The church in America—though not all congregations or believers—has given itself over to an idol in U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA: the ruinous gospel of power. In fact, recent data from the Pew Research Center underscores this alignment: white evangelical Protestants continue to be Trump’s most steadfast supporters, with more than seven in 10 saying they view him favourably, despite criminal convictions and anti-democratic rhetoric. This suggests neither incidental support nor mere political preference but that a deeper, more damning surrender has taken place. The church has traded the gospel for grievance, discipleship for domination, and the Sermon on the Mount for cultural warfare.
The church’s alignment with political power is also increasingly institutional. As the New York Times reports, Trump has re-fashioned 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into a kind of “White House of Worship,” where evangelical leaders now relish heightened influence and direct access to the president. Gathered for prayer and to influence strategy, these leaders are not guests but collaborators in a political project clamouring to claim and hold power.
Of course, the church has long courted power and has been a vessel of dominion. Slavery, residential schooling and even Manifest Destiny, for example, reveal such intention in the church. And the temptation of political power is ancient. When the church forfeits care for conquest, as Ukrainian Orthodox priest and theologian Cyril Hovorun writes, “political Orthodoxies” are revealed. Where and when revealed, the church ceases to be a nation’s conscience and becomes an instrument of statecraft.
Accordingly, what we are seeing in today’s America is not Christian renewal but a political religion baptizing cruelty as righteousness, bowing to false altars of class, race and nation, and whispering to the powerful that their ambitions are blessed. This false faith wears Christian vestments but abandons its heart while justifying itself through a corrupted order where wealth is holiness, whiteness is purity and power is virtue.
Again, histories bear this pattern. From 1932 to 1945, “German Christianity” refashioned Christ into an Aryan warrior, where the faithful were to be servants of the state. In Francoist Spain, Pinochet’s Chile and apartheid South Africa, the church was chaplain to tyranny. Today, Russia’s Orthodox Church baptizes Putin’s war as holy resistance. The church, seduced by influence, blesses emperors, autocrats and oligarchs while forsaking its prophetic call.
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In America, Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and their allies in the Christian right have made a golden calf of political dominance, wrapping it in religious language while rejecting the gospel’s demands and condemning a genuine call for mercy. Their vision is not of a church set apart but set above—above the stranger, the poor, the sickly and those who do not fit their nationalistic catechism. It is a vision to be strengthened by attempts at making law (as the “Big Beautiful Bill” proposes to slash spending on food aid and healthcare) and the return of cruel political doctrine and spectacle (like plenary power and the Alien Enemies Act, which has allowed for the sequestration and detentions of dissenters). It is a vision that does not see rightly the call to costly presence with and for others’ suffering.
Lawyer and lay theologian William Stringfellow’s Dissenter in a Great Society (1966) and An Ethic for Christians and Others in a Strange Land (1973) respectively elaborated and forecast this political crisis in America. He warned of such profanity in America, which he saw as already teetering toward revengeful totalitarianism in the 1960s. And he wrote of its possession by principalities and powers—forces that bind the church to nation, for example, transforming faith into a weapon of the state rather than a witness against its abuses. Where the church embraces resentment and these forces that take advantage of such bitterness, it becomes an apologist for violence, greed and national idolatry.
But such possession is not merely an American problem. The recent election of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party does not inoculate Canada from such problems, even when Trump’s hyperbole topples polls and opposition leaders lose their seats. The same bending of antipathy and faith to serve power, coerced by political orthodoxies that trade liberation for domination, stretch across the border. And when churches cheer the ascendance of rulers who fashion politics as conquest rather than care, they answer Christ’s question in Mark 8:36: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” They have chosen the world.
This does not mean the church has no place in public life. But the church must remember that she belongs among the broken and cast aside. Its work is not to wield the sword but to bind wounds, not to claim supremacy but to serve in humility. Not to seek revenge but to practice reconciliation. It is, as with Pope Leo XIV’s first words after the recent papal election, to proclaim and extend the peace of Christ, so that, in each person we serve, we might recognize and revere the face of Christ.
Repeatedly, the church has had to reckon with its condition. It must do so again today. It must relearn the gospel—not as a political weapon but as an invitation to love and serve others with humility as Christ has done. And it must finally recognize that it cannot worship both God and power, Christ and anti-Christ. One must give way to the other.
“Get behind me, Satan.” Listen for Christ’s rejoinder, “Follow me” (Matthew 16:23-25).
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Ashley Moyse is assistant professor of medical ethics, McDonald Scholar and director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives at Columbia University in New York. He has recently been appointed the associate professor of bioethics at Baylor University. He is also research associate at the Vancouver School of Theology, among other positions, and currently writes Broadview’s “Moral Compass” column.
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