The Obscure French Priest Who Explains Christian Trumpism Like No One Else
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Brad discusses the ideas of French Jesuit priest John Daniélou, who argued that the Church is best when it builds and sustains Christendom - a Christian civilization where religion is ingrained in culture to reach the masses. He explores how these concepts explain the rise of what he terms 'Christian Trumpism'—a form of Christianity more about power and public display than individual commitment. Brad also touches on this goes against the grain of what most Protestants, especially evangelicals, are taught about a counterculture church filled with true believers - rather than a lukewarm cultural Christianity of indifferent pew-fillers.
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you you you What if I told you that there is an obscure French Jesuit cardinal who is perhaps the decoder ring for understanding Christian Trumpism?
Today, I dig into some quotations and some work by John Danieleau, who's a French Jesuit from the 20th century.
Who talks about Christianity as a civilization, as a people, and says that the best thing that can happen is for the church to catch in its nets everybody, and for God and the angels to sort out the good and bad in those nets later.
What's needed is a public religion that makes it such that even the weakened spirit can convert those who don't have the fierce, ferocious faith.
of the committed, of the martyr, of the remnant.
I dig into him and his work because I think it is a super easy shortcut way to understand the kind of Christianity that is in vogue in Trump's second term and has been in vogue for 10 years.
It's something that goes against what a lot of us learned in church when we were young about a church that was fighting against The stream, a counterculture church, an underdog church, a church fighting for people who are fully committed to God.
What we have now is an idea of Christendom, a people given to God, whether they're good people or bad ones.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White Jesus.
What's up, y 'all?
Brad here.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
And today I want to talk about an obscure French priest who I believe provides the clearest explanation of Christian Trumpism we have.
Some of you might know that I am doing research and I'm actually in the process of writing a book called American Caesar.
And this book's set to come out in 2026.
And it's all about the push for an American monarch, the desire on the part of...
Traditional Catholics, reactionary Catholics, Reconstructionist Christians, Protestants, and technocrats to essentially affect a second American Revolution, and this time to seat a monarch rather than to break away from one.
And they all have different takes on this.
They call it different things.
They have different ways they want to get there.
But I'm tracing how those three groups overlap.
And that's people like Peter Thiel.
That's people like J.D. Vance.
That's people like...
Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth.
But one of the folks that I've been looking at in depth is a guy named Brent Bozell, who I've talked about on the show before and interviewed Jerome Kopioski, and we discussed him.
But Brent Bozell is this kind of obscure figure from the American right who was really active in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
Brent Bozell was the best friend of William F. Buckley, the man who started the National Review, who wrote a book called God and Man at Yale.
William F. Buckley, for those of you who know, is one of the most important conservative political thinkers in American 20th century history.
He was seen as kind of the vanguard of the new right in the 50s and 60s.
He was somebody who came before the likes of Paul Weyrich and the Moral Majority, and somebody who really set the stage for the kind of rightward leanings of the GOP in the latter half of the 20th century.
His best friend, however, was a man named Brent Bozel, who started a magazine called Triumph, and I go into this in my book, and I'm not going to go into Brent Bozel's whole biography today.
But as I've been doing this work, I've been reading a bunch of essays by Brent Bozel, and one of them is called Politics of the Poor.
And to me, this represents the best, I think, explainer for some of you out there who are confused as to why somebody would want a Christianity that is based on power.
And public religion.
I think so many of you out there are still in this mindset, and it's the one I grew up with, too.
Christianity is about not only helping the marginalized and helping those who don't get recognition from wider society, but that Christianity is about a true commitment to God.
So I want you all to hang with me.
Like, I was an evangelical in the 1990s.
And when I converted, I remember so clearly my youth pastor, Paul.
Telling me that Constantine was the worst thing that happened to the American church.
And Constantine was the worst thing that happened to the American church because Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire.
And there's so much debate about Constantine.
Was he really a Christian?
Did he just see Christianity as a way to, to kind of coalesce various interests within the empire, whatever.
Not going to get into that today.
The idea, though, behind what Paul was telling me was this.
That Christianity cannot be an official religion.
