The Trump administration has been described, with some frequency, as the governing expression of Christian nationalism. Evangelical pastors appear at rallies. Bible verses get quoted at press conferences. Cabinet members invoke Scripture to justify policy. The framing is tidy, and it’s everywhere.
There’s just one problem: the actual policies don’t line up with anything resembling Christian teaching. And increasingly, neither does the man at the center of it all.
The drama is in the gap
Trump has never demonstrated a particularly firm grasp of Christianity itself. He once told an audience he’d never asked God for forgiveness, thereby missing what most theologians would describe as the central premise of the faith. He referred to “Two Corinthians” at a 2015 event. He mocked Catholics by floating the idea that he should be pope. In April, he posted an AI image of himself depicted as Jesus, complete with glowing hands and linen robes, then deleted it and claimed he thought it showed him as a doctor.
His spiritual adviser, Pastor Mark Burns, told The New Yorker that Trump’s sins “don’t matter in the eyes of the Lord” because he’s been forgiven. That interpretation is doing some heavy theological lifting, particularly when the sins in question include nearly two dozen accusations of sexual misconduct and a federal jury’s 2023 conclusion that he sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll.
The gap between branding and behavior extends well beyond Trump’s personal conduct. The policies his administration is implementing don’t map onto Christian ethics in any recognizable form.
What the policies actually look like
Mass deportations have created a detention system housing migrants in federal warehouses under conditions a lawsuit describes as “severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards; squalid living conditions; spoiled and inadequate food; inadequate access to basic hygiene products such as soap, razors, or nail clippers; outbreaks of disease; and limited or no access to sunlight.” New Jersey is suing private detention operators for blocking state health inspectors.
When Elon Musk dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, he severed billions in funding to Christian charities and faith-based groups providing aid in developing countries. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of people died as a result. The administration’s response: aggressive indifference.
Trump celebrated the fact that his administration had “lifted nearly five million Americans off food stamps” in the past six months. What he actually meant: new requirements excluded more than four million people from SNAP benefits. The president was announcing that millions more Americans are now going hungry.
Conservative Christian writer David French tied the cuts to a shift among some right-wing Christians to reject empathy outright, pointing to evangelical books denouncing “toxic empathy” and “the sin of empathy.” Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, has expressed similar views about the limits of Christian love. Pope Francis issued a pointed rebuke.
The theological pushback is coming from inside the church
Many of Trump’s most vocal critics are Christians. Catholic bishops and mainline Protestant leaders have condemned his policies. Reverend William Barber, who leads North Carolina’s “Moral Monday” civil rights movement, told The New Republic in 2024 that Christian nationalists have “hijacked” the faith. “We have a name for it in Christianity,” Barber said. “It’s called heresy.”
Texas state lawmaker James Talarico became a flashpoint last month when he defended transgender students by citing Genesis. “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between,” Talarico argued in 2021. “God is nonbinary.” The statement ignited a postelection firestorm from Republicans. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru acknowledged, somewhat reluctantly, that Talarico was theologically correct. The Catholic catechism states plainly that God “transcends the human distinction between the sexes.”
Even Musk and Peter Thiel don’t fit the Christian nationalist mold in any coherent way. Musk describes himself as a “cultural Christian” who isn’t “particularly religious” but likes some of Jesus’s teachings. He rejects, for instance, the part about turning the other cheek. Thiel has been delivering lectures on the Antichrist that identify Greta Thunberg as a potential candidate and describe Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a “new Rome.” The theological rigor is not immediately apparent.
What it actually is
The animating logic behind these policies isn’t Christian doctrine. It’s white supremacy dressed in religious language. Christian groups once helped resettle refugees. The Trump administration ended those programs for everyone except white Afrikaners from South Africa. Christian hospitals helped administer vaccines. The Trump administration has embraced anti-vaccine propaganda in what amounts to a grave blow to centuries of American public health policy.
The term “Christian nationalism” gives the movement theological legitimacy it hasn’t earned and obscures what’s actually happening: a government using religious branding to justify cruelty, exclusion, and indifference to suffering.
The question isn’t whether Trump and his allies invoke Christian language. They do, frequently and loudly. The question is whether the millions of Christians who voted for him twice will eventually notice that the policies don’t match the Scripture, and whether that will matter when they vote again.
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