They’re doing to America what they did to Christianity | Bill McKibben – The Guardian

Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the Maga evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression
Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have dared – really, no other president would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with the government. And no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry. Even the worst American leaders were willing to maintain the notion that they represented all the people; Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked about the poop video, for once did not bother lying that he had not seen it. Instead he said: “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media.”
As disorienting as it is to watch the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to “the meek shall die of cholera.” This has happened more slowly, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
What particularly hurts is the fact that at no point did we manage to fight back, not effectively anyway. Without intending to, we surrendered control of the idea of Jesus. It is a story that may provide some insights into how to fight the attack on democracy.
Many readers, younger ones especially, will require some backstory. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the building that would house the National Council of Churches on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – on that day, according to a history of Protestantism by Mark Silk, a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible – every one of these denominations eventually backed the civil rights movement, and Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Washington was literally planned from the Methodist national headquarters, the closest private building to the Capitol. (Catholicism accounted for another third of Americans, an important piece of the story I will get to eventually.)
In the 60 years since, all that has changed; the mainline denominations are now barely a sixth of population, our churches largely aged and declining. Now the most public and powerful forms of Christianity, the vast and often denominationally independent megachurches and TV ministries, are as wildly different from that version of Protestantism as Donald Trump is from Eisenhower.
Paula White-Cain, for instance, who leads the newly created “White House Faith Office”, held a livestreamed prayer service the day after the 2020 election to call on “angelic reinforcement” from Africa and South America to swing the election away from Joe Biden. Doug Wilson, the self-taught pastor who co-founded Pete Hegseth’s denomination has insisted that it was a mistake to let women vote. (He also teaches that sex “cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”, because “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”)
Christianity, it must be said, has always trafficked in angels and had some serious trouble with the role of women. The actually distinctive things about this newly ascendant version of Christianity is that it meshes easily with the savage cruelty of the new political order, one whose tenets and tempers are directly contradictory to that older version I grew up in. They share the same forms, in that all pay homage to Jesus and quote from the Bible, just as the president still inhabits the same White House (or what is left of it). But the Jesus of this imagination – muscular, aggressive and American – is a different man than the one I grew up worshipping. The idea that he can be invoked to justify cutting off aid to foreign countries and bundling immigrants into the back of unmarked vans is repulsive to me, but also mystifying – as if gravity suddenly pulled objects upward.
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and because the fastest-growing cadre of Americans might have little sense of him since they are atheists or agnostics or nones. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith (of my three particular political heroes, only one – Dr King – is a Christian. Gandhi was Hindu, and his colleague, the too-little-known Abdul Ghaffar Khan – was a Muslim). But I do think that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story (though it should be said that I am no theologian, only a layperson and occasional Sunday school teacher).
It is emphatically not the story of a mighty king arising; instead, a baby is born to homeless parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade secret police. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too. This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had.
It is entirely fine to reject the supernatural elements of that story, or to bemoan the fact that it has been repeatedly captured, twisted and exploited by the powerful – but the story itself is one of the unlikely, distinctive and remarkable expressions of human civilization; it has been pressed into service behind any number of bad and violent plans from the Crusades on down, but it has also inspired an unfathomable number of artists, educators, physicians and helpers across the centuries.
