MAGA Jesus Is Not the Real Jesus

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, has become an evangelist of a certain sort. During her tenure, her department has on multiple occasions released slick social-media recruitment videos in which scripture verses feature prominently.

One video quotes from Isaiah 6:8 (“Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send me.’”); another quotes from Proverbs 28:1 (“The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are as bold as a lion.”). The most recent DHS video quotes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

What’s striking is less that the federal government is using Bible verses in its promotional videos than that the agency doing the recruiting is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The videos, set to music, include militaristic images. They show heavily armed agents in tactical gear, weapons drawn, donning masks, looking through night-vision goggles, zip-lining from helicopters, breaking down doors, and conducting nighttime raids.

[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

The message the Trump administration is sending is not subtle: ICE is doing the work of God. The brutal and sometimes lethal tactics being used by a growing number of ICE agents are divinely sanctioned. Come join this holy campaign.

Leni Riefenstahl would have approved.

THE KILLING OF RENEE NICOLE GOOD by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, has thrust the Department of Homeland Security into the red-hot center of American politics.

A horrifying video of Good being shot—one recent poll found that 82 percent of voters have watched it—provoked nationwide protests and vigils.

Noem, for her part, claimed that Good “committed an act of domestic terrorism” before she was shot four times at point-blank range. After Ross shot Good, a voice on one video could be heard calling her a “fucking bitch.” The Justice Department, meanwhile, is now investigating Good’s widow, prompting six federal prosecutors in Minnesota to resign.

The shooting in Minneapolis wasn’t surprising; under Donald Trump, and especially his immensely powerful aide Stephen Miller, ICE has become militarized, much larger, more aggressive, and less accountable. One former high-ranking Trump-administration official described ICE to me as a “paramilitary police force” under the control of Trump and Miller. (This person requested anonymity for fear of death threats.)

Miller has declared that agents possess “federal immunity,” while Vice President J. D. Vance has said they have “absolute immunity.” Trump, perhaps hoping for a confrontation, wrote on social media on Tuesday, “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Defense Department officials told The Washington Post that the Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minneapolis, after Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, despite opposition from state and local officials.  

Federal agents have already flooded the streets of Minneapolis. It is a city under siege; residents there say it “feels like an invasion” and compare it to a “military occupation.” Which is precisely what Trump wants. This has been the game plan all along.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

The Bible-quoting videos that ICE is using to recruit agents have a certain logic behind them. DHS says it is looking to hire “brave and heroic Americans,” but it obviously has a special focus on recruiting young men who identify as Christians and whose attitudes and moral instincts align with Trump’s, especially on immigration. Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

Many right-wing populists, despite being secular, are successfully recruiting Christians to their cause. And rather than Christians leavening the secular right-wing movements, those movements are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus.

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies. This isn’t the first time in history such things have happened.

In the 1920s, within the German Evangelical Church, a movement emerged: Deutsche Christen, or “German Christians.” They became a “church party” that actively supported Adolf Hitler, who self-identified in public as a Christian, even as he privately despised Christianity as a weak religion. Many Germans believed that Hitler had been chosen by God to lead the German state.

The Deutsche Christen promoted the idea of a “heroic” Jesus, even an Aryan Jesus, who fought against the Jewish influence in German life. They were encouraged by the anti-Semitic writings of Martin Luther. In the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Mariendorf, built in 1935, a wood carving on the pulpit depicts Christ preaching to a small group that includes a helmet-wearing Wehrmacht soldier. The church included other Nazi imagery, including an Iron Cross in the church’s chandelier and a baptismal font adorned with a Nazi SA stormtrooper, his head bowed in prayer. The church reflected the desire to construct a Volkskirche—a church that would serve the nation.

This horrifying story isn’t without admirable counterpoints. The Bekennende Kirche, or “Confessing Church,” arose in response to the Deutsche Christen movement. Its most prominent members, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, were key in publishing the Theological Declaration of Barmen, one of the most significant religious documents of the 20th century. But ultimately the Bekennende Kirche was forced underground and defeated; Bonhoeffer was hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

America in 2026 is not Germany in 1936; far from it. But we would be mistaken to pretend that political movements that aren’t as malevolent as Nazism can’t still advance sinister ends. We should also acknowledge that over the course of its history, Christianity, which has had glorious moments, has also taken some very dark turns.  

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

This moment, and what it reveals about American Christianity, will be studied for a long time to come. I imagine that when future generations consider those who corrupted their faith in the name of their faith, those who were in positions of spiritual authority and knew better but still kept quiet, and those who bravely spoke out despite the costs, they will get the verdict right.  

Several years ago I had a conversation with a theologian, a scholar of Søren Kierkegaard, who told me, “Christianity has in many cases stopped being the home to Jesus.” That, I fear, is the crux of the issue. Christians need to provide the world evidence of the compelling beauty and truth of God, but we cannot show the world what we ourselves cannot see. “Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new,” Augustine wrote in his Confessions. It was Augustine’s lament that it had taken him so many years to discover the beauty of the divine. But having discovered it, he was changed by it.  

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The Catholic Church and the Trump administration are not getting along]

Some time ago, it dawned on me that many Christians attempt to evangelize on behalf of a God we wish we knew but whom we do not really and fully know. We have committed to memory the phrases we tell one another. I have wondered sometimes if we mouth those words in the hopes that doing so will change our hearts.

There are shining counterexamples, of course, including people I have met along the journey who can authentically claim, “Thou and thou only, first in my heart; High King of Heaven, my treasure thou art.” But they are the exception, and it does no one any good to deny it. “Christianity has not produced Christlike people on any meaningful scale,” a theologian once told me. That is vividly evident in American politics today, but it is hardly the only domain in which that is true. And until it is less true, we have very little to teach the rest of the world.

My hope, as a Christian, is that those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus will soon discover what Augustine discovered later than he had wished. That we will fall more in love with Beauty so ancient, Beauty so new. That in doing so in a broken world, we will stand out as expressing our faith through love. That we will be repairers of the breach, true peacemakers. And that we will “shine as stars in the world.” The world would be better for it, and so would we.