By Peter Wehner
Monday, September 29, 2025
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 opponent. 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. We all do.
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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