I have often lamented the solid support that so many right-wing Christians give to the Trump/MAGA government.  Not only lamented, but I’ve also puzzled over how they reconcile their fervor for Trump with their professed  belief in the teachings of Jesus. It doesn’t add up.

 

It recently occurred to me that the stage was set for today’s apostasy 1,700 years ago. Constantine of Rome, not yet an emperor, vanquished a competitor, Maxentius, in the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 CE. Until then, Christians had been a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire. They were famously non-violent. They refused to participate in the cult of emperors. They were quintessential outsiders in Roman society. For this they were mocked, distrusted and persecuted. All this changed after the battle. 

 

Before the fighting began, Constantine, moved by a dream, ordered his soldiers to paint crosses on their shields. After winning the battle, Constantine reportedly saw a flaming cross in the sky and  the words, “In this sign, thou shalt conquer.” Afterward, Christianity was increasingly identified with Rome’s conquests and it relatively quickly became the religion of the Roman state. 

 

Was it good for Christianity? 

 

Many Christians would answer yes, but I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t be alone. Thoughtful Christian writers have for centuries argued that Christianity was perverted when it was co-opted by the state — any state. The mere thought of Christians supporting powerful, warring governments would have been anathema to early Christians. 

 

Recently, my brother, Ell, sent me a small book entitled Nonviolence — The History of a Dangerous Idea. It was written by the prolific and provocative author Mark Kurlansky with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. Kurlansky introduces the Constantine story thusly:

 

Then came the triumph of Christianity, a calamity from which the Church has never recovered. 

 

Writing in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, theologian Brian McLaren put it this way:

 

Since Constantine, Christianity has repeatedly claimed a legitimate right to do violence to its members (and others) to protect its interests and conserve its supremacy. It has sought far-reaching and sometimes limitless control over the behavior of its subjects. At times, it has behaved like a totalitarian power, suppressing dissent and claiming divine and absolute authority, capable of absolute corruption.

 

Kurlansky focuses on Christians’ abandonment of non-violence as a tenet of their faith, particularly Christians in the United States. The Trump administration goes to incredible lengths to blur the lines that separate its governance from Christianity. MAGAs yearn for the right to call our country a Christian nation — a notion repugnant to any thinking Christian.  

 

Kurlansky comments further:

 

One of history’s greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its non-violent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace . . . .

From Constantine to the Crusaders to the contemporary American Christian right, people who call themselves Christian have betrayed the teachings of Jesus while using His name in the pursuit of political power. 

 

So the present day tragedy of our government associating itself with Christianity is nothing new. But the power of those we call the Christian Right — not only White Evangelical Protestants (WECs) but also the JD Vance/Leonard Leo/Clarence Thomas/Opus Dei branch of the Roman Catholics — has never seemed greater. That powerful part of our electorate was represented brilliantly by the late Charlie Kirk. And his wanton assasination will probably light an even bigger fire under his erstwhile followers. 

 

They are doing unimaginable violence to the teachings of Jesus. Likewise they are doing great harm to the teachings of the prophets of Israel who decried violence, cruelty, and avarice in their societies. I am not qualified to speculate on how our Christian nationalists would offend  the teachings most sacred to Buddhists, Hindus,  Muslims, etc. But if I were betting, I would guess that backing the actions of the MAGA government would contradict the teaching of many of the world’s great religions. 

 

As governments and Christianity became symbiotic — one dependent on the other with both benefitting — early Christians were also undermining another tenet of Jesus’s teaching. They abandoned His admonitions about wealth, its accumulation, and its worship, and again the consequences were dire. It is especially evident today.

 

I am not a fundamentalist. I understand how the Bible was put together and when. And I know that Jesus’s followers didn’t take down his every word on note pads. But they did emphatically echo Jesus’s great themes — including those about non-violence and money. 

 

Jesus was unambiguous about the dangers of wealth and its accumulation. His advice to the rich young man — “Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor” — is well known to anyone with minimal Biblical literacy. Jesus tells his disciples that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Further, he tells them that they cannot worship God and mammon, (wealth). But the most convincing evidence of how Jesus felt about money and wealth comes soon after his death, resurrection, and ascension. 

 

The early Christians He left behind organized themselves into communes. Each person in a commune contributed his or her material wealth to the community, which then shared it according to the needs of members. These Christians took the parable of the Rich Young Man quite seriously and very literally. But later, as the church grew, new would-be converts hesitated to be baptized because, like the rich young man in the parable, they had “many possessions.”  So the church began to deemphasize the need to unburden oneself of wealth in order to follow Christ. 

 

In the era when the church built great edifices like St. Peter’s or the Hagia Sophia, it needed wealthy patrons, so the emphasis on the evils of accumulated wealth disappeared almost entirely. Fast forward to the 21st century. Today there are many so-called evangelists who preach the “prosperity gospel.” It holds that one’s prosperity, as evidenced perhaps by a shiny new Mercedes in your driveway,  is evidence of God’s favor. This fits neatly into the Trump mantra that the richest among us are meant to rule over the rest of us. How many Trump voters/enablers support him because they believe he will be better for business or the stock market? Millions, I assure you. How can such behavior be reconciled with what Jesus taught us about wealth?

 

To understand the almost obscene alliance between Trump/MAGA and the Christian Right, we need to understand Christian history way back in the first, second, third, and fourth centuries. It tells us how the church came to support governments and their wars. It also tells us how and why the church stopped talking about the camel and the eye of the needle.  If we  reflect on Christian history, we might agree with Mark Kurlansky that those two developments of early antiquity constitute “calamities from which the church has never recovered.” 

 

What about our nation? Will it ever recover?

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