By Joe Broadmeadow
Picture the scene: A congressman opens a session of the United States House of Representatives with a prayer invoking Jesus Christ as the foundation of the American republic. Hours later, he votes to cut food assistance for the poor, block refuge for asylum-seeking families, and strip healthcare from transgender children. He goes home that evening without apparent irony, apparently convinced that his God is pleased.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary political sense. This is something more specific and more dangerous: the wholesale construction of a counterfeit religion, bearing the name of Christ while systematically inverting every value he taught. The movement calling itself Christian nationalism is not a corruption of Christianity. It is the worship of a different god altogether — a god of ethnic dominance, political power, and enforced conformity — draped in a borrowed cross.
The evidence is not subtle. It is written in legislation, spoken from pulpits, and codified in a 922-page federal policy blueprint. And it stands in direct, irreconcilable contradiction to the recorded words of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Stranger at the Gate
Begin where Christ himself chose to begin when describing the final judgment. In Matthew 25:35–40, Jesus does not ask whether you attended the right church or defended the right civilization. He asks: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me… I was hungry and you gave me food.” Then comes the devastating coda: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both cited Romans 13 to justify separating children from their parents and caging them in detention facilities. The families being torn apart were overwhelmingly from Latin American Catholic countries — people who would recognize the crucifix on any American church wall. Christian nationalists vilified them as an “invasion.” They were, by any honest scriptural reading, the strangers Jesus commanded his followers to welcome. The cruelty was not incidental. It was a declaration of which god they actually serve.
Religious Intolerance as Policy
After September 11, Franklin Graham called Islam “an evil and wicked religion” on NBC Nightly News and said years later he hadn’t changed his mind. Rep. Lauren Boebert told a crowd she encountered Rep. Ilhan Omar in a Capitol elevator and quipped, “She doesn’t have a backpack — we should be fine,” adding that “the Jihad Squad decided to show up for work today.” The premise: a Muslim congresswoman is presumptively a terrorist. The audience laughed.
Christian nationalism claims to be Israel’s greatest ally, but as scholars at Political Research Associates have documented, Christian Zionist support is grounded in end-times theology: Israel’s restoration as a prerequisite for the Rapture, after which two-thirds of Jews will perish and the rest will convert. Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene promoted “great replacement” theory and posted that the Rothschild family used a space-based laser to ignite California wildfires. Documented patterns, not disavowed fringe positions.
Jesus, in Luke 6:27–28, was unambiguous: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” The Samaritan in his famous parable was a religious outsider — precisely the point. The co-existence of “Christian America” rhetoric and antisemitic conspiracy theory is not a paradox. It is tribalism using Christianity as a civilizational marker, not a moral framework.
The Mandate to Rule
The theological architecture of Christian nationalism’s ambitions has a name: the Seven Mountains Mandate. The doctrine holds that believers are called by God to “conquer” and “dominate” seven spheres of society — government, media, education, family, religion, arts, and business. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page governing blueprint, makes the ambition explicit: the government should “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family,” and — as the Interfaith Alliance has noted — US law should reflect not the pluralism of the First Amendment but one specific theological tradition imposed on all.
Jesus addressed this aspiration directly. When Pilate asked about his kingdom, he answered: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting” (John 18:36). These are not ambiguous statements. They are a deliberate refusal of the theocratic impulse, spoken by the figure whose authority is being invoked to justify it. The Seven Mountains Mandate is not Christianity. It is the power hunger that Christianity was specifically designed to rebuke.
A Word to Those Who Actually Follow Christ
There are millions of American Christians for whom the faith is exactly what Jesus described: a call to humility, service, and love that transcends tribe. They feed the hungry. They welcome the stranger. They are, by the evidence of the Gospels, far closer to the teaching of Christ than the men and women who have weaponized his name for political gain.
To those Christians, this moment demands something difficult: not polite demurral, not private discomfort, but public reclamation. The Jesus of the Gospels was not a nationalist, not an exclusionist, not a theocrat. He was a poor man from an occupied territory who spent his ministry among the despised, the sick, the outcast, and the foreign, and who reserved his sharpest fury for religious authorities who had made the house of God into an instrument of power. He commanded: “Love one another: just as I have loved you… By this all people will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:34–35).
There is a word for people who invoke a religion’s name while systematically betraying its teachings. That word is not Christian.
Joe Broadmeadow is a Rhode Island-based author and political commentator who writes on politics, culture, and justice.
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