Short Weekly Roundup: Donald Trump is the Anti-Christian President
In this episode of 'Straight White American, Jesus,' Brad Oishi discusses the Trump administration's paradoxical treatment of Christianity. Highlighting the arrest of Christian clergy during a protest at the Broadview immigration facility, Oishi critiques the administration's selective support for certain Christian ideologies while persecuting others. He explores the historical prominence of Evangelical Christianity in American politics and critiques the intersection of this with Trump’s deportation policies. Oishi underscores the dangers of Christian nationalism, emphasizing how it prioritizes a narrow interpretation of Christianity, leading to broader socio-political ramifications. The episode also touches on the broader implications of these actions, including upcoming ICE raids on Spanish-speaking churches and the administration's fragility amidst ongoing controversies.
Soulforce: https://redcircle.com/shows/bb8f7ce2-d8f0-4859-bbac-c33c48e3ccb6
American Unexceptionalism: https://redcircle.com/shows/b92b742b-b515-4bde-8f34-7d8e312edf82
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, founder of Axis Monday Media, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, bringing you an abbreviated weekly roundup this week because Dan Miller and I are attending the American Academy of Religion Conference in Boston.
Going to see some of you this weekend as we gather and get together.
And can't wait for that.
But I want to bring you just a couple minutes today.
And I want to just focus on one thing.
And this is maybe something you can keep in your back pocket when you talk to Uncle Ron or anyone else, your parents who watch Fox News, etc.
Here's a question.
Why is Donald Trump and his administration persecuting Christians?
That's what I want to know.
Why is Donald Trump persecuting Christian ministers, Christian people, and the Christian tradition?
This is from the Chicago Sun-Times.
It is by Violet Miller and Casey He.
The Reverend Michael Wolfe's pulpit was lined with many Jesus figurines Sunday morning as he stood and faced his congregation.
Under his suit, his body was marred by bruises sustained, he said, when he was arrested by state, county, and local police with 20 others during a clergy-led protest outside the immigration facility in Broadview on Friday.
He spent seven hours in custody.
And I just want to emphasize that this was a clergy-led protest.
So this was not a place where religion was invisible.
They knew exactly who he was.
They arrested him nonetheless and detained him for almost a whole day.
I continue.
Friday's gathering was intended to provide religious counseling to detainees at the facility, though an official there again denied clergy members access to detainees.
When demonstrators attempted to move closer to the facility so those housed inside could hear their prayers and know they weren't forgotten, several were arrested.
So they got closer so that folks could hear their prayers, and that is when they were arrested.
Now, the leader of Broadview mayor, I should say, Kartina Thompson said this.
These were out-of-towners, and they chose their fists.
But video shows that after the protesters were pushed out of the street, the situation was calm, and yet an officer grabbed Wolf by the wrist from the crowd.
The officers wrestled him to the ground and pressed their knees into his body.
There's another pastor who was arrested, Pastor Luke Harris Fari.
He and he and others were also targeted and plucked from the line.
He accused state and county police of, quote, actively aiding an ICE racist terror.
Now, I want to highlight these two arrests because they speak to something larger that I'll get to in a minute.
These are clergy-led protests.
They're people trying to pray for detainees.
They're folks who are offering religious Christian assistance to folks in the Broadview facility.
I talked about this last week, but I'm going to keep talking about it.
This is a situation where the state is deeming certain people not worth praying for.
And you see that not only in how they treat those who are detained inhumanely as not human enough to be considered religious, but you see that in the way they're treating the pastors and clergy.
Now, there's a long story here about American religion and specifically Christianity.
What counts as Christian?
One of the things we've maintained on this show for a long time is that over the last 75 years, a certain brand of Christianity has become the name brand of Christianity in the United States, and that's evangelicalism.
That evangelical leaders became the vanguard of the public face of American Christianity.
And you can think of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell.
You can think of Pat Robertson, but you can also think of folks like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman.
And of course, over the last 10 years, Donald Trump has catered to white evangelicals who voted for him in huge numbers all three times he ran for president.
This also includes a coalition with Catholics, but the history shows us that the Catholics were often the intellectual forces behind the political movement and the evangelicals were the mouthpiece.
As a result, the evangelicals became the face of the operation.
I bring that up here because I want to remind everybody that the Trump administration is the administration that instituted the White House Faith Office with Paula White as its head.
This is the White House that invited 15 Christian clergy, most of them white, with a few exceptions, to the White House in March to pray and meet with President Trump.
This is the White House, though, that I think more specifically gathered and created the Task Force Against Christian Bias, the Task Force Against Anti-Christian Bias.
Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, and a host of others.
We covered it.
Many of you are aware of it.
You know about it.
So here is on one hand an administration that says, we are going to recognize and protect Christianity.
