Ex-GOP rep. unleashes on pro-Trump evangelicals: 'You don’t understand your own religion'

In response to former President Donald Trump's bizarre Christmas Day rant in which he openly hoped his political opponents would "rot in hell," a retired Republican congressman called on evangelical Christians to reconsider their support of the ex-president.

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who was one of the two Republican members of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack, seized on Trump's Truth Social post to make the argument that pro-Trump Christians couldn't choose to follow both Jesus and the former president.

"I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian. If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion," Kinzinger posted to X.

"Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.'"

Kinzinger, who himself is a member of the Baptist Church, is joining a growing chorus of evangelicals who are calling on their fellow Christians to reject Trump. On Christmas Day, author and journalist Tim Alberta wrote that the looming threat of Christian nationalism — in which adherents of far-right ideologies want to seize the levers of power to institute a Christianity-based hierarchy in society — was too grave to be opposed by Christian believers alone.

"It is incumbent upon [evangelicals] to stand up to this extremism in the Church," Alberta, the son of a megachurch pastor who identified as an evangelical since childhood, wrote in The Atlantic.

"Yet the responsibility is not theirs alone. No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society — none — without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture."

In a November interview with Baptist News promoting his new book Renegade: Defending democracy and liberty in our divided country, Kinzinger said both his political party and his faith had been "hijacked by extremists who represent a real danger to our democracy."

"The devil’s greatest trick has been to convince my fellow Christians to basically destroy their own reputations," Kinzinger said.