“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” — Matthew 5:3-12
“We negotiate with bombs.”— Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary for the Trump Administration
The language of modern government is the language of empire.
It is the language of domination, retaliation, conquest and control—of enemies to be crushed, nations to be subdued, and dissenters to be silenced.
Under the Trump Administration, the language of empire has also been imbued with a religious fervor that recasts Jesus Christ—not as a peacemaker—but as a mascot for power, conquest and control.
War has been dressed up in patriotism. Wrapped in Scripture. Called “righteous.” Marketed as “peace through strength.”
But this is not a holy war. It is a political war dressed up as holy.
Despite the pageantry—crosses held aloft, prayers offered from podiums, politicians invoking God while demanding loyalty—the values animating America’s wars and power plays bear no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Jesus said: Love your enemies. The government says: destroy them.
Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. The government says: blessed are the war-makers.
Jesus said: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. The government cages the poor, criminalizes the homeless, bombs the foreigner, and calls it security.
This is not a misunderstanding of Christianity.
It is a deliberate rewriting of it.
Consider the prayer offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon worship service: “Let every round find its mark… Give … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”
No mercy. Spoken in the name of the Prince of Peace.
This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism.
It is the hijacking of religion to sanctify violence—the turning of the Sermon on the Mount into a war manual.
It is also an attempt to recast modern warfare as a holy war—sanctioned by God, justified by faith, and beyond moral reproach.
That idea is as unconstitutional as it is un-Christian.
And it raises a constitutional question that should alarm every American, regardless of faith.
The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of fusion of church and state power. It protects the free exercise of religion—but it also forbids the government from establishing, endorsing or advancing religion.
There is a difference between religious freedom and religious indoctrination.
There is a difference between private belief and state-sponsored theology.
When government officials invoke God to justify violence, when military power is cloaked in religious language, when prayer becomes a tool of state policy—we are no longer dealing with freedom of religion.
We are staring at the early stages of religious establishment.
History has shown us where that road leads.
As Thomas Jefferson warned, the Constitution erects a “wall of separation between church and state” precisely to prevent this kind of fusion of political power and religious authority.
When government begins to speak in the language of divine mandate, that wall is already being breached.
And more to the point—it is the very abuse of religion that Jesus Himself stood against.
Jesus did not preach “overwhelming violence.” He did not bless empire. He did not anoint governments to kill in His name.
As he was being executed—wrongly accused, beaten, nailed to a cross—Jesus did not call down vengeance. He prayed: “Father, forgive them.”
Forgive them. Not revenge. Not retaliation. Not “overwhelming violence.” Not “no mercy.”
And yet today, we are told that violence brings peace, domination ensures security, and revenge is strength.
It contradicts everything Jesus stood for. Everything Christianity is supposed to stand for.
What we are witnessing is not Christianity.
It is Christian nationalism—a counterfeit religion that wraps political power in religious language and calls it holy.
It is idolatry of the nation masquerading as devotion to God.
As theologian Mark Lewis Taylor warned, the true power of Jesus lies in His ability to critique empire—not to crown it.
Christians are not called to identify with power, but to speak truth to power—even at great cost.
That has always been the dividing line between genuine faith and political religion.
Yet today, far too many churches have traded prophecy for proximity to power. They have exchanged the cross for the flag.
As Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic:
“The marketing genius of Donald Trump [is] that he never sold himself to Christians as one of them—pious, devoted, merciful, forgiving, irenic, biblically literate, a faithful husband and father, a man of high moral standards. Instead, he sold himself as their protector. He didn’t hide his cruelty or his belief that the ends justify the means; doing so would have been impossible for him because they are central features of his personality. So he did the opposite: He presented himself to Christians as a fierce, even ruthless, warrior on their behalf. It worked. He built a huge, loyal, fanatical following . . . Much of today’s evangelical world sees Trump’s viciousness not as a vice but as a virtue, so long as it is employed against those they perceive as their enemies, against those whom they resent and for whom they have a seething hatred.”
