Weekly Roundup: MAGA 2.0 and Bishop Mariann Budde's Plea to Trump
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In this weekly roundup, Dan discusses the week's political landscape in light of Donald Trump's recent inauguration and his claims of a divine mandate. Bishop Mariann Budde gives a plea for mercy from Trump for marginalized groups. The episode moves into analyzing Trump's executive orders, including immigration changes, termination of DEI initiatives, and pardoning January 6th insurrectionists.
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy Let me make one final plea, Mr. President.
Millions have put their trust in you.
And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God.
In the name of our God, I ask you.
To have mercy upon the people in our country.
We're scared now.
There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.
And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, Who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals?
They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.
Hello and welcome everybody to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted as always to be with you for this week's weekly roundup.
As always, just want to thank folks for listening, for all the feedback, however that comes.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com is a way to reach me.
You can find Straight White American Jesus on Facebook and other social media.
You can find us at our Discord if you're a subscriber.
If you are a subscriber, thank you.
If you're not a subscriber, please, I would ask you to consider doing that.
All the things going on in the world, trying to do our small parts to keep people appraised of what those things are and how to think about those.
And I'm flying mostly solo this week.
Brad is out of town.
He does have a piece that he recorded that we'll get to here in just a minute.
But of course, it's been a tough week.
There's no way to get around that.
We are now...
In, you know, America MAGA 2.0, Donald Trump is president.
He was inaugurated, as promised.
He signed a flurry of executive actions and so forth.
We're going to dive into those, but I want to start with throwing it over to Brad with some reflections about the bishop who spoke at Trump's inaugural event before Trump and the significance of this.
If you're aware of this, this will stand out to you.
Lots of people have talked about this, but Brad's got some great reflections on this, and they're really going to stand in marked contrast to the vision of America that comes through from Trump and in this, I guess what I'm calling the MAGA 2.0 American moment that we are now in.
in.
So I'll throw it over to Brad.
Brad Johnson: What's up, y'all?
I'm sorry not to be with you for the entire episode, but I did want to jump in here and just comment on the Bishop's remarks in front of Trump and Vance and share some thoughts.
And so, you all heard the clip at the top.
I'm sure many of you have heard the clip independently and in other places, but Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde pled for mercy in front of Trump and J.D. Vance, asking them to understand that there are people who are scared and people who are gay and lesbian, people who are trans.
And to have mercy on them.
And I think there's a couple things to say here, and some things that are actually really, really important to me about what happened.
Number one is, this is one of the very few times that I can imagine these two men having someone say this to them to their face.
Unfiltered, without any kind of worry of what they would hear in return.
No ability for Trump to scream back or to stand up and cuss them out or whatever.
When else does this happen?
It's very interesting that this happens at the National Cathedral.
I actually used to teach a lot about the National Cathedral in American religion courses.
I have a friend who's written a dissertation or dissertation chapters about it.
And it's very strange to me that we have a National Cathedral.
And I'll be honest, I'm not somebody who's always been a fan of the fact that we do.
a lot of government and national ceremonies are held there.
And it kind of is a nod to the Christian privilege of our country that if we're going to have an official federal government ceremony or ritual of some kind, it would be at a Christian place.
And so why not?
You know, it's just sort of like weird, like, oh yeah, we're not a Christian nation, separation of church and state.
But you know, when we have a thing, it's over at the cathedral, the Christian place.
I'll remind you that the reason that Vance and Trump were there was that they were having an inaugural prayer service.
So I think there's a larger discussion about the role of the cathedral in our national life and the ways that it plays into national rituals and ceremonies.
Nonetheless, Marianne Edgar Buddy is the Episcopal.
She's the leader of the Diocese of Washington in the Episcopal Church and the first woman to hold that role.
And in a strange kind of Happening in this turn of events in my life, I've actually had dinner at her home with a few other people after a conference that I attended in Washington, D.C. And I bring that up because I can tell you in person this is not someone who is a braggadocio, somebody seeking attention, somebody who's out for the limelight or comes off in any way as wanting to advance by doing something splashy.
I meet a lot of people.
At events, at conferences, I come into contact with other authors and other folks who are doing things publicly, and it's really easy to tell who is the kind of person that is doing things to get their name places, and their face places, and their profile places, and their books sold.
And this is not one of them.
In person, Bishop.
Buddy comes off as a soft-spoken person who's interested in other people and wants another story, is a welcoming host and somebody who is seemingly motivated by helping others and inclusion.
One of those people who you meet and you feel like you could sit down with a cup of coffee and talk for a couple of hours about what matters most in life.
And so when I saw this, I was not surprised and I was actually quite inspired.
There's something in a piece at the New York Times by Elizabeth Diaz that caught my eye that I think is actually really pertinent to what this means.