That if it's something that people do because of culture, because they're born into Catholic Spain or they're born into Protestant Denmark, it doesn't count.
Christianity is about the heart.
Christianity is about a true commitment.
And I think a lot of you out there know...
What this means.
I think if you were an evangelical, you know that the idea was you need to be on fire for God.
That it didn't count unless you made a personal commitment to him.
It didn't mean anything unless you were, you know, you could have grown up Catholic and been baptized and confirmed, but unless you had a personal relationship with Jesus, it didn't really count.
It wasn't really the thing.
Some of you are people who grew up mainly, perhaps in a mainline Christian setting.
You grew up in Presbyterian or Lutheran settings where You know, you felt like, yeah, I go to church and my family's religious.
And then you met an evangelical friend at school and they were like, maybe you're not really religious.
You went to their summer camp or you went to their youth group and it was different than what you were used to.
And it was all about this personal being on fire for God idea.
And so for me in the 90s, and I think for a lot of people out there, this makes sense, is that evangelical approaches to faith are really about the individual having this personal commitment.
And thus, it's hard to have a public religion, a state religion, because you have to really have everybody on board and be committed.
And so you start to see, like, the kind of contradictions.
And this is where I went wrong in the 90s and really in the early 2000s with evangelicalism is because I couldn't understand why my fellow evangelicals were so excited to have, like, laws and policies and politicians who were supposedly Christian.
Because to me, it was just all about us as a church and the people who are part of that church creating lives and communities that lived out the gospel in very committed and radical ways who cared if the government was on board with us.
We were swimming upstream anyway.
Weren't we supposed to be like the early church?
That's what I always heard.
We're supposed to be like the early church who gathered in the room upstairs after Jesus.
Ascended to heaven and they fought against the tides of persecution and they didn't care that the Roman Empire didn't recognize them.
They were brave and they were fierce and they were radical and they were willing to die in the arena because they were Christians.
These were the examples I thought of.
Honestly, taking to heart those examples really led me away from evangelicalism because so many people in my church didn't live that way.
I would look at this random real estate agent named Scott in my...
Church all the time.
And I knew he was a jerk.
I knew him well enough.
I had his kids in my youth group when I was a youth pastor.
I was up close and personal with this guy in the community enough to know he was a jerk.
And I don't think he actually cared about church that much.
He just needed to go to church so that people around town thought of him as a trustworthy real estate agent.
And I always thought, this guy's going to heaven?
Because he, like, prayed a prayer?
But Gandhi isn't?
And so...
The idea that you had to be really committed to God actually was part of what took me away from evangelicalism because it felt incoherent.
But nonetheless, that stuck with me, right?
That to be a Christian is actually to give yourself to God in a voluntaristic way.
And yet, so much of what we see in Christian Trumpism goes against that idea.
So much of what we see in Christian Trumpism really is about public power.
It's really about...
Having control in the public sphere.
And it seems like the Christianity that is being lived out is more cultural.
It's more about an identity.
It's more about being part of the in-group than it is about this on-fire radical commitment to God.
And we still hear about that.
You'll still hear people discuss their relationship with God that way.
Sean Foyt or prosperity gospel preachers or anyone else.
But you also see them...
Like, allied with Proud Boys and militia members.
You'll see them cozying up to white supremacists.
I've told this story many times in this show of going to a protest at a megachurch and having people walk out and talking to them, people from the church.
But having Proud Boys across the street kind of counter-protesting what we were doing and basically acting as, like, boots on the ground to make sure we didn't do anything, I guess, to people from the church.
And having people from the church invite them to lunch and they go, hey, Jeff, how are you?
You going to come over to the barbecue later?
Instead of saying, hey, we don't need proud boys at this church.
Please don't do that here.
There was an alliance.
We've seen that across Christian Trumpism for a long time.
And one of the things that Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead point out in their landmark book, Taking Back America for God, is that To score as a Christian nationalist, you don't actually have to be somebody who goes to church a lot or really even reads the Bible all that often.
You might be somebody who simply says, yes, the government should declare this a Christian nation.
Yes, the government should teach Christianity in public schools.
