Politics, Power, and the Hijacking of Real Faith
I was baptized Catholic but was born a skeptic. By the time I hit first, maybe second, grade, I could barely spell, but I'd already decided religion was just an anthology of farfetched, boring-as-hell stories. My mother had me in after-school religion classes for my first communion, and I hated every second of it. Not the communion itself—drinking wine seemed cool—but the classes. After a long day of single-digit math and trying to sound out words, the last thing I wanted was more droning jibber jabber. I remember begging her to pull me out, but she was a single mom working full-time for a cable TV service provider. Looking back, I get it: she needed a safe place for me until her shift ended. But at the time, my little brain was too busy with Legos and being the center of the universe to care.
I was done with religion.
One day, as the final school bell rang, I made my move: The Great Escape, Elementary Edition. I acted like I was getting on the bus, let the teachers see me in line and everything, then ducked out, weaving through the loading buses to start the five-mile walk home. It was a straight shot through some of the sketchiest parts of the city, back to the projects where we lived. I didn't tell a soul. My logic: by the time I finally made it home, Mom should be off work and able to let me in.
What I didn't expect was for her to screech her car to a halt and cut me off on the sidewalk halfway there. That look on her face, equal parts rage and fear, is something I'll never forget. She was furious, sure, but mostly terrified. She'd been doing everything possible to hold our lives together, and there I was, unraveling it, one skipped religion class at a time.
My little stunt caused enough chaos that the school started an after-school program for little shits just like me.
Now that I'm the father of a little guy myself, even with what seems like an alternate reality, stable family, and living situation, I still think about that day. Partly because I can imagine how panicked I'd feel if my son vanished on foot through questionable neighborhoods, but also because I'm grateful I can give him a real choice in what he believes. However, now that religion and politics are so heavily intertwined these days, it feels like we're forcing kids to grow up with a prepackaged faith. Back then, I didn't have the words for it, but I felt the weight of being told what to believe, how to act based on consequences instead of morality, and what to value, not because it spoke to me but because someone else decided it was important. Now, I see parallels everywhere: sermons disguised as campaign rallies, pastors endorsing false-idol candidates, and laws framed as divine will. It's not faith anymore; it's politics, power, and control.
Idolatry much?
This is where we get into that age-old trap of idolatry: shaping God to fit our own agendas. The Old Testament is chock-full of warnings about fashioning a golden calf and calling it the Almighty: different era, same hustle. Augustine basically said that if you love anything more than God, whether it's power, political dominance, or your own pride, you've turned it into your 'real' God, and that God looks suspiciously like your own face in the mirror. You can call it 'faith' all you want, but what you're actually worshiping yourself. Or I would argue the collective consciousness, given the fact that Christian nationals love a good mob mentality.
Take Trump's all-too-quiet disembowelment of the Johnson Amendment, a rule that, since 1954, kept nonprofits and churches out of endorsing political candidates. In May 2017, he signed an executive order telling the IRS to 'relax' on enforcing it. He didn't kill it outright (that would've involved Congress) but effectively neutered it. Churches morphed into campaign hubs, and pastors felt free to endorse candidates who championed Christian nationalist platforms openly. Sunday sermons became stump speeches, framing political issues, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights as a crusade for America's moral soul.
Dehumanization is the Engine of Oppression
None of this political mixing can survive without scapegoating. You have to set up an enemy or two (or three) so folks rally around the cause. Immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and religious minorities conveniently label the 'them' in the 'us vs. them' narrative. Hannah Arendt wrote about the 'banality of evil'—how ordinary people commit atrocities when they treat other human beings like numbers or objects. When these nationalists drum up the idea of an invasion at the border or some 'unholy plot' by secular elites, it's not innocently playing politics. They're systematically stripping real people of their humanity. Overriding morality if they believe their cause is righteous enough. Suddenly, cruelty is reframed as a 'necessary sin,' and lying or excluding entire groups of people is just 'collateral damage.'
Sin is supposed to be feared according to their rules with the whole going to hell thing.
Trump's move accelerated the fusion of religion and politics, turning churches into partisan echo chambers that galvanized evangelicals into one of his most loyal voting blocs. Moral leadership gave way to brute political influence. Jesus preached humility, compassion, and a radical love for the marginalized, a message of selflessness, not supremacy. But the religious leaders who leaned into partisan politics replaced the church bell with a warhorn. It stopped being about feeding the hungry or welcoming the stranger; it became about drawing lines in the sand—a lot of lines.
The meaning of genuine faith is supposed to be personal and can't just be handed to you by an institution. Prayer is, after all, a direct encrypted connection to the big man himself—mano a mano. Christian nationalism, on the other hand, basically tries to mass-produce 'faithful voters' through fear and patriotism wrapped in crosses. That's about as inauthentic as you can get. Dietrich Bonhoeffer similarly called this out, warning against 'cheap grace,' slapping a Christian label on your agenda but never actually loving your neighbor when it costs you something.
