When I was young, the Christian right was my nemesis.
These days, I’m praying for its return.
I grew up as a 1990s kid in the conservative suburbs north of Atlanta, where it was a given that everyone was at church on Sunday morning (and Waffle House afterward, as everybody knows that Chick-fil-A rests on the seventh day, just as God did).
Although I was raised Muslim, my parents enrolled me in the finest local pre-K, which was run by Baptists. My aversion to the Christian right started early: The teachers confiscated my Halloween coloring book for its sinful themes, which made me collapse into a fit of tears.
In high school, I grew politically aware and joined my high school’s chapter of the Gay-Straight Alliance. I frequently argued with every classmate I could that gay marriage was not only acceptable but preferable. In Pakistani American culture, if you’re not married by your mid-20s, you’re basically a loser who will die alone. How could I consign my gay friends to that fate?
As the George W. Bush years rolled on, I joined my fellow liberal activists in watching documentaries like “Jesus Camp,” which warned of an impending Christian theocracy. I argued vigorously for separation of church and state, and I waited on pins and needles for the end of a movement I viewed as stifling freedom of religion and freedom of expression.
But I’m starting to miss the Christian conservatives I grew up with.
Unlike the Christian right of my childhood, today’s variations — some of which see President Trump as a religious figure — seem incapable of being compassionate toward outgroups like mine.
I think back to the days right after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush — the politician most closely associated with the 21st-century Christian right — visited a mosque in Washington, D.C., to emphasize that Muslims were just as American as anyone else. It’s easy to laugh this off, given what happened afterward — he set off a bungling war on terrorism that included an unnecessary war in Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Yet Mr. Bush set the tone for the millions of devout Christians who voted for him. In the weeks after Sept. 11, my friends, classmates and teachers all echoed his remarks, offering their protection to me from what they feared would be the rise of religious bigotry. A man who knew my father told him that if anyone messed with us, just let him know; he would take care of it.
In my 20s, I volunteered at a Christian-founded nonprofit for the homeless and indigent. The volunteers and employees, by and large, were big-hearted conservatives who worked to make sure poor people had food and shelter and were put on the path to gainful employment. We didn’t share a religion, but we shared the belief that no matter who walked in the door, we would help them, just as Christ always helped those in need.
Conservative Christian charity still thrives, helping heal the sick and tend to the poor, but the Christian right of the Trump era, which marches in the Trump army under banners like Christian nationalism, can be distinguished more by cruelty than kindness.
These new Christian conservatives are represented by people like Matt Walsh, a popular right-wing Catholic commentator.
Conservatives spent years working across the aisle on criminal justice reform. Mr. Walsh has floated the return of whipping and amputations as punishments and said that by resisting Mr. Trump’s militarization of law enforcement in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson had committed treason and should be “given the requisite punishment for a capital offense.” When Pope Francis declared the death penalty immoral in 2018, Mr. Walsh acknowledged that he had “waffled back and forth on the issue quite a bit.” But by 2024, he had apparently resolved his internal debate and suggested that even people who deface monuments could be justifiably put to death.
There is no issue where the current crop of Christian right politicians departs more from the old than immigration. Christians like Mr. Bush condemned nativism. These new activists embrace it.
Paula White-Cain, a televangelist and a longtime Trump spiritual adviser, defended the president’s immigration policies in 2018 by arguing that Jesus — whose family fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s oppression and who was crucified for sedition — had not been an illegal refugee and that he didn’t break the law.
Vice President JD Vance, a former atheist who converted to Catholicism in 2019, justified the administration’s stances on immigration by citing the concept of ordo amoris, or order of love.
Mr. Vance explained in a TV interview that it means, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He complained that many on the “far left” have the reverse priority and that they “seem to hate the citizens of their own country.”
There’s a difference between tending to your own family first and treating the rest of the world as if their lives were disposable.
This month Mr. Vance told a liberal commentator he doesn’t “give a shit” if killing suspected drug traffickers in a military strike is called a war crime.
While Francis’ Christian mercy extended all the way to Gaza — whose Catholic parish he called nearly every day to remind its members that they were not forgotten — Mr. Vance’s stops right at the border. His faith, unlike the faith practiced by Mormon missionaries who evangelize around the world or Catholic charities that offer refuge to those fleeing war zones, seems to deny that all people around the world are children of God.
Mr. Bush knew that. His fundamentalist supporters stood by him when he campaigned on outlawing gay marriage and when he established the H.I.V. treatment and prevention program PEPFAR, which helped save millions of lives throughout Africa.
Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham cheered when Mr. Trump banned transgender people from the military. They said little when he tried to eviscerate PEPFAR and other international humanitarian aid programs, setting a likely death sentence for thousands of people abroad.
Many of the white Christians who voted overwhelmingly last year for a man who seems to relish the transgressions the Bible proscribes, from adultery to greed, saw Mr. Trump as a lesser evil than the Democrats, who support secular government and progressive social values.
Among them, still, are echoes of the Christian ethos I always knew at the edges of American politics.
“I forgive him because it is what Christ did,” Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, said of his killer while choking back tears at her husband’s memorial. “The answer to hate is not hate.”
We can only hope that this sentiment gets through to Mr. Trump, who, moments after Mrs. Kirk’s tender words, announced, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
As a Muslim raised in a deeply Christian community, I could write a book about my religious confusion. But I’m sure that the most admirable aspects of religion — mercy, charity, grace and contemplation — were found in Mrs. Kirk’s words, not Mr. Trump’s. I can only pray that today’s Christian right finds more inspiration in her than him.
Zaid Jilani is a journalist based in Georgia who writes the American Saga newsletter.
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