Does this mean anything?
And here's what Diaz writes.
Previous inaugural prayer services were hosted by the cathedral but planned with the presidential inaugural committee, meaning the president-elect often picked the participants.
But that changed last year when the cathedral itself took over the planning well before Election Day.
It was a move toward religious independence, so the service itself would be free of partisan interference, and so it would not be seen as a coronation or sacred anointing.
Like I said, I have my issues with the cathedral being the site of these inaugural prayer services and the way it functions.
But this detail is really important, and I want to just think about it for a minute.
The inaugural prayer service used to be planned with the president-elect, and that means that they chose everyone Or at least had a say in everyone, including that person who preached.
So here we are at an inaugural prayer service that celebrates the inauguration of a new president.
And that president, the leader of the federal government's executive branch, is picking the preacher at that inaugural prayer service.
Like I said, I have friends who've written about things like this.
I have colleagues who explore.
The dynamics of these things.
But in 30 seconds I'll just say, I really dislike that.
Because it sounds like the leader of our executive branch is picking the religious figure to pray at the inaugural service that celebrates their inauguration.
Something that is so quote-unquote official, even though it's unofficial.
That this president and his vice president, who have done nothing else according to custom tradition, norm, process, who are overstepping every institutional bound, attended.
It's still something that is, quote, so official, unofficial, I guess, that they were there.
So here is the foresight to say we're not going to let them pick who preaches.
That's a big deal.
Friends, What happened in this instance with the bishop and the president is a matter of separation of church and state.
This is an example of what happens when you separate the church and the state.
You get a lot of things, but one of them is that you get a chance to speak truth to power.
You get a chance in a setting where Trump cannot yell back, where no one can interrupt you.
Where you can look him in the face, 10, 20 feet away, and say things that no one else in his orbit will say for the next however long, probably until he dies, to his face with no interruption, 14 minutes.
When you separate church and state, religious people are free to practice their religion, yes.
Hopefully, non-religious people are free.
To not be religious and not have religion imposed on them.
But you also have a situation where instead of a Trump MAGA pastor wearing a MAGA hat and an American flag shirt and an American flag tie screaming about how God chose Trump to save the country, we have a bishop speaking truth to power.
The second point I want to make is that if you listen to the clip, she asks for mercy.
She does not tell him what to do.
She does not say things like, God didn't choose you and you're evil.
She does not say things like, you have no right to be in this building because you inspired an insurrection.
What she says is, please have mercy.
And the responses from MAGA World, as you can imagine, have been, Pretty gross.
One congressperson, Mike Collins of Georgia, said that she should, quote, be added to the deportation list.
Trump himself, of course, had things to say.
She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way.
She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart.
I think we could have written this for Trump.
It's pretty predictable by now.
It's not a big deal and I don't...
I really want to comment on it.
But I want to comment on Collins and the others who reacted to Buddy, to the bishop.
We're in a place in our country where a Christian leader, standing in a pulpit, asking for mercy, is supposed to be added to a deportation list.
An American citizen, somebody who is a leader, has a doctorate, born and raised in the United States, it doesn't matter.
None of that matters.
I don't care.
But nonetheless, I just want you to think of where we are.
A bishop asks for mercy.
Tells the president people are scared.
Please consider that.
Doesn't yell at him.
Doesn't call him names.
Doesn't say that he's going to hell.
Doesn't say he's an evil, fascist something.
None of that.
Simply have mercy.
She's considered woke.
She's considered this, that, whatever.
Put her on the deportation list.
There's just something so insightful there about the state of the country that a Christian leader who is asking for mercy is considered to be somehow unchristian, somehow a problem, somehow something.
Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, who is always interjecting his faith into politics and talking about The ways that God is doing this or that says that the bishop hijacked the prayer service and that it was shameful.
This is where we are.
We're at a place where a white woman who is a Christian stands up to power and people say she should be deported.
We're at a place where American Christianity is such that if you ask for mercy, you're the enemy.
You're not doing things Jesus said to do.
You're not doing things that Jesus asked or taught.
You're not doing things that Jesus himself manifest in his life.
Nope.
You're the problem.
So I think we should notice that too.
But once again, we wouldn't have had this kind of Christianity without separation of church and state.
Do you think that Mago World would have allowed a woman to preach?
Do you think that Mago World would have allowed a mainline?
No.
The final thing I want to say today is that the reason this matters is that hope inspires hope.
That courage inspires courage.
This matters because these little acts of resistance, of defiance, and of standing up to the bully matter.
And I just want to say that I know From our Discord, from talking to friends, from taking the general pulse of things that so many of you are feeling like it's too much.
What do I do?
Because every time I turn on the news, every time I check into social media, I'm bombarded with bad things.
