MAGA-fied Christianity
By 
On the current state of American Christianity:
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.
There’s not really much point in stressing the contradictions between Christian doctrine and Christian political activity. I had the good fortune to read Peter Heather’s Christendom, which covers the evolution of Christianity from Constantine until about 1300. One of the key insights (and there are many, into Christianity, the collapse of the ancient world, and the emergence of the medieval order), is that Christianity is incredibly flexible… as you would expect of a religion that has survived in some form for 2000 years and is embraced to greater or lesser extent across six continents. Trump is not the first case in which the Church (and to lesser extent the laity) has embraced a warrior ethos that is at extreme tension with what might seem the obvious theological injunctions inherent to Christianity.
Heather also points out that we’re currently in an odd place in the history of the religion. While it’s completely absurd in most Western societies to think of Christians as a persecuted minority, it is nevertheless true that the grip of Christian churches on Europe and the Americas (less so in Africa and Northeast Asia) is weaker now that it has been in a very, very long time. This feeds into paranoia which leads many Christians to believe that what they need is a warrior figure to defend the faith. It’s also worth noting that it has long been accepted in much Christian thought that those who defend the faith with the sword endure a special moral vulnerability; they must do things that are detestable in the eyes of God in order to maintain the security of the flock. In this sense a Trump is not such an unusual figure in his evident disdain for the actual teachings and trappings of Christianity, and indeed his lack of observance is ironically a strength; he is risking his immortal soul to fight a battle to save the rest of the flock.
We can complain about this all we want, but it is what it is. It’s not all of Christianity, but then nothing has ever been All of Christianity. Nor is there any easy solution for talking Christians out of this… Biden and Obama and Clinton and most every other Democrat did the things that were necessary to demonstrate their fealty to Christ and it hasn’t dented the persecution complex of right-wing Christianity (both evangelical and Catholic) even a bit. These are the battle lines and the battle must nevertheless be won.