Evangelical Christianity Is Showing Its Ugly Face

Throughout the New Testament Christ condemns the Pharisees who wear their religiosity on their sleeves while displaying callousness or worse towards the plight of others.  Likewise, Christ told the rich to sell all they own, give the proceeds to the poor, and to follow him.  Fast forward to 2025 America and we see modern day Pharisees out in force voting for and supporting the Felon - a utterly morally bankrupt individual - and his cruel policies which are anathema to Christ's message of love and empathy for other. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ showed the proper treatment of foreigners yet we see evangelicals applauding the warrantless seizing of migrants and separation of young children from their parents.  Similarly, we see evangelicals supporting total bans on abortion even as they applaud cuts to social programs, food assistance and medical care access that aid children and their families.  The disconnect between claimed beliefs and support for cruel policies is stark, although given Christianity's often bloody history of hate, bloodshed and horrors, perhaps one should not be surprised.  A column in the New York Times focuses on the ugliness and hypocrisy of self-proclaimed "Christians" who support the Felon and his cruel, racist agenda.  Here are highlights:

When Christianity goes wrong, it goes wrong in a familiar way.  Last Friday, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”

Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.

True enough, but that’s irrelevant to the question at hand. Yes, we’re all going to die, but it matters a great deal when, how and why. There’s a tremendous difference between dying after living a long and full life that’s enabled at least in part by access to decent health care, and dying a premature and perhaps needlessly painful death because you can’t afford the care you need.

By the standards of 2025, Ernst’s comment would have been little more than a micro-scandal, gone by the end of the day. And if we lived even in the relatively recent past, demonstrating humility could have worked to her benefit. It can be inspiring to watch a person genuinely apologize.

But we’re in a new normal now.

That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.

And so, the next day Ernst posted an apology video — filmed, incredibly enough, in what appears to be a cemetery. It began well. “I would like to take this opportunity,” she said, “to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall.” But her statement devolved from there. . . . . “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Remember, this was not a snarky, impulsive rejoinder. It was a considered response. She decided to film the statement and release it. There is no ambiguity — the video delivered exactly the message she wanted to send.

The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.

Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. . . . . Trumpists think it’s good to be bad. But why bring Jesus into it?

America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.

To understand what I mean, let’s turn to a much darker time in American history, when Christianity and slavery existed side-by-side in the American South. . . . The master hardened his heart to the plight of the slave by fundamentally rejecting the idea that his vertical faith in God carried with it a series of horizontal earthly obligations to love your neighbor as yourself, to do justice to the oppressed and to care for the vulnerable. . . . . So long as the vertical relationship between God and man was secure, the horizontal relationship between men was of secondary importance, to the extent that it mattered at all.

Thankfully, we don’t live in such extreme times. We’re far from the dreadful days of slavery, and we’ve left Jim Crow behind, but I’m noticing a morphing of American evangelicalism back to the vertical, away from the horizontal, and that change is turning our gaze inward, to our own well-being above all, sometimes even to the exclusion of caring about the fate of others.

In April, I wrote about Paula White, one of Trump’s principal faith advisers, and her Easter offer of “seven supernatural blessings” in exchange for a suggested offering of $1,000. My piece was focused on the cohort of pastors and their Christian followers who behave more like Trump than like Jesus.

But I could have just as easily focused on the sheer selfishness of her message as well. Look again at the gifts White offered to her flock: “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The emphasis is clear — look at what God will do for you. It’s all vertical. Honor God (by giving White a pile of cash), and he’ll make you healthy, wealthy and strong.

Consider also the evangelical turn against empathy. There are now Christian writers and theologians who are mounting a frontal attack against the very value that allows us to understand our neighbors, that places us in their shoes and asks what we would want and need if we were in their place.

But Christianity is a cross-shaped faith. The vertical relationship creates horizontal obligations. . . . when the sick and lame approached Jesus, he did not say, “Depart from me, for thou shalt die anyway.” He healed the sick and fed the hungry and told his followers to do the same. . . . these passages do not dictate any particular policy, but they do tell us that we must try to meet the physical needs of the poor — here, on this earth — even if our souls are far more durable than our bodies.

Trump’s rise has revealed the extent to which the will to power has always lurked in Christian hearts. When faced with a conflict between their stated principles and their access to power, millions of Republican Christians chose power over principle — and they are continuing to do so every day.

At the same time, some things have changed. An evangelical community that once celebrated, for example, George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program — the AIDS initiative that has saved an estimated 26 million lives — has now either applauded or stood by passively as Trump has decimated American foreign aid and damaged the a program that was one of America’s greatest humanitarian accomplishments.

But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear.