The battle of theologies taking place right now is anything but a new phenomenon, even if it's at an inflection point, with life-and-death consequences for our democracy, Christianity itself, and those who are God's greatest concern. The Christian nationalism, exceptionalism, and white supremacy ascendant in Trump 2.0 has evolved from a long genealogy that has enabled an elite strata of mostly white Christian men to rule society and amass enormous wealth and power throughout American history.
Such Christians have always anointed themselves with the lie of divine righteousness, while insisting that they are God's chosen representatives on Earth. To maintain this charade, they have brandished the Bible like a cudgel, bludgeoning poor people, people of color, the Indigenous, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others with tales of their supposed sinfulness meant to distract, demean, divide, and dispossess. Therefore, if we are truly serious about confronting and countering the influence of such an authoritarian version of Christianity under Trump, Vance, Johnson, and their associates and followers, we must learn from how it's been wielded (and challenged) in other times in history.
The roots of such idolatry reach back centuries, even before the founding of this nation, to the conquest of Indigenous lands by European invaders. In 1493, after Spain first sent its ships to islands in the Caribbean, Pope Alexander VI issued the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls granting all newly "discovered" lands to their Christian conquerors. Those church documents asserted the supposed "godlessness" of Indigenous peoples, smoothing over the ruthless colonial campaign of extermination being waged with a veneer of moral virtue. Centuries later, the idea of "manifest destiny" drew on the same religious underpinnings as the Doctrine of Discovery, popularizing the belief that white Christians were destined by God to control and therefore redeem the lands of the West. Manifest destiny not only valorized the violence of westward expansion but sanctified and made exceptional the emerging project of American imperialism. God, the argument went, had chosen this nation to be a beacon of hope, a city upon a hill for the whole world.
Alongside the dispossession and attempted extermination of Indigenous peoples, invocations of God and the Bible were used to justify the enslavement of African peoples and their descendants. Slaveholders cherry-picked passages from the book of Ephesians -- "slaves obey your earthly masters" -- and lines from other epistles of the Apostle Paul to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They ripped out of the pages on the Exodus from Egypt, huge sections of the prophets, and even Jesus's inaugural sermon praising the poor and dispossessed from the Bibles they gave to their enslaved workers. Those "Slave Bibles" would serve as evidence of just how dangerous the unadulterated gospel was to the legitimacy of the slaveholding planter class.
They also twisted theology to serve their political needs by obscuring the common interests of enslaved Black workers and poor Southern whites. Readings of the Bible that claimed God had singled out Black people for slave labor helped the Southern ruling class turn many of the region's majority of poor whites into zealous defenders of a system that relegated them to marginal lands and poverty wages.
After the fall of the Confederacy, the Bible remained core to the new racialized divide-and-conquer system in the South. Pro-segregationist preachers, no longer able to use the Bible to defend slavery per se, turned to stories like the Tower of Babel to claim that God desired racial segregation and abhorred intermarriage across racial lines. In 1954, Baptist preacher Carey Daniel wrote a pamphlet entitled God the Original Segregationist in which he explained: "When first He separated the black race from the white and lighter skinned races He did not simply put them in different parts of town. He did not even put them in different towns or states. Nay, He did not even put them in adjoining countries." The pamphlet was distributed widely by White Citizens' Councils and sold more than a million copies.
Parallel to the theological justifications for the system of segregation that came to be known as Jim Crow, a national theology of industrial capitalism emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the Gilded Age, a prosperity gospel and its theology of muscular Christianity flourished among the white upper class. Amid the excesses of the Second Industrial Revolution, they celebrated their own hard work and moral rectitude and bemoaned the personal failings of the poor. When the economic bubble finally burst in 1929 with the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal ushered in an unprecedented era of financial regulation and labor protection, the nation's corporate class turned once again to the church to fight back and put a stamp of approval on its free-market aspirations.
As historian Kevin Kruse writes in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, in the 1930s and 1940s, "corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase 'freedom under God.' As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most -- not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as 'Christian libertarianism.'"
The phrase "freedom under God" captures the tension at the heart of the long battle over the Bible in this country in which there have always been two diametrically opposed visions of freedom: on one side, the freedom of the vast majority of the people to enjoy the fruits of their labor and live with dignity and self-determination; on the other side, the freedom of the wealthy to control society, sow division, and hoard the planet's (and in Elon Musk's case, the galaxy's) abundance for themselves. Poor people, disproportionately poor people of color, have always been on the front lines of this battle, as both canaries in the coal mine and prophetic leaders. Think of it this way in the age of Trump: As their lives go, so goes the nation.
Ordo Amoris and Other Theologies of the Day
This age-old debate is playing out in JD Vance's recent statement about "ordo amoris" (or "rightly-ordered love"). Weighing in on cutting both domestic and global aid as well as scapegoating immigrants, the vice president wrote on social media, "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."
Pope Francis offered a fitting rebuttal to Vance's statement and the actions of the second Trump administration by summing up its deeply heretical nature and echoing a historic prophetic tradition of increasing importance again today. In his letter to the American bishops, urging them to reject Vance's theology of isolationism and egotism, Pope Francis wrote, "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the 'Good Samaritan' (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception."
As this statement from the Pope reminds us, history is replete with examples of people from many religions who have grounded their struggles for justice in the holy word and the spirit of God, not just extremists trying to claim and justify their lust for power and avarice for wealth. Abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, student protestors, civil rights leaders, and various representatives of poor and oppressed people have insisted that divinity cannot be reduced to private matters of the soul and salvation. They have affirmed that truth, love, and justice, starting with the most vulnerable and marginalized, are what matter the most to God. They have insisted that the worship of God must be concerned with the building of a society in which all life is cared for and treated with dignity. In every previous era, there were courageous people for whom protest and public action were a form of prayer, even as the religious leaders and institutions of their day hid behind sanctuary walls -- walls currently being torn down again to release forces devastating to the most vulnerable among us and to the planet itself.
Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new attacks daily on what the Bible calls, "the least of these," it's important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the past as well as the heroic, if often unnoticed, moral organizing happening now. I return to my colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses Hernandez-McGavin who sum up the sentiment of many people of faith in our society today: "God's love and truth are alive whether elected officials seek to legislate them out of existence or not. God's Word continues to call for justice and mercy for all people regardless of the distortions of the Word by religious and political leaders obsessed with the worship of their own power. They are not God. And God will not, and cannot, be stopped."
As they conclude, offering a message of hope and encouragement in these dark and dangerous days: "God's liberating action will break through in this world through the steadfast work and witness of people of goodwill who are beholden to a higher law, who refuse to comply with unjust executive orders, who continue to defend the vulnerable against abuses of the powerful in courtrooms and school buildings and hospitals and in the streets across the country."
The question then is: In the second age of Donald Trump, which side will you choose?
Copyright 2025 Liz Theoharis
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