Polishing the Golden Calf: Faith and Politics in the Age of Trump

I can’t help but wonder what is happening in the minds of my parents and other American evangelicals now. I don’t see them as caricatures, hypocrites or traitors to their own faith, but as people trying to metabolize power, fear, loyalty, prophecy, decline, identity, and history all at once.

Something has shifted. Donald Trump now occupies a place in the imagination of many believers that would have been unthinkable in the Christianity of my childhood. He is not merely supported as a candidate or tolerated as an instrument. For many, he has taken on the aura of sacred symbolism, spoken of as chosen, anointed, raised up for “such a time as this.”

Political preference has, in certain circles, metastasized into devotional language.

That transformation unsettles me because I was raised in a tradition obsessed with guarding against precisely this kind of confusion: idolatry, deception, false prophets, counterfeit miracles, rulers who demand adoration. We were warned that many would be deceived not by weakness, but by their attraction to power.

And now here we are.

Pentecostal televangelist Paula White-Cain drew explicit comparisons between Trump and Christ at a 2026 White House Easter event, suggesting he had “paid the price,” been “betrayed,” “persecuted,” and “risen up” in victory. It was grotesque, almost nauseating in its brazenness.

Soon after, Trump circulated AI-generated imagery of himself draped in Christlike grandeur, gleaming robes, healing gestures, Gospel iconography. The image placed him beside a hospital bed attending a figure resembling Jeffrey Epstein, a near-universal symbol of moral rot in contemporary America. It was kitsch, blasphemy, spectacle.

I asked my mother what she thought. Her response was cryptic: He loves America.

That sentence lingers.

What does it mean to love America? If the phrase is to carry any moral weight, it must include devotion to constitutional order, limits on power, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of authority. Love of country cannot mean merely winning, humiliating enemies, or “owning” the other side. And yet, for many, “he loves America” seems to mean something else: he reflects their anger, validates their fears, promises restoration, and frightens those they believe are threats.

In that sense, love becomes indistinguishable from allegiance to power.

My mother pivoted, almost defensively: AI is awful.

And yes, AI can be awful. But it is mostly an amplifier. It reveals the moral taste of the person using it. A counterfeit halo still requires someone willing to place it on a head.

So what explains the durability of this devotion to Trump?

Part of the answer is that many evangelicals no longer evaluate leaders by the moral teachings of Jesus. They evaluate them by usefulness, specifically, by their usefulness in a perceived cultural war.

Jesus of the Gospels blesses the poor, warns the rich, commands love of enemies, rebukes hypocrisy, and elevates peacemaking. That ethic can feel fragile, even dangerously weak, within a framework that interprets politics as existential conflict. If the world is understood as a battlefield, then the Sermon on the Mount begins to look less like wisdom and more like surrender.

Into that vacuum steps a different theological imagination, one that has been quietly gaining ground. It is the fusion of Christianity with a martial ethos: God as commander, nation as covenant, politics as combat. Figures like Pete Hegseth often articulate this vision explicitly, invoking scripture in the cadence of a battlefield briefing, verses refracted through the logic of strength, dominance, and righteous violence. Biblical language is not discarded; it is repurposed. Christ becomes less the suffering servant and more a kind of divine war captain. “Spiritual warfare” bleeds into literalized cultural warfare. Enemies are no longer abstract forces of sin but embodied political opponents.

In that interpretive frame, the Bible itself can be made to sound like a recruitment document.

Trump, then, fits more comfortably, not as a Christ figure in any orthodox sense, but as a kind of instrument within a broader narrative of struggle. He is cast as Cyrus, the pagan ruler used by God for Israel’s purposes. Increasingly, he is also cast in darker archetypes, figures like Jehu, who seized power through bloodshed and purge. The shift is revealing: some are no longer looking for a shepherd. They are looking for an avenger.

But this exposes a deeper problem. The scriptures emerged in worlds defined by kings and empires. We inhabit, at least in principle, a constitutional democracy built on constraints, institutions, and shared authority. To import ancient monarchical frameworks directly into modern governance is not just sloppy theology; it is a category error.

America does not need a Cyrus. It needs public servants.

It does not need a Jehu. It needs accountable institutions.

Yet prophecy is more intoxicating than procedure. A warrior king captures the imagination in ways that a zoning board or committee hearing never will.

And then there is the lingering specter of the Antichrist, the figure many evangelicals were raised to fear: deceptive, lawless, adored, theatrical, intertwined with false religion, hungry for devotion. The unsettling question is not whether Trump fits that description. It is what happens if one believes he might, and supports him anyway.

Because that would suggest that prophecy was never really about discernment. It was about identity, fear, and tribal alignment.

Most believers are not foolish. But many are embedded in a powerful psychological structure:

• Faith, nation, party, and self fused into a single identity

• Cultural change experienced as existential threat

• Moral compromise justified as necessity

• Scandal reinterpreted as persecution

• Loyalty hardened by sunk cost
  

Within that system, contradiction becomes livable. Facts are absorbed and repurposed. Doubt is transmuted into defiance.

What remains is not reasoning in any classical sense, but belonging, held together by fear, memory, grievance, and the ancient temptation to prefer strength over truth. To choose Barabbas because Barabbas looks like a winner.

Trump himself is not the anomaly. History produces figures like him with regularity. What is new, and more troubling, is the readiness of those once trained to detect idols to instead sanctify them.

A movement that once warned against golden calves now polishes one.

And so the question that lingers is brutally simple:

When power and Christ diverge, which one did we actually follow?