Yes, there should be prayer in public schools.
Yes, the policies of the United States should follow Christian values or morality.
You might say yes to all those things.
And then the next question might be, so what church do you go to?
And the answer might be, I don't go to church, or I never have, or I haven't been in a long time.
When's the last time you read the Bible?
I can't remember.
That's a Christian nationalist who wants a Christian nation, even though they don't seem to be committed to God.
They don't have a personal relationship with Christ, per se, but they want their country to have the markings of what they think is a Christian nation.
For someone like me, that feels deeply incoherent and it feels deeply hypocritical.
Why would you want a Christian nation if you're not a practicing Christian?
And the answer, of course, is power.
It's an in-group identity.
It's a story.
It's a comfort level with certain kinds of people, as we talk about all the time in this show.
A comfort level with other Christians who look like you.
People who are not brown and Hindu.
People who are not Muslim and black.
People who are like you, people who think like you, and you feel like you have a cultural connection with, perhaps.
But I want to turn to a quote that comes from one of Brent Bozell's essays, The Politics of the Poor.
And he quotes a French priest named Jean Danielou.
And this priest is someone I'm familiar with because I spent years in France studying French Catholicism and mysticism and other things.
And in 2000...
10 and 11 and 12. I spent a lot of those years either in Paris libraries or living and studying at the Institute Catholic in Paris.
And Danielou is a kind of famous figure at the Institute Catholic in Paris, so I was familiar with him.
But when Bozell quoted Danielou in this essay, I thought, I have to share that with you all because this is going to help explain so much about Christian nationalism that may not connect.
So here is a quotation from Brent Bozell's Politics of the Poor.
And it is from John Danielu.
The essential character of the gospel is to be the religion of the poor, using that term not to indicate those who are detached from earthly things, but those who form the great mass of mankind.
So he's saying there that to be poor is not to not have things, money, house, food, etc.
That's not what poor means.
This view shares St. Augustine's picture of the church as a net in which all sorts of fish are caught.
So to be poor is to be part of the masses.
The poor in spirit are actually just the masses of humanity.
When the church casts its net, it catches all kinds of fish.
Where the task of separating the good from the bad is for the angels, not for men.
On this view of the matter, the church was most truly itself in the days of Christendom, when everybody was baptized, and it is this state of affairs which is much to be desired.
Daniel is like explicitly nostalgic for Christendom.
Now, when I was a Christian, Christendom was seen as this time that was like a dark age because everyone had to be Christian.
Nobody was committed to Christianity.
And we loved the Protestant Reformation.
We especially love Soren Kierkegaard, the individualist, the melancholy Dane who wanted to resurrect a Christianity of the heart, not a Christianity of a public baptism.
But Danielou, the French Jesuit priest here, is, no, that's what we want.
Why?
And he gives you an indication here.
He's, look, the church casts a wide net.
And there's good ones and bad ones in there.
So that jerk, Scott, I talked about from my old church, he's part of the, he's in the net.
He's kind of a bad one, if you ask me.
But that's not for us to decide.
You might have bad people in the church.
You might have good people in the church.
You might have people in the church who are in the church, but not really committed to the church or to God.
They're just baptized.
That's for the angels to decide, not for us.
You know what's really desirable?
It's for everyone to be baptized and everyone to be in the net.
And here's the real key.
Here's the real key.
Don't miss this.
To be poor in spirit, to be poor, is to be part of the masses.
It's not to be poor economically or any other way.
Now, what does that mean?
Let me explain through another quotation.
The extension of Christianity to an immense multitude, which is of its very essence, was held back during the first centuries by the fact that the social cadres and cultural forms of the society in which it operated were hostile to it.
So Danielu has the exact opposite view of the early churches I was taught.
He's like, those first centuries?
Not great.
Because there was persecution.
And before Constantine, Christianity was kind of seen as suspect and Christians were persecuted at times, even martyred.
Not good.
Now, what I was taught is that was a time of true devotion to Christ.
It was a time when the church was truly itself.
And he said, no, it wasn't.
It was not.
What we really want is the extension of Christianity to an immense multitude, the masses.
