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“I hate my opponent, and I don’t want what’s best for them,” President Trump declared at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Phoenix over the weekend. He was responding to Kirk’s widow, who had said, “My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life…. That young man. I forgive him, because it was what Christ did.”
But Christ is not the example Trump wants to point people toward. Trump claims to embody a better idea – retribution. He doesn’t forgive his enemies, he hates them. And he is using the office of the Presidency to proclaim retribution as the way forward for the country.
Sadly, a stadium full of 95,000 fans laughed along and cheered Trump’s proclamation that his way of retribution is superior to the way of Jesus. What’s worse, not a single pastor or clergy who was there to conduct a Christian funeral had the courage to stand up and correct him. It was a microcosm of the dilemma of religious nationalism: politicians are more than happy to use faith for their benefit, but the church is often ill prepared to defend the faith against this kind of exploitation.
Donald Trump is certainly not the first person to reject Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness, but it is especially troubling that he has been able to reject Jesus while at the same time convincing so many people that he is a champion of Christianity. The danger of religious nationalism is that it can mislead well-meaning people to support the politics of retribution with religious zeal. For the sake of the common good and the well-being of people’s souls, we are called as Christian clergy to reject this misuse of our faith.
The vast majority of Americans do not approve of the authoritarian movement Trump is trying to use Kirk’s death to advance. Before any evidence about Kirk’s killer was known, the President blamed “the left” and declared that he would use the resources of the federal government to go after his political opponents. The retribution he imagines doesn’t need to wait for evidence to go after political opponents in the wake of political violence. It claims any loss as justification for continued, divisive attacks.
Why then do so many Christians continue to support a man who openly declares that his way is better than the way of Jesus? They are not stupid, nor are they uncommitted to the faith that defines their values and commitments. The painful reality that the spectacle of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service forces America to face is that the language, the music, and the symbols of Christian faith have been hijacked by a religious nationalism that does not serve Jesus Christ, but Donald Trump.
This so-called “Christianity” has a Jesus problem: it does not encourage its followers to do the things that Jesus did in the way that Jesus did them. Instead, it invites people to feel righteous as they embrace the pattern of retribution that Jesus interrupted through the way of nonviolent love.
As Christian clergy, we are clear that this problem isn’t new. The Scriptures we preach and teach in our congregations testify that the most dangerous moments in human history are when people believe God calls them to do things that will harm them and their neighbors. The prophet Ezekiel cries out against priests who whitewash the wrong-doing of politicians, blessing policies that are actually a curse on the people who will suffer from them. Jesus pronounced judgement on religious teachers of his own day who “neglect the weightier matters of the law” – namely love, justice, and mercy in public life. Right here in the United States, religious nationalism is a “deep story” that has been used to justify the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the persecution of some Christians by other Christians, as sociologist Philip Gorski has shown. Scholars of authoritarianism around the world note that religious nationalism is often a driving force for regimes that aim to impose a “moral deregulation” that normalizes the acceptance of violence against some neighbors.
A football stadium full of mourners cheering the President’s embrace of retribution is a stark image of how dangerous these patterns are in our present. But we also know from the ancient Scriptures and from history that moral leaders who nonviolently oppose religious nationalism have shown us how to stop the descending spiral of authoritarianism. From Moses in Pharaoh’s court to Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa, the moral witness of a faith that refuses to bow to religious nationalism offers us a path toward freedom.
As tragic as it was to witness the President’s bizarre self-worship at a time of mourning, he has at least made the choice clear. Christians in America must decide between Jesus and Donald Trump. To worship the God who Christians know in Jesus Christ is to turn away from the way of retribution that Trump has embraced – a way that can destroy any one of us. If we love our neighbors who’ve been misled into believing that retribution can be righteous, then we should pray that any of them – including the President – might repent and embrace the way that leads to life.
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