The NIH, the 14th Amendment, an executive order mandating two genders, and the list goes on.
What am I supposed to do?
And I'm here to say, number one, do the next right thing.
I had a friend tell me that recently and I have not gotten it out of my head.
Do the next right thing.
What does that mean?
It means that there's probably a chance at some point today or tomorrow or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday that you're going to hit your limit where you cannot read any more news without becoming Frozen with fear.
Angry to the point of destruction.
So what's the next right thing in that scenario?
It is not to keep reading the news endlessly until you self-destruct.
If you are feeling like you have taken in too much already, that you don't know how to respond to what feels like a deluge, I will say this.
What are you doing with others?
To do the next right thing.
I am severely disappointed in the Democratic Party this week.
Because they are so busy, not all of them, they are so busy, though, licking their wounds and being embarrassed that they lost, that they are not everywhere, screaming about the fact that eggs are about to spike in price, that ICE arrested an American citizen without a warrant and detained him.
They're not out in unison.
Decrying the agenda that Trump is enacting.
Some are.
If you look at AOC's comments, if you look at Senator Murphy, Senator Representative Raskin and others, there are some who have been out in front leading.
If you are overcome with fear right now, I want to know what you're doing for 2026 in the midterms right now.
I want to know what campaign you're going to get involved in.
I want to know what candidate you're going to support.
I want to know if you even are connected to the folks that can help with that election.
Your local representative, a state representative, a state senator.
I want to know where it is you're organizing.
What are the local groups who are protecting immigrants and how can you be part of that?
What cog in that network can you be?
Where are the folks who are planning?
For resistance in other areas?
Reproductive rights?
Policing?
Are you plugged in anywhere to something productive?
To something helpful?
You are not going to help yourself or others by taking in so much news that you are simply overcome.
That is exactly what they want.
That is exactly what they want from you.
So if you want to resist, resistance means saying I'm going to do the next right thing.
And that means getting involved.
And it could be mundane and boring most of the time.
Meetings and negotiations and planning and details.
But I've said this so many times in this show, and I'll just say it one more time before I sign off today and hand the reins back to Dan, who's going to outline all the aspects of Trump's Christian America.
When you're with others doing things to build a world that is better, you feel better.
If you want to feel better, go find a way to plug in.
Go find a way to contribute.
Go find a group to help resist and hold together what's left of the social and cultural and political fabric of the country.
To make one that is better.
To quilt something for the future that is more beautiful and more inclusive of who we are or who at least we want to be.
They want you to feel this way.
And resistance is already showing up in lawsuits and other things.
I'm not going to go into all of them today, but people stand up to bullies, and bullies don't get everything they want.
I'll be back Monday with more.
This is my thought and my encouragement for today.
I'm going to hand it back to Dan.
Thanks, y'all.
See you soon.
So Brad had a lot of really good things there to say, I think, about...
What a certain kind of separation of church and state can look like, the way that it can free religion to speak, as he says, truth to power.
And really, you know, briefly in its way, in the words of the bishop, a vision of a very different kind of model of like, what would a quote-unquote Christian America look like?
And it stands in marked contrast to what we saw this week on full display.
From Trump and the inauguration and everything about the GOP and MAGA world and so forth, and that's where I really want to take us today.
What I really want to look at is, what is Trump's Christian America?
What is Christian nationalism's Christian America?
And I'm going to circle back around to this at the end of the episode, but...
If your parents are MAGA people, your brother is a MAGA person, your sister-in-law is a MAGA person, your son or daughter or daughter is a MAGA person, this is their vision of America.
This is their vision of what Christian America is.
This is their vision of what American Christianity is, and I think we have to understand that.
So I want to start with this.
I want to start with Trump's claims for a divine mandate.
We're once again in, as I say, an America with President Trump.
He is now...
President Trump, not former President Trump, not President-elect Trump.
It's President Trump once again.
And as Trump promised, and as we expected, he wasted no time fashioning the country into a MAGA model of Christian America, the Christian America that he and his followers have dreamed of.
And so I want to start with some reflections on his inaugural speech.
We could spend a lot of time on his inaugural speech.
There was a lot of stuff there.
We could spend a whole episode.
I'm not going to do that, okay?
I want to spend some time on that.
I want to look at, concretely, the contours of some of what that Christian vision of his and MAGA is.
And I want to reflect on what this tells us about Christianity in America at present.
Okay?
So, his inaugural address, among many other things, he claimed a mandate to rule.
And I want to say a mandate to rule.
Trump is not claiming a mandate to govern.
He is claiming a mandate to rule.
Everything about MAGA world, all the emphasis on the unified executive, on, you know, the immunity of the president, all of that stuff is about ruling.
It's not about governing.