In no small measure, it made me who I am. I grew up in the suburbs in the 1960s and 70s when mainline Protestantism retained its strength. I was baptized as a Presbyterian in California; the pastor who previously led my church, Eugene Carson Blake, headed the National Council of Churches, marched with King, and was on the cover of Time in the days when that was ultimate imprimatur. I was confirmed in a Congregational church in Lexington, Massachusetts – the direct descendant of the church where the original Minutemen had worshipped 200 years before. In college, at Harvard, my preacher was a man named Peter Gomes who exemplified the cross-cultural power of that tradition: a Black American with an anglophile’s appreciation for high church solemnity and a Republican by temperament who prayed at Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural, he was nonetheless a profound believer in the liberal tradition in which he came up. And when I left college I ended up for a few years in William Sloane Coffin’s Riverside church in New York, built by John D Rockefeller as more or less the St Peters of American Protestantism where Harry Emerson Fosdick had once preached – a name few recognize today but all would have known at a certain point in our history, for he was the foremost preacher of the first half of the 20th century. Riverside was right next to that building that Eisenhower had dedicated in 1958, the National Council of Churches headquarters sometimes known as “the God Box” – though that institution was already turning into a shell of its former itself, its corridors emptying as the mainline denominations downsized and then downsized again. Sunday morning church was no longer a civic obligation for Americans the way it had been in my youth, and for those who still wanted a Christian life, the evangelicalism we now see in full flower was beginning its rise.
I am less concerned with the shrinkage of the mainline church than with the replacement of its Jesus with this very different one. In some ways the Jesus of my early years was a good fit with the New Deal and then postwar politics – at once concerned with others, and also a figure of peace in a tense bipolar world. Not a pacifist, but an apt figure for an age reacting to Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Montgomery. The new Jesus is none of that. Indeed, according to his acolytes, he rejects all of it, and utterly.
Consider, for instance, one heir to Charlie Kirk’s place at the top of Maga Christianity. Allie Beth Stuckey, grew up in a megachurch; her father, a Texas state legislator, is senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation, the cradle of Project 2025. She is a distillation of the currently dominant American Christianity, and above all, her Jesus rejects empathy. This year, she published a bestselling book describing the concept as toxic and unbiblical; she is enthusiastic in her support for the president, including his immigration policies, which she describes as scriptural. As she told a reporter recently: “We can only look to scripture to see the principles of nations, of governance, of laws, of borders, of security, of God’s provision through walls, the Book of Nehemiah, and say: ‘OK. Can we apply those principles to America today? Do they still have wisdom? Does it make sense why God wanted secure walls for Jerusalem? Does that still apply to America?’”
Basing your support for ICE raids on terrified immigrants on a relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs. In this case, a story about Nehemiah rebuilding walls in parts of Jerusalem becomes a reason to ignore the utterly clear and oft-repeated instruction of Jesus to welcome the stranger. Indeed, Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan, which quite clearly extends this welcome beyond our nationalities. “Philoxenia” is the Greek term used in the New Testament for this love of strangers – it is the opposite of xenophobia, which is what JD Vance and Trump were practising when they started lying about immigrants dining on cats and dogs. To continue with the gastronomic theme, as a theologian the cherrypicking Stuckey, in her citation of Nehemiah and his walls, is like a restaurant critic who has visited a steakhouse, noted that it has creamed spinach on the menu, and declared confidently that it is a vegetarian eatery. (And as long as we are on the subject, Nehemiah, once done with his wall project, spent a fair amount of time chasing entrepreneurs out of the Temple because they had been using it for their own commercial purposes; tickets for Stuckey’s recent Share the Arrows conference, according to the Wall Street Journal, cost between $99 and $5,000, which bought VIP seating and a private lunch and dinner with Stuckey. Attenders strolled hallways lined with vendors selling everything from Christian-themed clothing and children’s books to Patriot cell service: “America’s Only Christian Conservative Wireless Provider – Defending God-Given Rights & Freedoms”.)
But the Bible at least talks about walls. It has almost nothing to say about the rest of their favorite culture war hobby horses – you can find five scattered references to what might be homosexuality in the Bible, though recent scholarship makes clear they were actually attacks on prostitution and abuse. Jesus himself had exactly nothing to say on the topic – not a sermon, not a parable, not even an offhand nasty joke. He also did not talk about transgender people, even though they have been a feature of every culture any anthropologist has ever studied. In her concession speech after her loss in the Republican Virginia governor’s race, Winsome Earle-Sears declared that she was “a Christian first and a Republican second”. But 57% of the Republican party’s advertising spending in her race had reportedly gone to attacking transgender people, a topic – again – that Jesus ignored. None of that spending went to attacking Elon Musk (a recently self-proclaimed “cultural Christian”), who had managed to kill 600,000 poor people by “feeding USAID into a woodchipper” in the first weekend of his Doge campaign. Musk’s new pay raise means that he could have, if he had pleased, made each of those 600,000 people a millionaire instead, but he did not, which may explain why Jesus thought that it was easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man to heaven. If you think I am being hyperbolic here, a “rich young ruler” actually presented himself to Jesus and asked what he should do, and Jesus said he should sell his stuff and give it to the poor. This is what Jesus was about.