To cleave to Christianity called then for a strength of character of which the majority of men are not.
Capable.
So this is the thing, y 'all.
What he's saying is the masses, most people are not capable of withstanding persecution.
They're not capable of commitment to God if it means going against the grain, being part of the minority.
They're not willing to gather with the holy remnant who are committed to Jesus, even though the culture around them is not.
Most people are poor in spirit.
That's what he means.
He has a very low view of the masses.
The regular ordinary person doesn't have the strength of character, the fortitude of spirit, to be a Christian in a time of persecution or even during a time when Christianity is not the majority religion.
When the conversion of Constantine removed these obstacles, the gospel was made accessible to the poor.
And there it is.
Constantine was the answer because Constantine made the gospel available to the poor in spirit, the masses, the 90% who don't have the strength to be a Christian during a time of Nero, during a time when they have to gather in the upper room and pray, during a time when Paul is going around the empire and telling churches to be strong in the face of opposition.
When the conversion of Constantine removed these obstacles to the gospel, it was made accessible to the poor.
That is to say, to those very people who are not numbered among the elite.
Danielou has this idea that 90% of people can't be Christian because they're not strong enough.
So you have to create a culture in which they will be Christian automatically.
The man in the street could now be a Christian.
Far from distorting Christianity, this change allowed it to become more truly itself a people.
Think about what he just said.
There's so much there.
He's like, first, when Christianity is the official religion, you open it up to the masses.
That's what he wants.
He wants a church of people that are baptized because that's just part of the culture or because they have to be.
It's that wide net of the church.
The best thing we could have is a church where like, It's so ubiquitous in culture that you have to be baptized to be any kind of part of the community.
Good people, bad people, corrupt people, liars, doesn't matter.
People are just doing it for personal gain.
Who cares?
As long as they're part of the church, as long as they're baptized.
And this made Christianity what it's truly supposed to be.
What is that?
A people.
There's this real weird sense that Christendom...
Is a kind of ethnicity.
That you're a people.
Like a nation is a people.
That Christianity became a people group.
And that's what the church should be.
Not a holy remnant.
Not a persecuted few.
Not a committed cadre of saints.
Not those willing to face worldly opposition for their faith in the crucified God.
The church is supposed to be a people with power, a people with public status, a people that is recognized as the dominant group.
He continues.
In short, it was found that for the great generality of men, a Christian civilization was the indispensable medium for communicating the Christian message.
The idea, and this is Bozel now, it's no longer Danielou, is that a Christian civilization is the only way to reach the masses.
So you've got to have a Christian civilization.
You've got to have a civilization that's based on Christianity, where you might just have to, like, make Christianity the law or create laws that kind of foster people into Christianity, that Christianity is kind of the default religion through policy.
Through social organization, through tax situations that favor those who follow Christian practices in terms of family and birth.
Having a Christian civilization is to have a true church.
Bozell continues, For most men, as McLuhan would say, the medium was the message.
And so it is today that a Christian people is to be found only where the vestiges of Christian civilization still exist.
This could be Spain or Ireland or Italy.
It is practically impossible for any but the militant Christian to persevere in a milieu, which offers him no support.
This is why there is laid upon the Church a duty to work at the task of making civilization such that the Christian way of life shall be open to the poor.
So what Bozell goes on to argue, following Danielou, is that...
If you want Christianity, you have to have a Christian civilization.
Meaning Christians have to have power.
Christians have to have authority.
It has to be the official majority-dominant religion.
That pluralism, that existing alongside those who are not Christian, whether atheist or Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist, existing alongside those who don't follow your way of faith, will not work if you want.
The church has to be An imperial church.
And you have to have things in public that speak to God.
Bozell says, the world must speak of God.
Otherwise, man can have no access to him.
And he's actually quoting Danielou here.
You have to have public memorials.
You have to have cultural components that point to God.
That there's no point in encouraging virtue in the family.
And having it undermined at school.
You have to have schools that teach about God.
You have to have a calendar that is set up for you to observe the Sabbath and other holy days.
You have to have a president, officials.
You have to have everything pointing you to the church and the worship of your creator.