It's about ruling.
And he claimed a mandate for this.
Now, we've heard this before.
We've heard all about the mandate ever since the election.
The guy who won 49% of the popular vote, he won a plurality of the popular vote, not a majority of it.
The guy who won on a coin toss, it's a 50-50 bet.
That if somebody voted in this election, they voted for Donald Trump.
It's a 50-50.
It's just as likely that they voted for Kamala Harris as it is that they voted for Trump, statistically.
But claiming a mandate, we know this, okay?
But here's what he says in his inaugural.
He said, quote, My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom.
End quote.
He claims the mandate.
And he makes that political claim that we've heard from the GOP and MAGA since the election.
But he goes further than this.
He explicitly claims a divine mandate for his second term.
He goes on to say this.
He says, Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life.
I'm just going to pause here.
Notice all the my language.
It's Trump talking about Trump.
My election.
And they try to take my freedom and take my life.
America for Trump is Trump.
He embodies the nation.
That's populist nationalist logic.
We'll come back to that, I'm sure, because I always come back to that.
But that's a thing.
All right.
Back to what he says.
He says, Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life.
Just a few months ago in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear.
But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason.
I was saved by God to make America great again.
Let's just take a minute to think about this, to think about and to decode what it is that Trump is claiming here.
The first thing, it was God who delivered him from justice.
He notes the legal actions taken against him and so forth.
He is a convicted felon.
God didn't deliver him from that.
And it wasn't God who delivered him.
It was the courts and it was an election and so forth, but it's all credited to God.
God delivered him from justice, and more importantly, from an assassin's bullet.
And why?
To make America great again, to enact everything in his America First policies.
And what does that do?
What does it do if he moves from a political mandate to say that he won the election, which is true, to saying he has a divine mandate, that it was divine action that preserved his life and gave him the presidency?
It cloaks everything he does and says with sacred authority.
And those of you who listen to It's in the Code, you know I talk about this all the time.
This is what religious language does.
It cloaks ordinary, mundane realities, and it makes them sacred.
It puts them beyond all contestation.
So these are not Trump's policies.
They're God's policies.
And if you oppose them, you're not just a political opponent.
You're not just opposing Trump.
You are opposing God and God's will.
And so that's the claim that Trump makes.
That's how he situates everything that comes in that address.
I think it's what situates everything that comes after.
He has not only a political mandate, as he says, but a divine mandate as well.
And this is the logic of a divinely ordained messianic figure called by God to deliver the people, a well-worn trope within both the Jewish and Christian traditions.
And what it does is it makes the political question irrelevant.
It doesn't matter that he won a plurality and not a majority of the popular vote.
God put him in office.
And this is also the logic of the big lie of the election deniers transposed to the context of political victory.
This is why those who believe the big lie say, like, it didn't matter.
If the election was rigged or not, it would not have mattered if Trump lost.
He would still carry this divine mandate.
That's what legitimates any action undertaken against those who vote for Trump, against democratic procedures, against democratic processes.
Once you can claim that divine mandate, anything you do becomes justified.
And this is where I think all of that I and me language from Trump in the inaugural matters.
I've talked a lot of times about how...
Within populism and nationalism, and Christian nationalism as a subset of that, the populist leader is the incarnation of the people, the authentic people.
And that is how Trump is understood and perceived by his followers.
That is how he is positioning himself here.
So his election is the divine installation of what they see as a kind of renewed Christian America.
So this is the notion.
This is the core idea.
This is how he situates what he's doing.
I think this is how we have to understand the context, sort of rhetorically and pragmatically, and for millions of Americans, as a matter of faith, this is how we have to understand everything else we've seen this week and everything we're going to see moving forward, this notion that it is divinely mandated and that Trump is carrying out a literal divine mission in governing the country, in ruling over others.
So that's the context.
That's the background.
In concrete terms, what does this look like?
Right?
You might have Uncle Ron or somebody else who talks about it being a Christian nation.
Maybe you're starting to be like, okay, but what does a Christian nation look like?
Walk me through that.
Trump did that this week, folks.
All of these executive orders he signed did that.
I think it's also why he focused on culture war issues and not like his tariffs.
You know, it says that they'll be enacted February 1st.
Who knows?
But remember, he boasted and bragged and assured everybody forever that day one he was going to impose tariffs.
He didn't do that.
He didn't do a lot of the economic things.
He said he was going to be focused on culture war stuff.
Why?
Because that's the Christian America stuff.
That's the stuff that the Magath faithful really buy into.
He promised to sign, he said, close to 100 executive orders immediately after being inaugurated.
And those following, those of you who've listened, and Brad talked about how hard it can be to try to keep up with this and to listen to this, how overwhelming it can be.
And there have been so many things coming fast and furious.
