The Issues MAGA "Christian" Voters Are Neglecting

If one is a true Christian one must pay attention to Christ's social gospel and the call to aid the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless.  As noted often on this blog right, wing "Christians" and members of the MAGA base totally ignore Christ's gospel message and instead typically cherry pick selective Old Testament passages to malign and dehumanize those they dislike or deem as "others" - typically, gays, women, blacks, Hispanics and non-Christians. Equally disturbing is the allegiance of these self-congratulatory "Christians" to the Felon, a man who embodies the seven deadly sins and remains a key figure in the Epstein files. Rather than base their political actions on Christ's message, these "Christians" are focused on maintaining white privilege, disparaging non-whites, and opposing anything and anyone who challenges their often archaic beliefs that emphasize blind certainty with no room to learn from others.  As noted in prior posts, these right wing/MAGA "Christians" view empathy towards other as a dangerous weakness. Indeed, their hypocrisy - that would make a biblical Pharisee blush - and cruelty has done much to drive the rise of the "Nones", i.e., the religiously nonaffiliated, who have walked away from organized religion, particularly Christianity, entirely. A long piece at The Atlantic looks at the misplaced priorities of these false Christians.  Here are highlights:

Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”

Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness.

The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues . . . . but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.

Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. . . . . there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?

According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?

Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”

The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America.  Why the silence?

One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term, President Trump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out.

The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.

Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America.

Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering. . . . . measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.

That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people.

So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat. . . . Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.

Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.

The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.

The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew. In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun.

The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history. . . . The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.

None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid, or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order.

A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.