Re-enacting the Crusades
MAGA is nothing if not tribal. It has two deities—Donald Trump and a parochial and xenophobic Christian God—and views everyone outside those faiths as enemies to be dissed, degraded, or destroyed.
Evangelical Christians have long been more tribal than Christian in any theological sense, which for decades has predisposed them to flock to Republicans who not only attacked their political opponents but effectively consigned them to Hell. They remain the largest constituency in the MAGAverse, as no one previously had railed against those they saw as pagans and heretics as vociferously and violently as Trump. Even as the polls show increasing public rejection of Trump and his war in Iran, the MAGA faithful have stuck with him and all his dubious enterprises. An Economist/YouGov poll from March had Trump with an overall approval rating of 35 percent, but among self-described MAGA Republicans, it was still a stratospheric 82 percent. This despite the fact that by ordering his face be placed on coins and on banners draped from government buildings, he has become the first literally idolatrous president in our history. That the MAGA faithful are idol worshippers is daily demonstrable.
This has not required the MAGA faithful to abandon their tribal form of Christianity, of course, and in recent weeks, both the vice president and several cabinet members have conflated state policy with the tribal version of Christianity. Speaking last week in Budapest on behalf of the re-election campaign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (which was soundly defeated on Sunday), JD Vance noted that Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary were united by their common allegiance to “Christian civilization and Christian values.” He implored listeners to vote for Orbán as the way to “stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers.” That Trump-Orbán bond was sealed by their respective wall-building projects on their borders, and their determination to keep immigrants—non-Christians and Muslims in particular—from coming to their lands.
The Christianity of Vance, Hegseth, and Rollins is a blood-and-soil Christianity.
Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was already a militant evangelical Protestant before Trump plucked him from Fox News to run the Pentagon. He’d enrolled his children in a Classical Christian Education school, where science was subordinated to scripture. He’s held sectarian evangelical services within the Pentagon, and has made repeatedly clear that U.S. armed forces fight not just for America against its enemies but for Christianity against its enemies—secularists, adherents of other faiths (Muslims particularly)—for which reason God (the Christian God, of course; there is no other) is on their side.
Vowing “no quarter” would be given to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime, Hegseth called on the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee … in the name of Jesus Christ,” for victory. (Somehow, I doubt war hawk Steven Miller did that.)
Hegseth’s fusion of state policy with tribal Christianity was echoed on Easter when another Trump cabinet member, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, emailed the roughly 100,000 USDA employees, not to wish them a happy Easter, but to share some Christian news:
“Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind,” she began. “From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed. Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life—risen life—there is hope.”
Of course, a number of USDA employees had recently finished their Passover seders or observing the fasts of Ramadan, or celebrating Easter with an egg roll rather than commemorating Jesus’s resurrection. For that matter, the armed forces Trump and Hegseth have deployed to the Middle East are anything but uniformly Christian. Indeed, the most recent Pew poll on the subject found that the percentage of American adults who are Christian has declined to just 62 percent, which is both cause and consequence of the governmental advocacy of Christianity we’ve seen from Hegseth, Rollins, and increasing numbers of Republicans.
The Christianity of Vance, Hegseth, and Rollins, of most evangelicals and, judging from Antonia Hitchens’s article in the April 13 issue of The New Yorker, the neo-Nazi Groypers who increasingly dominate the ranks of young Republicans, is a blood-and-soil Christianity. America belongs to the descendants of the white Protestant pioneers who were here first, provided you disregard the Native American tribes and the slaves brought here from Africa. This also requires ignoring the fact that America’s founders, seeking to avoid the kind of intra-Christian conflicts that had laid waste to Europe for centuries, prohibited the nation from adhering to “the establishment of religion,” lest Protestant sects or Catholics and Protestants go to war against each other. And it requires ignoring the most fundamental foundation of American exceptionalism: that this nation was overwhelmingly a land of immigrants, united and defined not by a common racial or religious heritage on land they long had tilled, but by a common set of nonsectarian beliefs. It ignores the fact that one reason religious faith is stronger in America than it is in Europe is that no religion here was ever officially proclaimed to be the state religion, so that those discontented with the government never had to disavow that government’s religion.
Hegseth, of course, has been busy turning Jesus into a god of sectarian war, determined to resurrect, if not Jesus himself, at least the Crusades. That has compelled Pope Leo, whose early life as Chicago Bob schooled him in America’s separation of church and state no less than his faith has schooled him in the belief that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, not the slayer of schoolchildren, to insist that God is not the wingman of our bomb-bearing pilots, and that Hegseth has somehow mistaken Jesus for Attila the Hun. Even before we went to war on Iran, however, Hegseth underling Elbridge Colby, the DOD’s undersecretary for war policy, summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S. to impress on him that Trump’s America was going to violently roll over a host of enemies, and it would behoove the Vatican to get with the program. To Hegseth’s evident dismay, however, the Vatican not only deplores the violence of war, but also, since the Second Vatican Council, has taken an ecumenical turn away from its tribal history and no longer views adherents of other faiths as enemies per se.
That ecumenism is nowhere to be found in the tribalism of the evangelicals, the Groypers, and with each passing day, more and more Republicans. As the share of Americans who identify as Christian—and white—continues to shrink (along with the share of Americans who are flourishing in the 21st-century economy), that tribal rage is only likely to increase, even as its outbursts will likely and correspondingly repel the growing number of Americans who are outside its fold. That’s not to say that a version of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (the mass killing of French Protestants by French Catholics in 1572) is necessarily in our future—after all, the reach of our armed services is such that we can revive that practice in a distant land. But it’s not to say it’s not.
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