I guarantee you, by the time you are listening to this, there'll be something I'm saying now that is dated or wrong or has missed something.
Or I'll get emails and say, why didn't you talk about this or that or the other?
Because it's just kind of happening all the time.
It has been fast and furious in this flurry of activity.
And so I want to look at just a few of the most notable examples of this, a few of the most notable of these executive actions undertaken within the context of this claim to a divine mandate to get a vision of, okay, practically speaking, in concrete terms, what does a Christian America look like for the MAGA faithful?
So the first thing I want to look at are the pardons of J6, January 6th insurrectionists.
Trump pardoned over a thousand of the rioters and insurrectionists from January 6th.
He also commuted the sentences of leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
He referred to them, the people that he was pardoning and commuting, he referred to them as, quote, hostages.
What are they?
They are political prisoners who are being persecuted because they supported him.
Part of his divine mandate is to free those oppressed for supporting him.
He had said he would pardon nonviolent insurrectionists, but he pardoned some of the worst.
So for example, and I think this is coming from CNN, It notes that the group that he pardoned includes individuals like Julian Cair, who assaulted U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and later pled guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon.
Devlin Thompson, who hit a police officer with a metal baton.
Robert Palmer, a Florida man who attacked police with a fire extinguisher, a wooden plank, and a pole.
Right, just to give some examples.
These are not non-violent offenders.
These are some of the worst from January 6th.
So, okay, we know that.
He said he was going to do that.
Okay, Dan, like he pardoned him.
He said he was going to.
Like, what does that mean?
Well, so here's the question.
How does that fit into the vision of Christian America?
When Uncle Ron or anybody else in the MAGA faithful talks about this being a Christian nation, when Trump says it's a divine mandate, that the things he is doing are carrying out a divine mission, what is Christian America here?
How does this fit into this?
And the first thing to recognize is that these are not just rioters or insurrectionists.
They're not just MAGA loyalists.
No, they are Christian soldiers.
They are the front lines of a militant MAGA army that recognizes Trump's divine mandate.
This is their reward for their faithfulness to a divine mission.
And now Trump, America's new political messiah, has delivered them as promised.
And this is the key here.
They are not a MAGA aberration.
They're not a bug in the system.
They are a feature.
They are the Christian masculine ideal that makes America great.
This is the embodied vision of masculinity and power within the MAGA movement.
They are what real American men, and yes, there were some women there, but it was overwhelmingly men there at the Capitol that day.
They are what real American men and what real Christian men should be, Christian soldiers willing to fight, to kill if necessary, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of MAGA Nation and Trump's divine mandate.
So that's J6, and we're going to stick with gender.
That's a vision of masculinity, of what Christian Dume would call militant masculinity, of what others might just call hyper-masculinity.
But this sort of masculinity at the heart of the Christian conservative, high-control American religion model of what makes a man a man, what makes a Christian man a Christian man.
So let's stick with gender, because gender figured prominently in this vision of Christian America and the actions undertaken by Trump.
Okay?
So, he promised in his inaugural, in his speech, he also promised to reverse and counter government efforts to, quote,"...socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life." End quote.
So under a new executive order, and many of you know this, Brad referenced it, the U.S. government will only recognize the two sexes of male and female.
And that's significant because it reversed Biden administration policies that broadened gender designations, including the gender of X on passports and things like this.
And so here's what Trump said.
Trump said, as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.
End quote.
And just in case there's any doubt about this, the order uses the right-wing language of defending women.
I've talked about this before.
Again, those of you who listen to us in the code have heard me talk about the language of quote-unquote Christian health and safety.
We've talked about it in weekly roundups, how all of these things are always positioned as somehow like being there to defend women or defend children or defend the vulnerable.
We've talked about Trump saying that he would defend women whether they wanted it or not and so forth.
And so what do they call this?
He says, his order is called, quote, The Defending Women from Gender Ideology, Extremism, and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government Order.
Like, that's the title.
And so from now on, under this executive order, the government will refer to sex rather than gender.
So it's equating the two.
It is equating so-called biological sex with gender and saying that these are simply the same thing.
All official documents, including passports and visas and entry orders and all those things, have to accurately reflect one's quote-unquote biological sex.
And so-called single-sex spaces will be protected from trans and gender nonconforming individuals.
So in other words, if there's a space that's for women, it can only be so-called biological women and not biological men and so on.
They're supposedly reversing gender ideology they are imposing.
The sex and gender ideology that, again, if you listen to It's in the Code, we've been talking about this.
I've been talking about this for weeks.
The sex and gender ideology within conservative American religion, here it is.
So again, how does this fit into Christian America?
Trump explicitly places this vision of gender, this normative vision of gender, of binary genders, of men and women and nothing else, of a cis-heteronormative model, all of that stuff.
