Trump, the Christian?

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Ken Gray] I really appreciate the wisdom and insights of James B Greenberg, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Founding Editor of the Journal of Political Ecology, and past president of the Political Ecology Society. The blog reprinted below probes the connection between Trump and American conservative Christianity. Watching Trump pre-election rallies I found myself wanting to cry out “false prophet” or worse. I align well with those who on social media complain that Christians are being misrepresented by false messiahs such as Trump. As Greenberg notes, “He didn’t have to reflect Christian virtue. He just had to fight for Christian dominance.” See what you think.

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[James B Greenberg] How did Donald Trump — a man known for excess, cruelty, and contempt — become the spearhead of a Christian political movement? It’s hard to imagine a less likely candidate. And yet, for millions of Americans, he became more than a political figure. He became a symbol of divine purpose and cultural salvation. That alignment didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was the result of a much longer shift — one that reshaped broad swaths of American Christianity into something more focused on control than compassion, more invested in dominance than in humility.

Trump didn’t invent this transformation. He took advantage of it. By the time he entered national politics, many believers had already reoriented their priorities. They had grown accustomed to framing moral questions as political battles, and faith itself as a boundary line — a marker of who belonged and who didn’t. Trump didn’t need to persuade them to abandon core values. In many cases, those values had already been displaced by resentment and fear.

He offered them what they thought they were losing: power. Power to stop demographic change, to reshape courts, to punish political enemies.

He didn’t have to reflect Christian virtue. He just had to fight for Christian dominance.

They saw the lies. They heard the contempt. They watched him mock the vulnerable — immigrants, the poor, the disabled, the imprisoned — and they cheered. Not despite it, but because they believed those performances were a form of strength. They had come to see strength as the highest virtue.

In Trump, they didn’t find a savior. They found a weapon.

To make that alliance coherent, many believers adjusted their theology. Scriptural commands to love the neighbor, welcome the stranger, and serve the least were pushed aside in favor of slogans about borders, hierarchy, and national destiny. Christianity, in this context, became less a spiritual discipline than a political identity — something to defend, display, and enforce.

This was not limited to extremists. It reflected a broader shift in American religious life, where church became another front in the culture war, and where faith was slowly hollowed out by nostalgia, grievance, and the anxiety of lost primacy.

“Christian” came to mean not someone who follows Christ, but someone who belongs to a particular vision of America — white, conservative, embattled, and in need of restoration.

This isn’t theology. It’s politics draped in sacred language. It offers moral clarity not through service or sacrifice, but through opposition — to liberals, immigrants, secularists, Muslims, queer people, and anyone else perceived as a threat to the established order. Its energy comes from resentment, not renewal.

We’ve seen versions of this before. Priests in the service of empire. Bishops blessing war. Churches defending slavery or segregation. The pattern is familiar: when religious institutions seek protection through power, they end up serving it.

Anthropology helps explain why. Religions are not just systems of belief; they are frameworks for meaning, belonging, and authority. When those frameworks are captured by fear, they begin to reproduce fear. Rituals of solidarity become rituals of exclusion. Sacred language shifts from invitation to enforcement. The deeper the insecurity, the more aggressively belief is policed and difference punished.

Christian nationalism is just the most visible edge of a deeper shift — one that runs through churches, schools, and families. It has less to do with doctrine than with identity, less to do with Christ than with the need to feel protected, superior, and right. Its central question is not “How should we live?” but “Who’s in charge?”

That question won’t be settled by another election, and it won’t be resolved by fact-checking or debate. The alignment of religious identity with authoritarian power is not just a political problem — it’s a cultural one. And it will persist long after Trump himself fades.

This movement offers a stark moral architecture: enemies to confront, borders to defend, purity to enforce, and power to preserve. It calls itself righteous, but its logic is strategic. It defines virtue by who it excludes.

This was never just about one man. It’s about what happens when fear colonizes belief — when religion becomes a language for resentment, and when people trade community for control.

And it’s a question we’ll be living with for a long time.

Suggested Readings:

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Wallace, Anthony F. C. Revitalization and Mazeway Reformulation in the Process of Religious Change. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956.

Wilkinson, Richard G. The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009.