The contrast could hardly have been greater.
During a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, held in a stadium filled with nearly 100,000 people, Erika Kirk, the wife of the slain right-wing activist, expressed both her profound love for her husband and the profound grief brought on by his death. It was the speech of a woman deeply influenced by her Christian faith. And it included remarkable words, which she struggled to say but was still able to articulate.
“My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life,” Kirk said. “That young man. That young man. On the cross, our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do.’ That man—that young man—I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did. And it’s what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
The audience rose to its feet to applaud in support of the grieving widow. But there was another speaker yet to come.
Donald Trump, following Erika Kirk, said Charlie was “a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them.” But then the president, diverting from his script, couldn’t resist voicing his dissent. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said. “I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them.” He added, “I’m sorry, Erika.” The audience began to laugh and to cheer. Trump gave them a knowing smile. A man who lies about nearly everything couldn’t bring himself to lie about his hate for his opponents.
What Trump said at the Kirk memorial service was hardly a revelation. President Trump has in the past made clear his disagreement with, and even his contempt for, some of the core teachings of Jesus. So has his son Don Jr., who told a Turning Point USA gathering in 2021 that turning the other cheek has “gotten us nothing.”
Donald Trump, decades before he ran for the presidency, acknowledged that he’s a man filled with hate and driven by vengeance. It’s not simply that those qualities are part of who he is; it is that he draws strength from the dark passions.
Trump has spent nearly every day of the past decade confirming that he lacks empathy. He sees himself as both entitled and as a victim. He’s incapable of remorse. He’s driven by an insatiable need for revenge. And he enjoys inflicting pain on others.
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. 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.
It’s a complicated matter to untangle. For a significant number of evangelical Protestants the explanation is fairly straightforward: They celebrate the Trump ethic; it pervades their church and their faith communities.
Within this world exists a subculture that includes the so-called TheoBros, men who often identify as Christian nationalists who see themselves as theological warriors. In this subculture, compassion is viewed as a weakness; bullying and abusive language, snide putdowns, misogyny, and “owning the libs” are fashionable. They’re the Christian version of shock jocks.
One example: Pastor Joel Webbon, an influential figure within this world, believes that women should be denied the right to vote. Women’s suffrage was “just one liberal attempt by people who hated Christ to sever the covenant bond between husband and wife.” Extending voting rights to women has, he believes, proved a terrible mistake. “I want strong marriages, I want cohesive households, I want representative government all the way down to the family, and I also want babies not murdered. I don’t want drag-queen story hour, I don’t want rainbow jihad, and none of that could happen if women couldn’t vote.” Musing about how nationalism got a bad name, Webbon blamed an “Austrian painter who might, depending on your World War II history, might have been a little overly zealous. I personally, I don’t have—I don’t really have a dog in the fight.” You get the point.
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.
The churches and denominations that are not militantly MAGA but are still overwhelmingly composed of Trump supporters often get less attention than churches and denominations that are hyper-politicized, but they’re also essential to the Trump coalition. So it’s useful to understand the complex dynamic at play in those spaces.
I say complex because, every Sunday, millions of Christians attend churches that are nondenominational and that are affiliated with conservative Protestant denominations. These churches aren’t particularly political, and they are led by pastors who preach thoughtfully on topics such as loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, which Jesus talked about during his Sermon on the Mount; and on verses like this one, found in the Book of Ephesians, written by the Apostle Paul: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
The great majority of people attending these churches wouldn’t consider those verses to be woke talking points; they would view them as the inerrant Word of God. They would earnestly pray that those words would sanctify their life and that they would become more like Jesus. And almost to a person, these congregants would say that Christ is at the center of their life, their “all in all.”
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.
“It grieves me to see people I’ve known for years (some as far back as the Jesus Movement of the 1970s) seduced by a mean-spirited culture-war Christianity that is but a perverse caricature of the authentic faith formed around Jesus of Nazareth,” Brian Zahnd, a pastor and author, posted on social media recently. “Yes, it grieves me terribly.”
That grief is shared by many of us, and Zahnd’s comment raises these questions: How did the seduction of so many evangelicals happen? And how did Donald Trump, of all people, win not just their votes but their hearts?