Christian America, for Trump and for MAGA, only recognizes the patriarchal order of two fixed and immutable genders.
That's all it is.
And he appeals not only to God, but to spurious notions of biology for justification.
Whenever you have this language of biology and quote-unquote biological sex and so forth, this very selective and, in my view, laughable appeal to science to try to give this To give emphasis to this.
And again, the name of the order included, right?
Restoring biological truth.
The biological truth of gender being restored here.
So God's America only has two genders, folks.
Anyone who falls out of that binary, you're not only defying God again, you've got the divine mandate and divine order, but you simply have no place within Christian America.
This is another effort, among other things, to simply erase queer folk from social and public space.
They just don't exist.
And if people say that they're there, we will oppress them, we will marginalize them, we will pathologize them, we will persecute them.
But more importantly, we will just try to erase their social existence.
There is no space for queer folk in MAGA Christian America.
And the final dimension I want to look at here.
In MAGA Christian America has to do with race and diversity, equity, inclusion practices.
So Trump's America is not only pure in gender, it's racially pure as well, which is to say it's normatively white.
Christian Americans are white Americans.
Christian America is white America.
Trump signed orders on immigration, a core promise.
On birthright citizenship, another core promise, and on reversing decades of federal government policies on diversity and affirmative action.
So, on immigration, Trump declared a national emergency at the border.
He banned the use of an app allowing immigrants to legally enter the U.S. Remember all of this stuff about how you get, you know, Uncle Ron and others, the mogophores, be like, oh, no, no, no, we're just opposed to illegal immigrants.
We have no problem with legal immigration.
Nope, they're banning legal immigration as well.
What this means is that the U.S. border is essentially right now closed to asylum seekers.
It's never happened.
If you're an asylum seeker, you're somebody fleeing persecution, seeking asylum in the United States, sorry folks, the border's closed.
And then senior Justice Department leadership overseeing immigration courts were also removed.
In addition to that, the order also declared an end to so-called birthright citizenship.
That's the idea that those born on U.S. soil are citizens.
This is another longstanding gripe of Trump's, you know, going back to his first term.
It has developed into a promise that he was going to contest this in his second term, and here he does.
This has now been challenged in court already.
24 blue states' attorney generals challenged this as a clear violation of the 14th Amendment and said that it exceeds the president's authority on immigration.
This order has already been blocked by a federal judge on the grounds that it is, quote, blatantly unconstitutional.
And of course, we know that that's not an accident.
The aim of this order is in part to get this before SCOTUS and to try to do away with birthright citizenship.
But we've seen that.
And then the final piece of this, on this notion of racial purity, is diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, and federal policy.
Okay?
So Trump is also defending, he's not just trying to defend white America by keeping people of color out, by making sure that babies born to people of color are not citizens.
By making sure that those who are viewed as somehow rendering America racially impure can't come in, he's trying to defend white America from within.
So he signed an executive order revoking decades, decades of diversity actions within the federal government.
And this is like a sort of extreme escalation of the right-wing onslaught we've seen against diversity initiatives everywhere, whether it's the popular attacks on big businesses that get them to do away with DEI stuff, or cracking down on higher education, or what have you.
And we will see that here.
I want to read some examples here from Axios, which offered a great summary of this.
Because it's important to recognize here that this isn't something new, or this isn't Trump responding against new things.
We talk all the time about the reaction against the changes in America since the 1960s, and this is explicit in this order.
So again, this is from Axios that provides a useful summary of this.
They say, quote, Trump's order revokes one that President Johnson signed on September 24, 1965, more than two years after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
And it highlights some of what Johnson's order said.
Okay, so LBJ's order gave the Secretary of Labor the authority to ensure equal opportunity for people of color and women in federal contractors' recruitment, hiring, training, and other employment practices.
It required federal contractors to refrain from employment discrimination and take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity based on race, color, religion, and national origin.
The order came more than a year after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and just months after he signed the Voting Rights Act following violent attacks on voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama.
Folks, this is not taking on the new woke generation.
This is going back against Republican policies from the 1960s.
And the historical context is here.
Axios goes on to point out, this reversal comes after six GOP presidents, including Trump during his first term, kept the Johnson executive order in place.
Others have expanded it through amendments.
Presidents have consistently accepted this executive order and built upon it.
Right?
Who opposed it?
Segregationists opposed it.
Conservatives have voiced opposition to it.
And again, it comes just as on top of all these other movements within American capitalist corporate culture, these moves against DEI and higher ed and so forth, Trump undoes this.
So with one executive order, he undoes decades of government practice.
So he signs the order on Tuesday of this week.
Wednesday, the federal government websites devoted to diversity, equity, inclusion went dark.
