One of the obvious ironies of Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war of choice with Iran — and his statement to its citizen-protesters that this is their moment to overturn an authoritarian theocracy that is making them live in misery and destroying their economy — is that his MAGA movement is doing all it can to create a Christian white nationalist theocracy at home while cheering on the beating and killing of citizen-protesters.
Trump and his handpicked team of the worst people you can imagine (his incompetent, mewling kakistocracy) are gleefully attacking women, immigrants, universities, public education, scientists, LGBTQ+ folks and our historic allies, as well as nonpartisan experts in economics and governance and foreign affairs — everything, in fact, that has made America creative, prosperous and secure.
It’s gotten so dire under Trump that good people of all sorts are leaving the country in numbers not seen since the Depression.
Another obvious irony is that MAGA’s self-styled supreme leader of this Christian white nationalist movement is no Christian. As a serial sexual predator, a habitual perpetrator of fraud, the most relentless liar on the planet and a lifelong supplicant of Mammon, Trump is by every measure anything but a follower of Jesus Christ. (While we are pointing out incongruities, it should be noted that with his very weird daily troweling-on of pancake makeup, he’s also only rarely “white.”)
As reported by Jonathan Larsen on his Substack, “The F**king News,” some U.S. military commanders have been telling their troops that the war on Iran is a Christian war. So it is more than fair to critique these so-called Christian leaders.
As a serial sexual predator, a habitual perpetrator of fraud, the most relentless liar on the planet and a lifelong supplicant of Mammon, Trump is by every measure anything but a follower of Jesus Christ.
It hardly seems worth taking the time to pick apart Trump’s performative Christianity. He’s the guy who hawks Bibles and yet cannot name even one line of scripture he admires. (It’s too personal, you see. Oh, and he’s “probably equally” both an Old Testament and New Testament guy, 50–50.)
As a cultural Christian — I’m the grandson of a minister and was raised Presbyterian, and was active while our daughters were young — I’m not given to quoting scripture. Religious belief is personal, and I don’t appreciate it when people evangelize to me or, you know, try to write their beliefs into public policy. But this passage from Proverbs (6:16–19) is uncanny suited to our moment:
There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflicts in the community.
A quick check online shows that versions of that have been floating around in various online memes for some years. (For instance, back in 2019, Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, was attacked by Trump supporters for posting the passage without comment.)
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In the version I saw recently, above the verses is a photo of Trump, showing off some of the haughtiest eyes you’ve ever seen (imagine one of those tough-guy official portraits inspired by his mugshot, or the glare he gives a reporter who dares to ask him a real question). But, gosh, the manchild leader of the everyday American found himself a millionaire at the age of eight, so I guess he has an excuse for overall haughtiness, compared to the likes of you and me. He simply never learned better.
I may be only a cultural Christian, but as an old friend told me recently, she could go for more cultural Christians these days.
Me, too.
I harp on this frequently, but in these fraught times for religious freedom (as well as freedom from religion), it bears repeating: As journalist and historian Garry Wills notes in “Head and Heart: A History of Christianity in America,” most of America’s founders were deists, rather than straight-up Christians. Wills, who is himself a Catholic, called the separation of church and state embodied in the First Amendment’s Establishment clause “a stunning innovation,” the one unique, genius thing about our nation’s founding document.
Yes, the founders, for men of their era, were enlightened. One might even call them woke. Supporting a plurality of religious beliefs, along with the freedom to hold none at all, was part of the brilliant enlightenment they wrote into the Constitution.
Fast-forward almost 250 years, and we have a gold-plated faux-Christian in the White House insisting that we are a Christian nation.
I checked Dante’s “Inferno” to see where in that realm Trump might find himself. Most of the denizens of Dante’s imagined hell are being eternally tormented for specific moral crimes, but Trump would immediately be issued a gold VIP pass downward through every circle.
In 1631, a new edition of the King James Bible from the royal printers in London became known as the “Wicked Bible” because of the omission of a single word in Exodus 20:14, which accidentally (or, it was thought, satanically) read: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” If Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible (available in several different versions, including the $99 First Lady Edition) were true to the moral compass of its namesake, many more of the nots would disappear.
After Trump began to muse, some time back, about his chances of gaining admittance to heaven, I checked Dante’s “Inferno” to see where in that realm he might most likely find himself. Most of the unhappy denizens of Dante’s imagined hell are being eternally tormented for specific moral crimes in categories covering lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. What’s amazing about Donald Trump is that he would immediately be issued a gold VIP pass downward through every circle; they’d be eager to punish him at, say, the second level (for the lustful), but, knowing he was “in the house,” multifarious demons and imps from lower levels would begin clamoring to get their hands on him.
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Why should we rehash all this when every civilized person in the world knows who Trump is and is revolted by his hateful heart? Well, it is always necessary to tell the truth, calmly and forthrightly, in the face of propaganda. Trump trades on his entirely bogus Christian bona fides and, to use one of his favorite catchphrases, he is a sinner “like the world has never seen.” Whether you are a believer or someone who has no time for organized religion, the truth will set you free.
This final quote is not from the Bible, although it has the cadence of a religious verse. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been supreme leader of Allied forces in the fight against fascism during World War II and was himself a devoutly religious man, delivered a famous speech in 1953 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He had this to say about the ultimate effects of military spending:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Trump is spending billions on his fake-Christian war in Iran to distract us from the Trump-Epstein Files™ (as comedian Jimmy Kimmel has trademarked them), with no plan whatsoever — beyond, perhaps, having Pete Hegseth frat-boy his way through press conferences. He is destroying the lives of Iranians and Americans alike, at a much deeper level than the present-tense death and destruction we can see today.
I can think of various words to describe this war. But don’t call it Christian.