The obvious and straightforward fact that the Jesus of the gospels calls for a kind of radical love centered on the poor is what has always made Christianity something of a scandalous religion: appealing to the masses, but because of its inherent radicalness needing to be contained. In the 1950s it was contained by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo. The 1960s broke that – the leadership of these churches, who were among the most committed followers of Jesus, found that they had little choice but to march in Selma, literally or figuratively. But many of their followers did not want to; they had been on board because Protestantism was part of the fabric of American life, not a challenge to it. Membership in mainline churches began dropping off. And for many of those who still felt a cultural or personal need for Christianity, evangelicalism was on the rise: it meshed wonderfully with the emerging Reagan-era emphasis on individualism and spoke directly to Americans who rejected the movements of the civil rights era.
The idea that personal salvation – as opposed to concern for others – was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical, but over the decades it has morphed into the absurd farce we see now, where Jesus is held to bless every show of dominance and aggression we can imagine. There is, by now, a well-established genre of Republican officials posing for Christmas cards with submachine guns; Nashville Republican congressman Andy Ogles passed them out to his entire family for a picture. He was one of the congresspeople who led the charge not only to freeze USAID funding for the poorest people in the world, but to use that money instead for increased deportations from this country. It is as if he had decided to see exactly how un-Christlike it was possible for one human being to be – indeed, he demanded that the local private Christian college Belmont University lose federal funding because it had a hope, unity and belonging department that he thought was too much like “DEI”.
Evangelicals are not unanimous in their support for Trump. For years I have written a column for the progressive evangelical magazine Sojourners, for example, but even its publishers would confess that they are very much a minority. Realistically, white evangelicalism is the base of Trump’s support, and this flock has not broken with him the way many of his other followers have in the past nine months.
For most readers, rightly, none of this inside baseball will matter much. For me, personally, it certainly does: it is as weird to me as a Christian as it to me as an American to see King Trump fantasizing about offloading his bowel movements from a plane on our heads. But the reason I bother to write about it is not personal but strategic. That is because mainline Protestantism made a serious mistake: surrendering its vision of Jesus without much of a fight. It is not entirely gone – there remain thousands of wonderful and vibrant congregations, and leaders like the Rev William Barber who occasionally manage to break through in public. Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde raised a ruckus this winter when, with Trump in attendance, she prayed for him to show compassion to immigrants; there have been more than a scattering of pastors in the protests outside immigration offices, just as there are in almost every social movement in this country. But these exceptions prove, I fear, the rule of general passivity: in general, the old mainline Christianity never was able to offer a very potent defense against the aggressive and toxic new forms of Christianity.
There were structural reasons for that passivity – five or six declining and theologically similar denominations never really considered uniting into one more powerful one, and there were conservative movements within Methodism or Presbyterianism or most of the others that sapped their strength. And there were intellectual reasons – this older tradition wrongly believed, right back to the days of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, that the new emerging take on Jesus was so transparently bogus that eventually people would snap out of it and return to their former orthodoxy. They were wrong, and that is not an error I would like to see repeated in the struggle for democracy; having lost for now the cross, I am not eager to surrender the flag as well.