They disappeared.
And the White House threatened, quote, adverse consequences for agencies that didn't darken those websites.
And then the Office of Personnel Management also sent a memo to all agencies calling for all DEI workers to be placed on paid leave by 5 p.m.
that day.
Folks, DEI is done in the federal government.
There is no emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion.
So again, how does that fit into Trump's Christian vision of America?
MAGA America is white supremacist America.
It is an America in which white Americans control social, political, and cultural power.
Trump's Christian America is white America.
A Christian nation is a white supremacist nation.
And we've talked about this a lot on this podcast.
I'm not going to rehearse it all here.
We're already going to go long today.
We have talked about how when people claim that they're challenging DEI initiatives on the basis of, you know, Equity itself or being fair, the logic is always that if anybody other than somebody who's white has a position or holds a position, that they didn't deserve it, that those positions belong to white people.
This is white supremacy.
So in MAGA world and in Trump's vision and the vision of millions of Christian Americans, an ethnically or racially diverse nation, it's not just a threat to white demographics.
It's not just a concern about, you know, becoming a majority-minority nation and all that.
It's a threat to the nation's Christian identity.
To be a Christian nation is to be a nation in which white people have the power.
Folks, that's white supremacy.
We have to call it that because that's what it is.
So by keeping immigrants out, by making sure that their children aren't citizens, by maintaining white power in government, MAGA America preserves white Christian America.
That's the vision of Christian America for Donald Trump and the MAGA faithful.
So there's just a few examples.
A few concrete examples if somebody says, okay, Trump says it's a divine mandate, says it's a Christian nation, Uncle Ron and others say it's a Christian nation.
What does that look like in practice?
We've seen it this week, folks.
We have seen the vision.
And so I want to offer just a couple takeaways from this that I think are important, okay?
The first is this.
If that's the vision of MAGA Christian America, what does it tell us about the MAGA God?
What God does MAGA worship?
Your brother-in-law, your sister, your friend, your cousin, your parent, your son, your daughter.
Whoever it is that is part of the MAGA faithful, and when you ask them to explain to you why they vote for Trump, they say it's a Christian nation, and he's God's messianic figure.
He's the one that God has appointed to bring us there.
What God do they worship?
What do we know about the MAGA God?
We know that the MAGA God is a God that delights in retribution.
We know that the MAGA God is a God who's supposed to be all-powerful.
I talk about this a lot.
Within American conservative Christianity and the Christianity that feeds into Christian nationalism, there's all this talk about this big, powerful, masculine, omnipotent God, but that God can't seem to do very much.
That God needs human help.
That God is ultimately impotent without people like Donald Trump doing that God's bidding.
So you have this all-powerful God that needs people like Donald Trump.
Can't seem to do it himself.
The MAGA God can't seem to do a lot without humans.
Pulling the strings for him.
This is a God who celebrates strength and power and domination and who despises weakness and humility.
Brad contrasted at the beginning of the episode the bishop speaking before Trump's inaugural and gave some elements of that Christian vision.
This is a God that hates everything about that.
There is no place within MAGA for a God who aids the downtrodden.
There is no place for the poor, the orphan, or the widow, to use that prophetic language.
There is no mandate to care for, quote-unquote, the least of these.
And we can remember Jesus in the gospel saying, whatever you've done for the least of these, you've done for me, that that is the locus of the divine, not the Maga God.
The Maga God does not live or work or touch or care about the least of these.
The Maga God cares about power and wealth and masculinity.
There is no place here for serving others.
So that's the first thing.
That's the Maga God.
So the next time one of those people in your life tells you that they're just voting their Christian conscience, that's the God they're voting for.
Okay?
And that brings up the next question, and it's a question I come to all the time, and I know I do, and not everybody agrees with me, and that is fine.
But the question is, is this a vision of Christian America?
And I know, I know that there are lots of American Christians, I know there are lots of you listening, who don't share this vision.
I know that.
I'm going to get emails from people that say, Dan, I really appreciate everything you say, but you need to understand that not every, yeah, I get it, not every Christian, not every evangelical, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I get that.
And I know that there have been and are different visions of quote-unquote Christian America historically, and different visions now.
And again, Brad did a great job of highlighting In the speech of the bishop, the National Cathedral, a very different vision of what a Christian America might be, one that has mercy on the downtrodden, oppressed, and so forth.
But what we have to understand is that for millions of Americans, this is a Christian vision of America.
And I think we have to fight the temptation to dismiss that.
We have to fight the temptation to diminish that.
We have to fight the temptation to say, oh, well, it's not really Christian, it's really politics, or it's really power, as if religion can't be politics and power.
I say this all the time, I'm going to say it again.
Religions are what their adherents do.
