MAGA evangelicals have 'coopted' Jesus and turned Christianity into an 'absurd farce': analysis

President Donald Trump’s "wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the MAGA evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression," writes The Guardian's Bill McKibben.

McKibben notes that Trump's " most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating," came when he started posting plans of his gilded ballroom and then posted an AI video dumping feces on American cities.

"He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional," McKibben says.

But "no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry," he notes.

"Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party," McKibben adds.

McKibben says that those, including himself, raised as "mainline Protestant Christians" should not be surprised by any of this.

"We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be," he writes.

"At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the meek shall die of cholera'," he says.

McKibben says that despite this, he and his fellow Christians have not fought back against this effectively, if at all.

"What particularly hurts is the fact that at no point did we manage to fight back, not effectively anyway. Without intending to, we surrendered control of the idea of Jesus. It is a story that may provide some insights into how to fight the attack on democracy."

McKibben explains how Christianity has morphed into something completely different than it was in the 1950s when a majority of Americans subscribed to some form of the religion.

"Now the most public and powerful forms of Christianity, the vast and often denominationally independent megachurches and TV ministries, are as wildly different from that version of Protestantism as Donald Trump is from Eisenhower," he says.

Today's "newly ascendant version of Christianity," McKibben explains, is a far cry from that.

"The Jesus of this imagination – muscular, aggressive and American – is a different man than the one I grew up worshipping," he says. "The idea that he can be invoked to justify cutting off aid to foreign countries and bundling immigrants into the back of unmarked vans is repulsive to me, but also mystifying – as if gravity suddenly pulled objects upward."

McKibben says that "I am less concerned with the shrinkage of the mainline church than with the replacement of its Jesus with this very different one."

Allie Beth Stuckey, "one heir to Charlie Kirk’s place at the top of Maga Christianity," McKibben writes, has a very different version of the Jesus he grew up worshipping.

"She is a distillation of the currently dominant American Christianity, and above all, her Jesus rejects empathy," he says.

"Basing your support for ICE raids on terrified immigrants on a relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs," he explains.

The Bible, McKibben says, also says nothing on much of the culture wars MAGA mouthpieces use verse to attack.

It "has almost nothing to say about the rest of their favorite culture war hobby horses – you can find five scattered references to what might be homosexuality in the Bible, though recent scholarship makes clear they were actually attacks on prostitution and abuse," he writes.

And while the Bible says nothing about transgender people, he writes, "57 percent of the Republican party’s advertising spending in her race had reportedly gone to attacking transgender people, a topic – again – that Jesus ignored."

"None of that spending went to attacking Elon Musk (a recently self-proclaimed “cultural Christian”), who had managed to kill 600,000 poor people by 'feeding USAID into a woodchipper' in the first weekend of his Doge campaign," McKibben notes.

The parallels in today's MAGA movement are there, but they are lost on them completely, he explains.

"If you think I am being hyperbolic here, a 'rich young ruler' actually presented himself to Jesus and asked what he should do, and Jesus said he should sell his stuff and give it to the poor. This is what Jesus was about." he writes.

The hypocrisy, McKibben notes, has become downright farcical.

"The idea that personal salvation – as opposed to concern for others – was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical, but over the decades it has morphed into the absurd farce we see now, where Jesus is held to bless every show of dominance and aggression we can imagine," he says.

More people are becoming aware of this and acknowledging and fighting against it, he says.

Rep. James Talarico (D-TX), a part-time Presbyterian seminary student, has surged on the "strength of his forthright declaration of the kind of retro Christianity," McKibben says.

In a sermon Talarico gave two years ago, he said, "Jesus came to transform the world. Christian nationalism is here to maintain the status quo. They have coopted the Son of God. They have turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear mongering fascist. And, it is incumbent upon all Christians to confront it, and denounce it.”

McKibben says Pope Leo's recent words condemning the Trump administration's cruelty show demonstrate this denunciation as well, and he hopes there will be more.

"America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the best about American history, just as Christianity is best defended by reference to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of Jesus," he says.