'This is blasphemy': Prominent Christian leader has had it with Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One, en route to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., following a two-day visit to Ireland, September 13, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

On Monday, new reporting revealed that a prominent Christian leader has had it with the “blasphemy” of President Donald Trump. According to the Washington Post, John Whitehead – founder of the powerful Christian legal movement – believes that movement has “gone astray" in the era of MAGA.

As the Post reports, “The cause has become dangerously politicized and intertwined with right-wing politics, he says, wrongly staying quiet as Muslim rights are under attack and as President Donald Trump allows immigration enforcement officers into houses of worship. While religious-liberties-focused law firms have successfully argued in federal courts to greatly expand what it means to freely exercise one’s faith, Whitehead says the movement has wrongly elevated the rights of conservative Christians over those of religious minorities. He points to new laws in a handful of states mandating public schools to prominently hang the King James version of the Ten Commandments and threats last month by Texas officials against airports that offer foot-washing stations for Muslim travelers.”

“We started out trying to protect the little people,” Whitehead said. Now leaders in the movement are “sitting in the White House with Trump. They’re now part of the nationalist movement. Religious liberty is a constitutional principle, not a political program.” This position, said one former colleague, has made Whitehead a “persona non grata” within the movement.

“This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism,” Whitehead and his wife, Nisha Whitehead, wrote in March of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of religious language to promote the war in Iran. In October, after then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem prayed in public at an ICE facility in Portland, he wrote that her actions were “not Jesus’ Christianity — it is Christianity draped in the flag and wielding the weapons of war.”

Ironically, Whitehead once argued that the United States should be an explicitly Christian nation, and even wrote a book proposing the idea – a position embraced in recent years by Hegseth, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other Trump allies. And while Whitehead once argued that LGBTQ rights were a threat to Christianity, according to the Post, “by the mid-1990s, he was criticizing an amendment to the Colorado state constitution that barred communities from passing laws to prohibit discrimination against gay and transgender people.” He started moving away from Christian nationalism, which he says was the result of thinking differently about who Jesus really was. “We’re here to care for others,” he says now.

As the Post reports, “He says he finds value in some proposals of the Trump administration’s religious liberty commission, including efforts to create more ‘Know Your Rights’ materials in places like schools and hospitals. However, he said, the Christian legal movement is part of ‘a lot of overstepping.’ He pointed to the Ten Commandments laws and to a Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and was represented in court by religious liberties law firms. ‘If the government is acting as a Christian nationalist organization as opposed to one representing the Constitution and all Americans, there is a problem,’ Whitehead said.”

Over the course of Trump’s second term, Whitehead has argued in support offoreign nationals who lost their visas and were deported after protesting against Israel, as well as universities whose funding was suspended as part of the White House’s campaign against DEI, campus protests and antisemitism. One brief argued againstthe administration’s decisionto allow immigration enforcement inside houses of worship.

“Religious liberty is a constitutional principle, not a political program,” he said. “The moment religious freedom organizations begin aligning themselves with those in power, or framing their work in partisan or ideological terms, they risk weakening the very principle they are trying to defend.”

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