It has been a strange month for American Christians whose religious identity is not bound up with the adoration of President Trump.
We watched a president who postures as a defender of the faith pollute the holiest days of the Christian calendar by invoking God while making profane threats to commit war crimes and annihilate an entire civilization.
The same president offended Christians of all stripes by sharing an AI-generated image of himself appearing as a Christ-like figure, surrounded by prayerful and adoring supporters and carrying out a miraculous healing. Oh, yeah, and he responded to the pope’s calls for peace by rudely insulting the spiritual leader of the world’s Catholics.
We also had Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed “secretary of war” and bloodthirsty crusader wannabe, treating the U.S. attack on the Iranian regime as a holy war to be waged without mercy and with “overwhelming violence.” Meanwhile, he urged Americans to pray for American victory “in the name of Christ” — or was it in the name of Quentin Tarantino?
Hegseth, who clearly sees himself as a holy warrior, is not the only Cabinet member using taxpayer funds to proselytize a MAGA-fied Christianity. Wired Magazine wrote about the Trump team’s use of government resources to inundate civil servants with religious messaging, leading one employee to say that the administration “is not so much proudly Christian as it is belligerently so.”
“There exists a clear throughline of transgressive delight in violating the separation of church and state,” said a Health and Human Service employee, “of a similar corruptive mindset as the joy they take in forcing our agency to reduce services to the public whose mission it is for us to serve.”
It has indeed been a rough year for Americans who support the religious freedom and pluralism that thrive here thanks to the constitutional separation of church and state.
Trump’s devotees claim that he was anointed by God to carry out a divine mission to save America from people they see as their enemies — secularists, feminists, gay and transgender people, non-white immigrants — and to ensure that America remains, or returns to being, their version of a “Christian nation.”
But that’s more fantasy than history. If our country’s founders, who were unhappily familiar with Europe’s state churches, wanted to create a “Christian nation,” they could have written Christian dogma into the Constitution. Instead, they included a ban on any official national religion and an explicit ban on any religious test for public office.
That’s why it was so wrong for Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), chair of Trump’s “religious liberty commission,” to say this month that separation of church and state is “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.” In fact, it is a fundamental American promise that protects religious liberty for everyone. It’s a principle we should be celebrating as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of our declaration of independence from England and its official church.
Instead, the Trump administration is teaming up with a bunch of right-wing Christian nationalists for a May 17 event on the National Mall that is supposed to “rededicate” America to God.
I am no preacher, but what I have learned in my Baptist Church about the Old Testament prophets makes me suspect that God may not look very favorably on being asked to bless a government that is busy slamming its doors to refugees and taking food out of the mouths of hungry people while its corrupt leaders manipulate the system to enrich themselves.
Meanwhile, Trump-appointed judges okayed a Texas law forcing every public school classroom to post a particular legislature-edited version of the Ten Commandments, a set of religious instructions that begins, “I AM the LORD thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
To approve this overtly Christian nationalist legislation, the judges pretended that putting the official stamp of approval on this religious demand is not in any way coercive to students of other faiths and does not undermine parents’ right to direct their children’s religious upbringing. Their arguments are transparently ridiculous, like so many of Trump’s lies.
The political abuse of Christianity is not new to Trump. Millions of American Christians have become sadly accustomed to seeing their faith used and manipulated by politicians and power-seeking pastors to support policies that seem to have little in common with the teachings of Jesus.
That helps explain why so many Christians are excited about James Talarico (D), a state legislator and candidate for the U.S. Senate. Talarico is a seminarian who has thought deeply about his faith and why it leads him to support inclusive and compassionate policies. It makes him particularly effective at challenging religious-right leaders who are used to acting like they have the exclusive right to represent Christianity in the public arena.
Rather than welcome Talarico into our public conversations, they have attacked his faith, demonstrating that the folks who claim “religious persecution” whenever they are questioned are quick to reveal their own religious intolerance.
Trump himself has accused Talarico of insulting Jesus, a bold claim coming from someone who claims he is “all about the gospel” while wallowing in cruelty and corruption. Now that’s insulting.