Do you remember what Trump told voters on the campaign trail?
He talked to Christians directly and said, if you vote for me, it'll be the last time you have to vote because we're going to fix it so good.
You don't have to vote again.
He's talked about wanting Christianity to have power.
He's talked about wanting to revive God in our public square.
And he, of course, has surrounded himself with people who speak the same way.
That could be Paula White, but we all are aware now of Pete Hegseth's Doug Wilson-inspired theology, JD Vance's reactionary Catholicism, Pam Bondi's Christian nationalism, and on down the line.
I could mention Russell Vogt, who's one of the shadow presidents, a graduate of Wheaton College, and himself a self-identified Christian nationalist.
This is an administration that has made itself out to be a Christian administration.
And yet we come back to pastors being arrested, thrown to the ground, detained, targeted outside of the Broadfew facility.
We come back to the fact that only a certain kind of Christianity counts.
And this is something Dan and I have talked about forever, but I just want to bring it into relief today because it's so true.
And you see it being played out now.
That in the past, when others have ran as, quote, Christian people, they've not been recognized as such, not as real Christians, not as true Christians, not as devoted Christians.
If you're a Democrat and you're a Christian, it doesn't count.
But if you're Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, if you're Mike Pence, Christine Ohm, oh, then we all know you're a Christian.
You love God and country, faith, family, home.
That's what it's all about, right?
That has been true in elected politics, but it's now true in immigration policy and what's happening on the ground.
If you are an evangelical, Christianoma is inviting you to join ICE, be on the side of God's crusade to revive the country through mass deportation.
If you're not, well, you're clearly not the right kind of Christian or you're just a fake Christian because you're outside protesting this.
You're outside saying this is a terror campaign.
This is not what Jesus would want.
That this is the exact opposite of what Christ teaches.
We also see this in something that if you're a subscriber to Yahomi Talk, you will hear me talk about on Monday, but it's worth bringing up here.
ICE is going to raid churches from Thanksgiving until Christmas.
They're going to target Spanish-speaking churches and ensure that those churches are infiltrated by masked men in unmarked cars, dragging people away who are worshiping Jesus during the holiest time of the year.
Does that sound like anti-Christian bias to you?
Does that sound like a regime that's committed to protecting religious freedom, religious practice?
What we're seeing and what we know now is that this is a regime that sees mass deportation as the highest value.
Not prayer, not worship, not piety.
And if you want to be considered a religious person, then you will have to be a person who is for mass deportation, even the mass deportation of other Christians.
What has happened now is a foreign policy based on the idea that mass deportation is more important than public safety, public order, human flourishing, or even economic prosperity.
And that is lined up with a Christian understanding, an evangelical, reconstructionist, reformed, and sometimes Catholic theology that says revival will come when we rid the land of foreigners.
Those who not only worship other gods, but those who are not one of us, even if they worship Jesus, they should go home and worship Jesus where they belong.
That is what God wants.
And I'm writing about this in my book.
I've talked about it on the show, and some of you are like, what do you mean?
How can that be the idea for God's understanding of human beings and their communities and their kingdom?
But I assure you that it is.
There is a prevalent interpretation of Matthew 28 these days, the great commission, go into all the world and disciple the nations, that is interpreted like this.
Go to all the world and disciple the nations, make them Christian.
How?
Through a government and laws and policies that are Christian.
And by Christian, we not only mean that you worship Jesus, but we mean that you remain in the nations among the people and the ethnicities in which you were born.
There's a prevalent idea that what God wants is for you to stay with people like you.
And if you don't, even if you profess the name of Jesus, you are doing wrong by entering a different place.
This is why JD Vance has a reckoning coming.
His wife is either going to need to convert to Christianity or he's going to have to divorce her if he wants to be president.
That is my take.
So when ICE is raiding Spanish-speaking churches, when ICE goes into a place of worship, a sanctuary, and drags people out as they kneel and pray, remember that there are people in the government who think this is the exact right thing to do.
There are Christians who think this is what Jesus would do.
And that this is a regime that, as a result, is persecuting Christian Americans.
They are telling you that if you're the wrong kind of Christian, we will punish you.
We don't care if we share the same text, the same God, the same savior.
It doesn't matter.
This is one of those situations where you can see the effects of Christian nationalism clearly in practice.
Why is Christian nationalism so dangerous for everybody?
It's dangerous for everybody because it not only says to the non-Christian that you're not a real American and we might need to punish you as a result, that there are Christian nationalists this week, like Stephen Wolf, who have said that blasphemers and atheists should be put in jail.
But it also says to a large swath of Christians, you are not the right kind of Christian and therefore the government should punish you too.
Christian nationalism is not about protecting Christianity.
