American Political Christianity is Embarrassing

Without public moral conscience, Christianity is a lifeless husk

Megyn Kelly emotionally tells her viewers to vote for Trump after his assassination attempt: YouTube

Last year, during the height of campaigning for the November elections, a miracle happened. Well, if you don’t think it’s a miracle you must surely have a credulous belief in coincidences. The chosen one of God, Donald J bleach-drinking Trump narrowly avoid assassination by turning his head at exactly the right moment, a moment that saved the West from the unforgivable, terrifying possibility of four more years of Kamala’s cackling, bad DEI policies, the unconscionable fact of the rightly named Gulf of America still being called the Gulf of Mexico, and saved us from missing out on Elon standing in the corner of government meetings in a trench coat and a black cap looking like a stalker standing in the bushes in a car park. The horror.

If you’re so lacking in faith you don’t think said head turning was divine intervention, a tearful Megyn Kelly pointed out to her 3.4 million YouTube subscribers that it just so happened to occur at exactly six eleven PM. Ephesians 6.11 reads, she reminds us “put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” Miracle. Comments on the video include “I got the chills! God has taken the wheel,” “God’s work, He is not finished with Mr Trump.” “Saved by God’s grace! Absolutely!”

Before I lay into what this represents I should say this: I have a distinct fondness for literalist Christianity. I grew up in churches full of people who believed the world was made in seven days six thousand years ago, that a literal snake spoke to a woman and that an iron age man built a boat in his back garden that every animal on earth got into. One of the great difficulties for me in understanding how faith made any sense was the paradox that for many people I knew, seemingly irrational literalist belief opened the treasure chests of Christian goodness. In some peculiar way, many Christians I grew up around were distinctly and consciously more kind, thoughtful, unselfish and good because they believed things literally that seemed to be impossible.

Christianity has always been full of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is the appropriation of a religion whose central goal is charity, renouncement and love as a club of political power. From Constantine to Donald Trump, Christianity has at its heart an uncomfortable contradiction in its unfolding that has never and likely never will be resolved.

Yet throughout Christian history the fact that said religion has at its heart moral principles that stand against many of those who appropriate it has meant that rarely in Christian history has its abuse not been simultaneous with the voicing of its conscience and its moral outworking, from Saint Basil to las Casas to Martin Luther King, the moral basis of Christianity has never gone quietly into the good night, the benefits of which most of us take for granted.

Until, it seems, the age of Trump. In America, certainly in the public sphere, the voices who call themselves Christian represented by figures such as Megyn Kelly are so chained to political ideology that their literalism does not manifest itself as a trap door into the storehouses of moral transformation, but into a delusional form of zero sum discourse deprived of anything recognisable as Christian morality, let alone Christian wisdom.

Whether or not you believe that God could or would intervene in events in the kind of minutiae that might save a president from a bullet is beside the point. I would think that to any Christian, all the strange events of history are in the grand scheme not reconciled as coincidences, be it Constantine’s vision of a cross on the battlefield all the way up to the events of 2024, as hard as that might be to connect with the reality of causation.

But Megyn Kelly and the ridiculous amount of Christians she represents doesn’t just think that God is sovereign over reality, she thinks that the goodness of God is represented by a bleach haired, mendacious, capricious, adulterous megalomaniac whose only political aim is to run a country half like a business half like a reality TV show. Of course “woke” and everything it represents is no less of a hypocritical moral mess, and I celebrate its demise as much as anyone, but to think that the lumbering return of MAGA is the moral teaching of Paul coming to fruition is not stupid, it’s wilfully morally and biblically ignorant.

It’s the same moral ignorance that leads someone like Candace Owens to start announcing her Christianity to the world at the same time as she befriends Andrew Tate, or that causes the Christian podcast world to embrace Russell Brand. Who, yes, may be an accused rapist but he’s on our political side now.

Indeed so pervasive is this political dynamic, so insidious, that it is taken as perfectly obvious that all the accusations towards Brand must have been invented by his political opponents who wanted to shut down his YouTube channel. Because what other reason could there be? There are no moral issues here, sexual assault is irrelevant. Wisdom is moot, we are in a “spiritual battle,” by which it means we are in a war for the West and our only salvation is the kind of corruption that pays lip service to things we claim to believe. The enemy of my political enemy is my friend is the new forgiveness, the substitute and get out of jail free card for “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

But even those Christians in America with the courage to bring Trump to account usually are only doing so because they represent the opposite of this deranged dynamic. In a sermon which Trump was present at Rev Mariann Edgar Budde called on him to show mercy in his presidency, but rather than the poor, who she was referring to was “gay, lesbian and transgender” people. It’s a stark reminder that the “spiritual battle” of MAGA is often fought with other Christians who have equally a tenuous relationship to the things they claim to believe. The episcopal church redesigned its shield in the colours of the pride flag, something that Megyn Kelly would no doubt call “the schemes of the devil,” but that anyone else would simply point out is not morality or Christianity but a shallow political bandwagon, the same kind of bandwagon Kelly is on. Surely to any serious Christian, Woke and Trump are the same thing.

I suppose it is a comfort and a trouble to Christians that such hypocrisy is not new. When the Spanish ploughed into Mesoamerica they toppled the idols of gods from the tables of human sacrifice and proclaimed Jesus to the Mexica. As they did so they waged war on their cities, stole their riches, took their women as wives, and took their men as slaves. Yet it is still Christian principles that judged then and still judge those very actions as wrong. The Mexica did not have a god who advocated for the poor in Spirit or “the least of these,” or who cried that every valley should be lifted up and every hill made low. This paradox remains for those secular people who believe such moral principles today as much as for Christians. So often throughout history, it was those who in many ways we now judge as the baddies who brought with them the Good News.

Of course, to a believer, that may be the same paradox of sovereignty that propelled Trump to another term in office. Although perhaps as Kelly tearfully read Ephesians 6:11 I might remind her that if we are simply picking verses based on the time of Trump’s near miss, Micah 6:11 reads: “Shall I acquit someone with dishonest scales, with a bag of false weights?” Which one you choose to bring to your judgement of politics probably says a lot about which side of the divide in Christian history you stand upon.