So I have been heartened to see the steadfast resistance to Trump arise in this past year. It has been great solace to help build the movement that has taken to the streets in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired voters to turn out in numbers in the off-year elections earlier this month. (As the founder of Third Act, which organizes progressives over 60, I am especially gratified by the number of older Americans in the streets, many of them the children of the Eisenhower era, and appalled as I am at the foulness of the president). We will need to continue it, and in the same spirit, with American flags at every demonstration and appeals to the best parts of American history.
And indeed, there are signs of this starting to happen. In Texas, a young Democrat named James Talarico has surged into contention in the state’s Senate race largely on the strength of his forthright declaration of the kind of retro Christianity I have been describing. A part-time seminary student (Presbyterian, one of those mainline denominations that used to dominate America’s spiritual landscape), he said in a sermon two years ago: “Jesus came to transform the world. Christian nationalism is here to maintain the status quo. They have coopted the Son of God. They have turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear mongering fascist. And, it is incumbent upon all Christians to confront it, and denounce it.” (Talarico is doing well enough that he recently came under attack for the sin of following several OnlyFans models on Instagram; his campaign has said that he “follows back and engages with supporters who have large followings and does not investigate their backgrounds”. Given that the president’s record with, say, Stormy Daniels, it is one more example of evangelical absurdity).
Talarico is still an outsider. But Pope Leo is not, and in his first months he has begun at least to suggest that the Roman Catholic church may not watch from the sidelines as this era plays out. Catholicism has been a largely conservative force in American politics in recent years, institutionally obsessed with the abortion debate above all things. Globally, however, things are a little different. If you had suggested a generation ago that the Roman church might become one of the planet’s more progressive large institutions, I would have giggled. But Pope Francis made clear that abortion was not the only issue that counted, insisting that the church focus on the poor. His remarkable encyclical, Laudato Si’, usually described as “about global warming”, was actually much broader, a scathing critique of modernity and the politics of division and exploitation. He followed up, in the last year of his life, by firmly correcting new convert JD Vance, who argued that Augustine preferred that people centered their compassion on family and neighbors. Francis schooled him on the saint, explaining that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups” and urging him to meditate on the parable of the good Samaritan.
I was in Rome earlier this autumn for a session to mark the 10th anniversary of that encyclical, and so got to watch Leo close up for a little while. I was glad to hear him say that he will continue the church’s environmental activism unabated – indeed the Vatican will soon be the world’s first fully solar-powered nation. But I was equally as interested to simply take his measure. He is very much recognizable as a midwest American – if he showed up at your Thanksgiving table as a bachelor uncle in a White Sox cap, you would not find him out of place at all. But his 20 years in Peru and elsewhere around the poor world accomplished two things. One, clearly, was to make him as sensitive as Francis to the plight of the impoverished and vulnerable.
Just as important, Leo – Robert Prevost – was more away than not from America all those decades. So in some ways you see preserved in a kind of amber the attitudes of a man who took his first vows in the 70s, when the kind of ugly Christianity that marks the Trumpers was almost unimaginable. Many American bishops moved hard to the right in the decades that followed, identifying themselves with the Republican party, but Leo seems not to have followed. This month, he explicitly called out American immigration authorities for their brutal treatment of arrested immigrants, particularly the fact that they were being denied communion. “Many people who’ve lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now,” he said. But he went further, saying that when God judged humans: “We’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.”
In the eyes of the new Republican Christianity, that reflection would involve the sin of empathy. Better to build some walls. (This week the president’s staunchest defender, Laura Loomer, accused the Catholic church of “work[ing] so hard to try and destroy our country” by “condemning deportations”.) But for many of us it was a welcome reminder that the old Christianity has not yet been stamped out entirely.
I got to give the talk on Lexington Green at the last No Kings day, and it was a chance to quote from the American Gospel according to old Sam Adams:
The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.
America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the best about American history, just as Christianity is best defended by reference to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of Jesus. In neither case does it mean pretending the worst of both America and Christianity did not happen; it means both humility and belief, a combination that serious American Christians should be comfortable with.
Bill McKibben is the author of Here Comes the Sun (2025), and the founder of Third Act

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