It is about protecting a certain small myopic slice of the Christian tradition of a certain people who fit into a certain vision for the government.
That's it.
And if you don't, we will raid your church while you worship Jesus on Christmas, while you kneel for communion, while you sing hymns to the creator of the universe.
We will drag you out, put you in handcuffs, and treat you inhumanely.
And when people come to pray for you outside, we'll arrest them too.
That's Christian nationalism.
This is a regime that is persecuting Christians, period.
Now, if you don't believe me, I want to point you to a special report by Reuters, Raphael Satter, and A.J. Vicenz.
Two months after Charlie Kirk's assassination, a government-backed campaign has led to firings, suspensions, investigations, and other action against more than 600 people.
More than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, and placed under investigation since Kirk was assassinated on September 10th.
Some were dismissed after celebrating or mocking Kirk's death.
At least 15 people were punished or allegedly involving karma or divine justice.
And at least nine others were disciplined for variations on good writtens.
Other offending posts appeared to exult in the killing or express hope that other Republican figures would be next.
One down, plenty to go.
So the government is willing to back a campaign to get people who oppose a certain kind of Christian, Charlie Kirk, and in some cases celebrated, in other cases did not celebrate but talked about karma or something else and get them fired, somehow punished.
This article comes out November 19th, Wednesday.
What happened on Thursday?
Donald Trump responded to a PSA ad by Democratic officials asking military members not to obey unconstitutional orders.
He talked about it being punishable by death.
He called it sedition.
So here's a guy calling, it seems like, at least, for the death of Congress people, because they asked the military to not obey unconstitutional orders.
When others responded to Charlie Kirk's death, they were fired, let go, suspended, etc., doxxed, and so on.
Two lessons here.
Trump continues to be somebody who commits impeachable offenses every day.
He should be impeached for this.
I cannot imagine, and these comparisons are almost useless, but whatever, I'll make it anyway.
Any other American president doing this without being impeached.
This is an impeachable offense, period.
But we just chalk it up to Trump.
But number two, if you think about the 600 fired because they somehow said something disagreeable about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his death, a Christian leader, you see that the regime is interested in protecting a certain kind of Christianity.
And if anybody ever needs just any kind of proof that Christian nationalism is not about protecting Christianity, this is it.
Christian nationalism is about imposing a certain myopic view of religion on everybody.
And if you get out of line, you will be punished, period.
That's what Christian nationalism is.
So when it comes to Charlie Kirk, you're fired.
When it comes to Donald Trump, the Christian leader, he calls for the death of others.
That's just Trump being Trump.
He didn't mean it.
He's not serious.
He doesn't really want that.
You know, he's just being, as Caroline Leavitt might say, transparent or upfront or something like that.
That's where we are today.
And all of this is in the context of the swirling debate about what's going to happen with the Epstein files, the threat that those files make to Donald Trump and his regime.
It also comes amidst all the cracks in the administration.
And talk about this Monday, but you have the Texas map, the congressional redistricting being deemed illegal.
You have the James Comey case falling apart because the lawyer that was appointed by Trump has no idea what she's doing and messed it up.
You have the sweep by the Democrats in the special elections a couple of weeks ago.
And you have the Supreme Court striking down his tariffs.
I've said this before.
I'll say it again.
Trump is not invincible.
That this regime is vulnerable.
He's an old man.
There are people, especially younger people in his coalition who are starting to look past him, wondering what's next, wondering how they should plan for the future.
There are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene unwilling to back down when he challenges them in public.
There's going to be more of that from this side and from inside the MAGA movement.
There is a chance here to realize that this is not an invincible administration, but, and I'm going to talk about this Monday, they're going to keep doing stuff like this.
They're going to raid churches.
They're going to take ICE to Boston.
They're going to take ICE all over the place, wherever they can go.
Because the reaction is going to be to instill more terror and more fear in order to try to keep control, period.
If you are looking for more on this, I want to encourage you to listen to two series that we have running on Access Moody Media right now.
You can go to Soul Force, a queer feminist Latinx podcast channel all about faith and spirituality, but there is so much content on that channel about ICE and spiritual terrorism.
I also want to direct you to American Unexceptionalism by Matthew Taylor and Susan Hayward, which is a series all about the lessons Americans learn, can learn on fighting religious nationalism across the world from people who have faced it in their own countries, people from India, people from Myanmar, people from Korea, Brazil, and so on.
So check out Soul Force and also American Unexceptionalism for more content about things related to ICE, spiritual terrorism, and fighting Christian nationalism.
All right, y'all, I got to run.
We're at the conference.
We're busy.
We're meeting.
We're doing work.
Appreciate you all.
We'll catch you next week with a great interview and some discussion of a great new book by a Pulitzer Prize winner, Paul Starr, on American conflict.