And to me, when I think about these quotations from Danielou and the writing of Bozell, I think of...
What I'm seeing in the Trump administration right now, I'm seeing these prominent displays of Christian art and crucifix necklaces.
I'm seeing people sing praise songs at the White House and other official buildings.
I'm seeing a desire for Christianity as the public religion.
That if you want to be part of the in-group, you've got to show us publicly that you're one of us.
Some of you You can't square the idea that Christianity would be anything but living out Christ's teachings about helping the poor, the stranger, the marginalized, or the vulnerable.
Some of you grew up like me with the idea that Christianity is about a true commitment to God, being on fire for God.
But there's this other approach that says, look, Christianity is about a dominant people, an imperial power, a church.
That is so ubiquitous and in control of the public square that it catches the masses and it roots out anyone else.
People who won't convert.
Women who won't get on board with the role they're supposed to play in God's story.
People whose sexuality doesn't match up to what we take to be the Christian way of living and loving.
If you fall outside of the public We're going to make it so that you're so uncomfortable and perhaps so outside the bounds of the law that you can either change your ways or go somewhere else.
And we're going to catch in our net all of these bad actors who are going to get on board with us.
They may not have this on-fire commitment to Jesus.
They may not read the Bible every day.
But the militia members, the Proud Boys, the white nationalists, people whose commitments are to all kinds of violence and hurt against minority groups, they're with us now.
They're in our net.
They're on our team.
They're on the in-group.
So we're not going to ask them to change.
We're not going to tell them they're doing it wrong.
God can do that later.
What we know now is that they're helping us build a Christian civilization.
They're on our team.
They're not one of those out there that are working against Christianity in our narrative.
And so we're not going to sort the good fish and the bad fish in our net.
No.
The idea here is like when Jesus sends folks out to fish and they come back with a miraculously huge take, there's all kinds of fish in there, good and bad.
Let God separate it later.
Right now, the white nationalists and the Proud Boys, right now, the immigration xenophobes, they're on our team.
So we need everybody to create this Christian civilization.
This is how Christianity can be a locus.
A lot of people always like, why do you need Christianity?
And it's because Christianity, if you think about it in this way, it can bring together under one umbrella, this locus of people who are supposedly building this Christendom, this Christian civilization, even though they come from these disparate kind of vectors, right?
That you have white nationalists, you have immigration hardliners, you have abortion.
Abolitionists.
You have people coming from very different points of view.
If you can convince them, though, that they're all living out the same story in the same epic battle, and they're all facing the same apocalypse of the woke globalists who want to destroy their people, then you can get them working in the same way.
And you can, as a church, as a Christian, you can convince yourself, look, this is what we need.
Most people can't be, you know, St. Paul, shipwrecked and imprisoned.
Persecuted and battered.
No, most people aren't strong enough for that.
We've got to make it easy.
We've got to make it such that Christianity is so part of our culture that you're just kind of brought into the flow, sent along your way automatically.
That's what we want.
We don't want this holy remnant.
We want power.
And what you don't see in the Danilu quotations, what you don't see in what Bozell's talking about with Christendom is that There's so many ways that this means you have to oppress people who are not part of the Christian narrative, the Christian civilization.
You have to be deeply persecuted.
You have to persecute deeply the Jews as were done in Christendom.
You have to deeply persecute, go to battle with Muslims as was done in Christendom.
You have to make it such that if one is not part of your church, that they are persecuted as happened with the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion.
Like, the whole reason, y 'all, we have liberal democracy, the separation of powers, and the idea of human rights is because from the Enlightenment was born the idea that is what should govern our societies rather than are you Catholic or are you Protestant?
Now, it's more complicated than that.
Liberalism has its problems.
I'm not here to defend it and the Enlightenment tooth and nail.
What I'm saying, though, is the reasons we've got the likes of John Locke and Hobbes and others.
And the reason those folks inspired our Constitution is because inalienable rights for humans and the separation of powers meant we wouldn't have a form of religion that would impose itself on everyone else and thus lead to the kinds of violence, marginalization, hurt that the wars of religion that christened them included you Thank you.
All right, y 'all.
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