Enabled by the Johnson Amendment rollback, pastors have been freer than ever to wrap a political agenda in the Gospel, championing policies far from Christ-like. The Christian Right has long painted itself as a persecuted minority besieged by secular elites. Trump's order didn't start that narrative, but it was the high note in a decades-long waltz of faith colliding with politics. It's straight from Putin's playbook in Russia, where the Orthodox Church is a mouthpiece for nationalism. In both cases, religion gets weaponized. Sunday Mass becomes a war room, with pastors calling on congregants to vote 'correctly' under threat of spiritual doom.
Once a group believes its political cause is divinely ordained, things like compassion and honesty can go right out the window. However, true Christian ethics say no outcome is worth violating your love for your neighbor. None of it passes the sniff test when compared to Jesus, who told us to turn the other cheek and love our enemies; he definitely didn't say 'unless it's an election year.'
The Jesus of the Gospels rejected earthly power, served the downtrodden, and preached love for enemies. This new strain of Christianity is about cultural dominance, not compassion. Where Jesus washed feet, they legislate morality. Where he welcomed outcasts, they built walls—both literal and metaphorical. It's a campaign disguised as faith, abandoning the very teachings it claims to champion.
While the Johnson Amendment tweaks focused on political force, it also exposed Christianity to theological rot. Christianity should be about humility and caring for the powerless without expecting a reward. But Christian nationalists traded humility for triumphalism, recasting Jesus as a champion of their cultural grievances. When the loudest voices in the church elevate leaders known for cruelty and dishonesty, it's hard not to conclude that what's really being worshiped isn't God—it's power and man-made ideas.
Omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, my ass.
Biblically speaking, the measure of genuine faith is the 'fruit' it produces. Galatians 5:22–23 rattles off the usual suspects: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. You look at Christian nationalists, and you see the opposite: divisiveness, cruelty, arrogance, and fear-mongering. That's not just a minor inconsistency; it's proof in the pudding that their store-brand faith is blasphemous.
Christianity twisted to bless ambition, pride, and exclusion. They've built a God in their own image, one who endorses their power plays and prejudices. For believers who genuinely want to follow Christ, like my grandmother (who should be considered a literal saint imo), it's painful. They're forced to stay silent and watch their religion's reputation corrode or speak out and risk being called anti-Christian. Calling out these distortions isn't an attack on Christianity; it's a defense of it. But Christian nationalists bank on confusion, weaponizing faith so that any criticism of them feels like a swipe at the entire religion.
Even the pope himself has faced being called a 'dictator' and was forced to counter with silence.
There's also the unflinching age-old dehumanization under the shiny facade of Christian nationalism. Immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and religious minorities always have to be villains to validate their 'us versus them' worldview. Cruelty is relabelled as righteous, and theology is misused to make it acceptable, even 'godly.' This contradicts the very core of the Gospel, which sees every person as bearing God's image and deserving dignity.
Rousseau's definition of 'civil religion' is how religion can unite a state but quickly turns tyrannical when it demands total obedience and hunts down anyone who steps out of line. Christian nationalism is basically Civil Religion on steroids: if you don't conform to their idea of 'Christian' values, they deem you an enemy of the state. Faith collapses into politics, and nobody wins except the folks clutching the power at the top.
When the wage slaves discover who has all the money and power, it's time to unleash the sheep zealots.
So, what good is a religion if its loudest adherents ignore its moral foundations? If faith is supposed to guide believers toward compassion, then those who use it as a weapon against the vulnerable reveal their own tainted convictions. They don't follow Christ; they bow at the altar of power. This moment requires Christians who actually believe in Jesus's call to love. It requires courage to say, 'This is not Christianity,' when facing a mob that claims the exact opposite. It's about refusing to let faith be hijacked for a narrow political agenda. Otherwise, their submission could allow their religion to be dominated by a man-made doppelganger, which would yield a Christianity that is unarguably imaginary.
Trump's tinkering with the Johnson Amendment didn't cause this whole collision, but it handed Christian nationalists a megaphone. Churches transformed into partisan platforms, their sanctuaries and megachurches echoing with endorsements instead of calls to justice or repentance. The Jesus of love and mercy is barely recognizable under all that propaganda. At least in the hands of its loudest proponents, the faith became more about controlling others than changing oneself.
Ultimately, Christian nationals have boiled this down to a crisis of belief. If people proudly calling themselves Christians ignore Christ's teachings, what do they actually believe in? The answer seems clear: not the radical rabbi from Nazareth, but idols of man, corporations, billionaires, cultural dominance, and political power. Their faith is a perversion of Christianity, robbed of humility and love. For Christians determined to reclaim their tradition, now is the time to name this false faith for what it is, reject its cruelty, and champion a faith that's supposed to be rooted in love, justice, and the unshakable dignity of every human being. Anything less is a betrayal of the Gospel they claim to uphold.
If Christianity cannot endure the rise of these false Christian nationalist faiths and their existential reckoning, one must confront the damning possibility: has it ever truly existed in any meaningful form?
Thanks for reading. Stay Human.
Sources:
- Trump has no real mandate for what he is planning: The push for Christian nationalism may backfire
- Pope Francis takes on unprecedented attacks from American opponents
- Analyzing the 2024 Presidential Vote: PRRI’s Post-Election Survey
- Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
- Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
- Biblical References:
