “We need to go back to that.”
Nested in an aside on Hitler’s true intention toward Jews, making a case that Hitler was more of a Zionist who believed Jewish people should be completely removed from Europe and sent to the Levant, Tenney mentions that he first read Mein Kampf when he was 13. Naturally, this is also where he breaks with Lang, who believes white Jews can stay in the United States.
“No,” Tenney said, shrugging. “They all gotta go.”
In an Instagram post from July, Tenney, dressed in a tuxedo and holding a Trump challenge coin that he’s displaying for the camera, asks viewers in a caption if they have figured out who runs the banks and the media.
“Maybe you want to stop it? Remember what happened to the Goyim last time they stood up for themselves,” Tenney writes in the caption, directly echoing neo-Nazi talking points, as he plays around with the Trump coin. “It didn’t go well for them, millions displaced, 10s of millions killed, Germany & Europe destroyed.”
Lang, who Tenney seems to accompany around the country, is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent on his mother’s side.
Despite Tenney’s white supremacist tangents, the majority of the two-hour-long podcast was dedicated to talking about Armenia. This is not totally surprising, since it seems nothing is more important to him than the land-locked country in the Caucuses.
Appearing in an ascot in November 2023 for an interview with the Armenian media company Alpha News – not to be confused with the far-right media outlet with the same name based in Minnesota – Tenney was quoted as saying “Armenia is the greatest love of my life. I want my grandchildren to be Armenian.”
During the interview, Tenney claims God explicitly told him to sell off all of his possessions and to give his inheritance and savings to “Armenian widows and fatherless [sic].”
“I thought that Armenia was a Native American tribe, maybe,” he said.
Since that fateful day, Tenney has dedicated a significant amount of time and money to Armenia, even lobbying on behalf of Armenia, according to Tenney in his interview with Alpha News.
Another claim made by Tenney in the interview is that a car accident he was in years ago allowed him to see colors when playing musical notes, ultimately allowing him to perfectly play the music of Armenian composer Komitas.
On his family YouTube channel, seemingly dedicated to showing off his growing brood of white toddlers, he spends a lot of time in Armenia, producing content in the style of a travel vlog.
“Had 6 kids in 7 years to help the white race from going extinct,” his wife Sarah Elizabeth posted on Instagram earlier this year. “My husband says it’s time for white baby number 7.”
One video of him and his wife at Mar-a-Lago in February 2025 shows Tenney speaking with such MAGA-world figures as Michael Flynn. Another video shows him speaking to a press gaggle in front of the U.S. Capitol during Trump’s second inauguration, proclaiming a “restoration of Godliness in America.”
“This administration shall be the best administration that America has seen in over a century,” Tenney shouted. “We will stand with Poland, we will stand with Armenia.”
Another shot of Tenney inside the Turning Point “Inaugural Eve Ball” shows him talking to Jordan Peterson about the “ethnic cleansing” of Christians in Armenia.
In April 2018, a Minnesota jury found Tenney guilty of fifth degree criminal sexual conduct for sexually assaulting a woman at a hotel in Burnsville he was working at in 2016. According to the civil complaint, Tenney followed the woman into a bathroom and masturbated while she was in a stall.
When the woman attempted the leave the bathroom, Tenney stopped her by putting his hand on her chest.
“You’re not going to leave me like this,” Tenney allegedly said, according to the complaint. “You’re at least going to suck my dick.”
The woman, who had no permanent residence and was set up in the hotel by a social worker for one week, was afraid of losing her room at the hotel and so complied.
Video surveillance provided by the hotel showed Tenney following the woman into the restroom, where they both remained for nearly seven minutes.
On August 30, Tenney appeared with Lang again outside of the 180 Church in Detroit, Michigan, for Pastor Lorenzo Sewell’s Sunday sermon against the “demonic Democratic Party.” Sewell previously invited his congregation to pray over Lang and denounced “mongrel third-worlders” who are “multiplying like cockroaches.”
Tenney, with a handgun visibly holstered on his waist, stood behind Lang as he claimed the protesters were committing a hate crime for protesting outside of their house of worship and intimidating them with weapons.
“You don’t see us outside their satanic temples,” Tenney said, drawing the camera off of Lang. “You don’t see us outside the church of Satan or outside a Mosque disrupting their worship.”
In fact, during Lang’s extended hate march across the country, he has frequently appeared at mosques to directly confront Muslim worshipers and burn copies of the Quran. Most recently, he appeared in front of a mosque in Orlando, Florida, but regularly appears at the Islamic Center in Dearborn, Michigan, and the Epic City Mosque in Plano, Texas.
On one occasion, Lang went “undercover” into a mosque in Tampa, Florida, while it was in session, ultimately getting removed by staff.
“These people,” Tenney said, gesturing at the protesters on the other side of the street from the church. “They are protesting our right to worship in assembly, and this is just uncalled for.”
Tenney has not made any attempts to distance himself from Lang, who has drawn ire from avowed neo-Nazis who claim the J6er is a Jewish provocateur and not part of their movement.
Despite Tenney’s unfavorable view of Jewish people, considering Lang’s own ancestry, he continues to follow in the wake of Lang’s national campaign of terror, using the inevitable media attention to preach his own brand of hate.
This article has been updated as of Sept. 18, 2026, to include past sexual assault allegations on Tenney.
Cover image contributed by L. Cam Anderson.
Related Jake Lang coverage:
Hennepin County Drops Charges Against Jake Lang, Citing Communication with Police
Who Attended Jake Lang’s N-Word March in Minneapolis?
Minneapolis Once Again Thwarts White Supremacist Jake Lang
The Many Humiliations of White Supremacist Jake Lang
Far-Right Provocateur Jake Lang Chased Out of Minneapolis During Hate Rally
Jake Lang’s Campaign of Terror
More UR coverage of far-right investigations:
Follow us on X (aka Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky and Patreon.
Please consider a tax-deductible donation to help sustain our horizontally-organized, non-profit media organization:
