'Persecuted like Jesus': Religious scholar explains how MAGA copes with Trump’s betrayal

President Donald Trump’s Christian nationalist supporters see that their most powerful leader is “falling apart” and now must believe he is “persecuted like Jesus,” according to an expert on religious studies.

"They need to make sure that, lest their followers hear an anti-war message from another MAGA figure, that their allegiance remains to Trump, who God sent to save Christian America, and who demands your adoration no matter what,” journalist and Christian right expert Sarah Posner wrote for Talking Points Memo on Monday. Posner was describing the Trump administration’s unexpected and unprovoked war against Iran, one that many Trump supporters would otherwise oppose given their usual stance against foreign interventionism. To square that circle, though, they argue that Trump is in power through divine will.

"As Trump flounders in the prosecution of his war on Iran, his evangelical loyalists are feverishly closing ranks, including during a Holy Week marked by Trump’s and Hegseth’s Christianity-infused bloodlust, which prompted papal rebukes,” Posner wrote. “But Trump’s evangelicals are facing multi-front challenges to what they would like to portray as their dominance in the MAGA coalition, and their claim to represent the ‘true’ American Christianity. That is why they are intensifying their messaging that Trump is divine, that he is persecuted like Jesus was, that his war is destroying Iran and protecting Israel from Iranian savagery, all while igniting a Christian revival in America.”

Posner added, “They need to make sure that, lest their followers hear an anti-war message from another MAGA figure, that their allegiance remains to Trump, who God sent to save Christian America, and who demands your adoration no matter what."

At the same time, despite their desperate attempts to shore up Trump’s reputation, "the problem for them is that Trump, their anointed one, is falling apart,” Posner wrote. She later observed that “their pursuit of Christian supremacy through Trump now depends on their followers continuing to accept their reality-defying portrayals of the president at war."

This is not Posner’s first takedown of Trump and the Christian nationalists that keep him in power. Last month she told The New Republican that their religiosity fuels their acceptance of war crimes.

"Christian reconstructionism holds that biblical law is superior to civil law and that the Bible — biblical law — should govern every aspect of life: your personal life for sure, but also political life, military life,” Posner said. “So to Hegseth, this biblical law — the interpretation of which would be contested by different scholars or adherents to the Bible — but his version of biblical law is superior to the Pentagon's own internal military law, American civil law, and also, importantly, when we're talking about Hegseth and the prosecution of this unjust, illegal war, that it is superior to international law and the rules of engagement in war and military conflicts.”

Posner has also argued that the Trump/Hegseth version of Christianity can be inherently violent.

"Hegseth is expressing an extreme version of Christian supremacy, where America, a Christian nation, is entitled, and in fact probably, in his mind, required by God, to smite America's enemies — or to smite the enemies of Christianity, even,” Posner explained. “When we talk about Christian nationalism, this is exactly what we're talking about. But the important thing to remember with Hegseth, in contrast to other versions of Christian nationalism that we see more commonly in the Republican Party, is that his is a very extreme version of Christian supremacy where we Christians are entitled to go out and take dominion over the world, to vanquish enemies, and to do so violently — and even when they do so violently, with the express mandate from God."

Perhaps as a symbol of their opposition to secularism, Trump announced in March that he is ripping out White House fixtures installed by President Thomas Jefferson, who famously insisted on a strict separation between church and state. While serving as president from 1801 to 1809, Jefferson famously wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists that “believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”