MAGA Christians are getting scolded for their unwavering faith in President Donald Trump — whose "insatiable need for revenge" runs counter to the teachings of Jesus — and how his personality has "tragically warped his soul."
In a new analysis for The Atlantic from contributing writer Peter Wehner, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, the author outlines how MAGA's brand of Christianity has granted fundamentalists and evangelicals a common enemy, fueled by Trump.
"It’s no longer an interesting question as to why Trump is an almost perfect inversion of the moral teachings of Jesus; the answer can be traced to a damaged, disordered personality that has tragically warped his soul," Wehner writes. "What is an interesting question is why those who claim that the greatest desire of their life is to follow Jesus revere such a man and seem willing to follow him, instead, to the ends of the earth."
Trump has long claimed that he shuns the "love thy enemy" ethos and has made clear multiple times that "he’s a man filled with hate and driven by vengeance." And that was even before he ran for president.
While many Americans will spend Sundays in church, despite focusing on the teachings of Jesus, many continue to follow Trump.
"Yet many of them will spend part of the rest of the week, and maybe much of the rest of the week, in the right-wing echo chamber, in the company of conflict entrepreneurs, having their emotions inflamed, feeling the same way toward their enemies as Donald Trump does toward his enemies. And it will all make perfect sense to them," Wehner writes.
It's not just shocking, considering the hypocrisy of what Christians stand for, the author suggests. But it's complex, and MAGA-Christianity appears to be on the rise.
"Many of the leaders within the Christian-MAGA movement are autocratic, arrogant, and controlling; they lack accountability, demand unquestioned loyalty, and try to intimidate their critics, especially those within their church or denomination. The grievances and resentment they feel are impossible to overstate; they are suffering from a persecution complex. Fully MAGA-fied Christians view Trump as the 'ultimate fighting machine,' in the words of the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and they love him for it. The most militant and fanatical Trump supporters refer to our era as a “Bonhoeffer moment.” (The phrase is meant to draw parallels between the 'woke left' in America and Nazism.) Hard-core MAGA Christians hardly make up the whole of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, but they do constitute a large part of it, and they are on the ascendancy."
With culture-war politics at the surface, Trump's expressions of hate "consecrate their resentments," which is a sharp contrast to Erika Kirk's notable speech at her husband Charlie Kirk's memorial service and public statement of forgiveness. But for MAGA Christians, "they can move easily between two worlds," according to the author.
"For many fundamentalists and evangelicals, politics meets the longing and the needs that aren’t being met by churches and traditional faith communities," Wehner writes. "If there is something useful that has come of the Trump era, and there’s not much, it is that it has offered a diagnostic CT scan of much of American Christianity. Trump and the MAGA movement capitalized on, and then amplified, the problems facing Christian communities, but they did not create them."