The answer is convoluted and theological in nature. For far too many Christians, faith, although an important part of their life, is not primary, and it’s even less often transformative. Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, has said that Jesus is a “hood ornament” for many American Christians. The expectation of, among others, the Apostle Paul wasn’t human perfection. He believed that original sin touched every human life, and many of his Epistles were written to address serious problems within the Church.
But his assumption, and not his alone, was that Christians, because of their faith, were to be “set apart”—“ministers of reconciliation” known for their love and mercy, holy and blameless and above reproach, without malice, and free of bitterness, rage, and anger. Christianity was supposed to bring an internal transformation, a profound inner shift in a person’s identity and motivations. In a warped and crooked generation, the Book of Philippians tells us, followers of Jesus were to be blameless and pure, children of God, shining like stars in the sky. Elsewhere we’re told that the fruit of the Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Throughout history, countless people have had their lives transformed by faith and by grace, and have helped to bring healing to a broken world. It has been an enormous gift to me to know such people in the here and now; I have profiled several of them in The Atlantic. I know many more.
But they are exceptional, and if we’re honest—if Christians are honest—the gap between how those who claim to be followers of Jesus conduct themselves versus how others in the world conduct themselves is often narrow, if it exists at all. We see that in high-profile scandals and in people’s daily lives, where abusive behavior, harsh judgmentalism, and unkindness are spread pretty equally among believers and unbelievers.
What’s happened, then, is that faith isn’t nearly as central to the life of many Christians as they say it is, or that they wish it were. Christianity has its own semantic world, phrases and buzzwords that are meant to convey the importance of faith in our life. In many cases, though, these are expressions of an aspiration, not the reflection of a current reality.
When people in church services sing hymns of praise that declare, “Make me a channel of your peace; where there is hatred let me bring your love; where there is injury, your pardon, Lord; and where there’s doubt, true faith in you,” those are authentic expressions of real desires. But they often have a short half-life; they can be undone by midweek, especially if you happen to spend time on social media or listen to podcasts that stir up the dark passions. Peacemaking is not the coin of that realm.
In my experience, pastors tend to see that better than most of the rest of us. Their appeal, Sunday after Sunday, is for their congregants to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” They know that many in their congregation stumble and fall in answering that calling, and the honest pastors know that they often stumble themselves, too.
I say all this to provide context for my next observation, which may help explain this moment: Politics fills the void left by faith, and it’s doing so in ways that I’ve never quite seen before. For many fundamentalists and evangelicals, politics meets the longing and the needs that aren’t being met by churches and traditional faith communities. 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.
Politics, especially culture-war politics, provides many fundamentalists and evangelicals with a sense of community and a common enemy. It gives purpose and meaning to their life, turning them into protagonists in a great drama pitting good against evil. They are vivified by it. And they reassure one another, time and again, that the dark passions are actually expressions of righteousness. They consecrate their resentments. As a result, they deform what many of us consider to be the most compelling voice and life there ever was, an itinerant preacher who 2,000 years ago traveled throughout Galilee and Judea, teaching new commandments on some days and healing the sick and the social outcasts on others, all the while proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
Donald Trump might not be perfect, his religious supporters concede, but he is fighting on the side of the angels. He’s a modern-day Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed the Jews to end their captivity and return to their homeland. The hand of the Lord is upon this president. And they will stand with him every step of the way. That is why people at the Charlie Kirk memorial service could be moved by the words of forgiveness by Erika Kirk and also inspired by the words of hate by the president of the United States. They can move easily between two worlds. But they are encamping in the world of moral ugliness, a world of antipathy, and, for now, they seem quite at home there.
We don’t know how it will end. But here’s what I do know, or at least what my understanding of the Christian faith has taught me to believe: We are called to be faithful, not necessarily successful, for success lies beyond our powers. This world is broken but beautiful, a gift from God, and the good in this world is worth fighting for. One life on this Earth is all we get, and, in the words of the pastor and theologian Frederick Buechner, “at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.” God is far more resplendent than the theologies and doctrines about God that we humans construct. And, as the writer Rachel Held Evans put it, “faith is always a risk. No matter what we believe, there’s always the chance we might be wrong. But the story of Jesus is just the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”
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