Religious scholar explains how Christian nationalists use and abuse the Bible

Like Islam, Christianity is incredibly diverse, ranging from severe fundamentalists to people who are devout but have a more nuanced and complex view of their faith.

President Donald Trump is not a Christian fundamentalist; he was raised Presbyterian in Queens and comes from a Mainline Protestant background. But some of his most ardent supporters in the MAGA movement are white evangelical fundamentalists and far-right Christian nationalists, who embrace a much more severe form of Christianity than the Presbyterian churches Trump's mother, a Scottish immigrant, attended in Queens and Scotland.

Trump's Christian nationalist supporters have very strong views on scripture. But during an appearance on Mother Jones' "More to the Story" podcast posted on Christmas Eve Day 2025, author/religious scholar Dan McClellan stressed that New Testament scripture doesn't necessarily mean what Chrisitan nationalists claim it does.

McClellan, author of the book "The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues," told host Al Letson, "The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist. And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way."

McClellan noted that Christian nationalists are demonizing the word "empathy" and railing against "the sin of empathy." Claiming that "empathy" is inherently bad, according to McClellan, is a distortion of scripture.

McClellan told Letson, "Those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they're trying to convince others it's bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It's bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It's bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good."

During the interview, McClellan emphasized that Christian nationalists are "interpreting" the Bible in a way that fits with their political worldview.

McClellan told Letson, "Like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, 'You cannot serve God and mammon.' And Jesus says, 'Blessed are the poor.' And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit.' And so, people say, 'Aha. It doesn't say…. That's not about economic poverty, that's about humility.' But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, 'Blessed are the poor' — which very clearly is referring to economic poverty."

The author/scholar continued, "As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we're bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that's generating the meaning."

The full Mother Jones podcast is available at this link.