And so if you have millions of American Christians, millions of people who understand themselves as Christians, millions of people that when Donald Trump stands up and says he has a mandate from the Christian God, they believe it, they feel it, they think that it's true.
And when that guides their actions, when they believe that they, as Christian Americans, are called to vote for and support Donald Trump and MAGA Nation, folks, that's a part of the Christian tradition.
We simply can't dismiss it.
And I get that those who are operating within different theological traditions, I understand.
You want to have those arguments about how it's not really Christian or it's not consistent with the gospel, whatever.
Do that.
But if I'm looking at it as a scholar of religion and a social analyst, Folks, this is the dominant form of American Christianity.
And when you ask most Americans, whether they are MAGA Americans or not, what they associate with the notion of a quote-unquote Christian nation, this is the vision.
And we have, again, to confront the temptation to dismiss this.
And part of what I have in mind, I talked about this a long time ago in one of the It's in the Code episodes, and this is the episode that got me the most pushback of any episode.
And it's the person who says, and I hear it all the time, I get emails about it, I hear it, you know, I hear clients in my coaching work who struggle with it.
I encounter colleagues who talk about this who say, like, you know, I hear what you're saying, but you know what, my father-in-law's a good guy.
He supports all this, but you know, he's a good guy.
My mom, she's a nice person.
My brother-in-law, he's a stand-up guy.
Like, I get he thinks all these problematic things, but you know, he's not a bad guy.
And my suggestion in the episode was maybe we need to rethink that.
Maybe we need to get over the, I don't understand why these people think these things because they're good people, and recognize that maybe if they think these things, they're not good people.
And I got a lot of pushback there.
I got a lot of people who said, how can you judge?
Yes, I'm making a judgment.
There are people in the world we don't think are good people.
These are not people.
If these are their true values, if this is the God they worship, these are not people that I want teaching my children.
These are not people I want, you know, educating their kids, indoctrinating their children to encounter my children in the world.
These are not people that I want making legislative and medical policies and decisions for my kids or anybody else that I care about.
We have to be willing to confront that, folks.
We have to be willing to confront that.
And I say this because there is still this cultural deference to religion, that when somebody cloaks even abhorrent ideas, In the sacred cloak of specifically Christianity, this is the height of Christian privilege.
When they do that, that somehow it makes it not bad or not dangerous or not sincere.
Folks, I'm here to say that it is.
We have seen this week clearly what quote-unquote Christian America is for MAGA.
We have seen what we can look for from a newly empowered Donald Trump who is willing to ride the wave of millions of Americans who believe that he is a divine figure mandated by God to rule.
There's a lot there, and it's hard.
And And again, I'll refer back to Brad, who did a great job at the end of his segment, talking about some of the ways of, you know, sort of, for lack of a better term, right, of taking care of ourselves and not being overwhelmed by this and not being moved to in action and so forth.
And I want to just encourage folks to do that.
Because, folks, we've got a long time of this coming, at least two years.
We'll see how the midterms go and if that can stifle Trump or not.
We don't know.
But we've got a long time of this coming, and we've got to be in it for the long game, and I understand that.
So it's important to see these things.
I think it's important to recognize where we are.
I think it's important to be honest about where we are.
I think it's important to recognize what it is we're up against.
It can be hard to find reasons for hope this week.
I find one in something I've already mentioned, but it was that the federal judge's ruling on Trump's birthright citizenship has already come out.
As I say, by the time you listen to this, there may well be other rulings.
I don't know.
I'm interested to see where that goes.
I am hopeful.
If I'm being really optimistic, that's not my particular flavor.
If you know me, you know this, but if I want to be really optimistic, I'm optimistic that enough appeals courts and lower appellate Jurisdictions will simply say this is not constitutional, that SCOTUS might refuse to take it up.
It's probably not likely.
I am relatively hopeful that SCOTUS is not going to accept the Trump line on birthright citizenship.
I don't know what happens if that takes place, and of course I could be wrong.
I talk about this all the time.
Hope and certainty are not the same thing.
If I was certain that that would happen, I wouldn't have to have hope.
But that's my hope.
My hope is that that has already happened.
My hope is that that will continue to happen.
My hope is that we will begin to see this opposition.
I think tied in with that, my hope, and again, Brad kind of hinted at this, is that maybe those who oppose Trump can stop focusing on what went wrong in the election, how do we lick our wounds and so forth, and actually oppose this agenda.
I want to thank everybody for listening.
Again, a hard episode, a bunch of hard stuff, hard things to face up to.
I take hope in you.
I take hope in those of you who listen.
I take hope in those of you who support what we're doing.
I hope that you take hope in what we're doing.
I take hope in what we can do together.
So thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us.
Let us know what you need from us.
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