In abandoning the radical, disruptive, inconvenient Jesus, today’s evangelical church in America has opted to replace Him with a coarse, vindictive political savior in the form of Donald Trump.
This is the same man who has spitefully relished the deaths of political opponents from John McCain and Rob Reiner to Robert Mueller. Yet as Bret Stephens points out in the New York Times:
“Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds. That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done… But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional.”
That this egomaniacal, bloviating demagogue has become the face of today’s evangelical movement underscores the profound disconnect between what Christianity should be and what it has become in the American police state.
The same Christians wholeheartedly supporting Trump’s policies rooted in cruelty, deception, violence and vengeance will proudly display their crosses, flood social media with Bible verses, and loudly proclaim Christ as the Prince of Peace.
That contradiction—celebrating leaders who lie, cheat, dehumanize and kill, so long as those leaders claim to be “on God’s side”—speaks louder than any sermon.
It tells the world that Christianity is not about following Jesus—it is about wielding power.
This is not new.
Power has always sought to co-opt religion.
Politicians court pastors. Campaigns mimic revivals. Prayer rallies double as political launches. Faith becomes a voting bloc. Scripture becomes a talking point.
Yet there is always a price to be paid for proximity to power.
Time and again, religious institutions that align themselves with the government find their message compromised, their witness diluted, and their moral authority traded for access, influence and political favor.
And in the process, the message of Jesus is hollowed out. Stripped of its challenge. Neutralized.
Because the real Jesus is dangerous to power. He doesn’t flatter kings. He confronts them.
Jesus was not crucified for being polite. He was executed as a threat.
To the authorities of his day—both religious and political—Jesus was a destabilizing force. He challenged the legitimacy of power built on coercion, greed and violence. He exposed hypocrisy. He disrupted systems of exploitation.
And for that, the empire killed Him.
Crucifixion was not just execution.
It was a warning.
This is what happens to those who refuse to submit.
Which raises a question modern Christians would rather avoid: If Jesus walked into today’s halls of power—into the Pentagon, the White House, the halls of Congress—would He be welcomed?
Or would He be surveilled, silenced, labeled a threat?
Would He bless drone strikes and military parades? Or overturn tables?
Or would he be told, as Americans increasingly are, to comply, submit, obey and defer to authority?
Because the version of Christianity now being sold to the public is not one of resistance to injustice, but one of obedience to power.
The Jesus of the Gospels was not aligned with empire. He was aligned with the poor. The outcast. The imprisoned. The stranger. “I was hungry… I was a stranger… I was in prison…”
Not: I was powerful, and you defended me.
Yet today’s political religion flips that script.
It exalts power. It sanctifies wealth. It demands loyalty to the state. And it calls this inversion of the Gospel “faith.”
But Jesus was clear:
“Those who exalt themselves will be humbled.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers.”
There is no footnote that says—except in matters of national security.
This is the great moral crisis of our time.
Not just that the government wages endless war, but that it dares to do so in the name of God—and too many cheer it on.
The early Christians understood something we have forgotten. Their allegiance was not to Rome. It was not to Caesar. It was not to the machinery of empire.
Their allegiance was to a higher law. And for that, they were persecuted, imprisoned, executed.
They did not seek to control the empire.
They refused to conform to it.
Today, by contrast, much of the modern church has chosen comfort over courage. Influence over integrity. Access over accountability.
As a result, it has become indistinguishable from the power it once challenged.
But the teachings of Jesus have not changed.
They still confront us.
They still demand something costly.
They still refuse to be weaponized for political gain.
So we are left with a choice.
The Constitution was designed to guard against the union of political power and religious authority.
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we are witnessing today is not just a theological failure—it is a constitutional one.
Will we follow the empire? Or will we follow Jesus? Will we bless violence—or embody mercy? Will we conform—or will we resist?
Because the two paths are not the same. And they never have been.
“Jesus wept.”
He wept for a world that confuses power with righteousness.
He wept for a people who would rather conquer than love.
He wept for those who would invoke His name while betraying everything He stood for.
And if we’re paying attention—He is still weeping now.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/ymttyrta
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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