The Feuding Little Christian Fiefdoms of the Trump Administration

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

From AI blasphemies to attacks on the papacy to prayers from the filmography of Quentin Tarantino, the Trump administration has managed to pack what feels like a year’s worth of breaking religion news into the past week. Since Sunday, when Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a healing Jesus Christ and then bizarrely attacked Pope Leo XIV as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” matters have escalated, or rather descended, into greater depths of what many Catholics and Christians would consider rank heresy. Reacting to the Pope’s criticisms of the Iran War, Vice President JD Vance, speaking at a sparsely attended Turning Point USA event in Georgia on Tuesday, lectured that “it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” and questioned the Augustinian pope’s understanding of, well, St. Augustine. On Wednesday, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth offered a prayer for “great vengeance and furious anger” that was derived from a fictitious elaboration on Ezekiel 25:17 by Jules Winnfield, the character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. 

It is easy to get distracted by  the bonkers content creation, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the First Amendment proscribes government establishment of religion, even if the founders could not imagine AI or dark Hollywood crime comedies, much less their misappropriation to wage an illegal war. The Trump regime has a preferred religion — a bellicose, nationalist Christianity — but its expression, as we saw this week, can be very erratic and often theologically incomprehensible. But one thing is clear from all the chaos. The Trumpist establishment of religion is made up of various fiefdoms within the federal government, all aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.

The goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. In Trump’s second term, both the White House and federal agencies have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies. Vance has been Catholic for seven years and starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war). Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Hegseth aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military. The scandal-plagued Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer — who is under investigation for, among other things, ordering staffers to bring wine to her hotel room while traveling on government business, and for her husband’s and father’s alleged predatory behavior toward agency employees — has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon. The Department of Justice released a highly deceptive report, accusing the Biden administration of anti-Christian bias because of its prosecution of anti-abortion protesters under a federal law protecting patients from harassment and violence at abortion clinics. Now, the DOJ is using that same law to prosecute journalists covering and activists attending an anti-ICE protest at an evangelical church in St. Paul — seeking to criminalize both a free press and activists who are motivated by a Christianity opposed to ICE’s lethal immigration crackdown.

All these moves are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies. 

Congress, too, and particularly House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), has rooted its conduct in biblical imperatives about how government is supposed to work, laying bare the willingness of congressional Republicans to relinquish their constitutional duty of checks and balances. Johnson believes that government is a “design of God,” so he is answering to an authority that he considers higher than the Constitution. (Yes, Trump.)

Meanwhile, Axios reports that Trump got the provocation to post the AI Jesus photo (which was originally posted, in a slightly different form, and then deleted by MAGA influencer Nick Adams on X in February) from Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte is not at all known for his religious beliefs, but is very well known for his corrupt but so far failed efforts to bring down Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and to get the DOJ to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey for mortgage fraud. Pulte, who according to Axios is a regular at Mar-a-Lago — a house of worship of corruption — is highly unpopular within the administration; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent once reportedly threatened him by saying, “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.” 

Since Trump first ascended as evangelicals’ favored candidate in 2015, his base has seen him as a salvific figure leading a Christian nation to healing and resurrection from an epidemic of wokeness. His self-depiction as Jesus Christ, though, was considered sacrilegious by many of them. While they are unlikely to abandon him, they cannot deny that they are principally responsible for having turned him into a self-serving messianic figure. They primed their unhinged king. Trump has alienated even conservative Catholic allies, too, with his anti-Leo rants drawing criticism from Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, who Trump appointed to the White House Religious Liberty Commission last year. This week, Barron called Trump’s posts insulting Leo “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful.” 

But Leo seems less concerned with the diss, and more with the exploitation of religion. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” he said in a speech in Cameroon on Thursday. The pope understands that this is about corruption, not theology — as much as Vance and Hegseth would like to bully the world into believing they are each waging their own holy war.