US politicians on all sides have long called on God to bless the United States of America, but having surrounded himself with evangelical firebrands, President Donald Trump is now being accused of weaponising American Christianity – and using it as pretext for an increasingly authoritarian approach at home and abroad.
The White House is preparing to host a prayer festival this weekend where speakers will include Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain, who has compared him to Jesus, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has talked of the conflict with Iran as a holy war.
The Rededicate 250 National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving – planned alongside the country’s 250th birthday celebrations and partly funded by US taxpayers – features mostly evangelical Christians. But the focus on appealing to a small subsection of Americans has big political risks, and could tear apart Trump’s Maga movement, experts have warned.
The festival, along with regular White House prayer meetings and the establishment by Trump of a White House Faith Office, are part of a wider strategy to cast the US as a righteous Christian nation that needs defending by Trump and his supporters, according to Robert P Jones, author and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, a think-tank based in Washington DC.
“This is not a democratic vision for the country. This is an ethno-religious, anti-democratic vision for the nation,” Jones told The i Paper. “This is all part of a vision of Trump as the divinely chosen leader and the country as a righteous Christian nation. And anyone who says otherwise is literally in league with evil.”
While polling from the Washington-based Pew Research Center shows that a majority of the American public don’t see Trump himself as deeply religious, by surrounding himself with controversial figures such as former televangelist White-Cain, and using nationalist Christian imagery in official government communications, Trump risks putting off other Christians and those from different faiths.
Matthew Taylor, author and visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University in Washington DC, believes the US is “poised between being a liberal democracy and being an authoritarian Christian nationalist state”.
Trump with Pastor Paula White-Cain in October 2024 (Photo: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)With Trump’s Maga movement controlling both houses of Congress, and the President having stacked the Supreme Court with conservative religious judges, Taylor believes events such as Sunday’s prayer festival are a way to whip up his supporters and lay the groundwork for a more authoritarian government.
“When you have consolidated control of the branches of government, you don’t need a majority to maintain that control. What you need is a very loyal base that you can continue to keep angry and hostile and give them a sense of threat and persecution,” Taylor said.
“Trump and his leadership circle are not particularly concerned about all Christians. They’re concerned about keeping their kind of Christians angry, keeping their kind of Christians afraid and frustrated,” he added. “And the kind of event planned for this weekend is a very effective use of governmental power to enshrine certain narratives that say, ‘our kind of Christians are not just the legitimate Christians, but the legitimate Americans’.”
In comments to The i Paper, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, pushed back, saying that Trump “won in a landslide victory with historic support from patriotic Christians across the country because he promised to fight for people of faith, and he has delivered in record time”.
She added that Trump “launched a task force to eliminate anti-Christian bias, pardoned Christian and pro-life activists, stopped the chemical mutilation of our nation’s children, and stopped men from competing in women’s sports and invading their private spaces. The President has delivered unprecedented victories for Americans of faith, and he will continue to protect and expand our sacred right to religious freedom”.
Previous US presidents from both parties, including born-again Christian George W Bush and deeply religious Jimmy Carter, used faith to shape their agenda in power, but the Trump administration seems to be taking a more narrow and aggressive approach.
“It’s a form of cosplay Christianity,” said Krish Kandiah OBE, a Christian theologian, commentator and founder of the UK-based Sanctuary Foundation. “Previously, many people from the Church voted for Donald Trump, often on issues that relate to many Christians such as the sanctity of life, the importance of marriage.
“But it feels quite transactional – if the Church gives Donald Trump their allegiance, he’ll help them with these hot-button ethical issues – and it’s used as an endorsement for the whole Maga project. And many aspects of the Maga project, I would say, are outside of the realms of Christian ethics.”
Trump is to host a prayer festival with mostly evangelical Christians at the White House (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)Kandiah also sees Trump taking on the Pope, the head of the world’s 800 million Catholics, as a risky move.
“The Latino community were willing to support Trump in the past as they liked some of his conservative values, were a bit worried about some of the progressive values on the other side,” he said. “But now he’s challenging the Pope and the Pope means more to them than Trump does.”
The US President recently angered Catholics by attacking Pope Leo XIV as “weak on crime”, as well as sharing an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure – though he later said it was supposed to represent him as a doctor, before deleting the post.
The political risk from losing Catholic and other religious voters may be nothing compared to the longer-term risk of breaking up the coalition of voters Trump has built through his Maga movement. And it is the war with Iran that is defining the battle lines for Trump’s would-be successors – and shaping the debate on how to use Christian nationalist rhetoric.
For Jones, the language used by Trump, Hegseth and others to justify the conflict in the Gulf sounds increasingly absurd, but with deadly consequences. “As soon as you cast it as the United States, as a Christian nation, fighting Muslim nations you’ve really left the realm of politics and you’ve entered into this religious fantasy of a cosmic battle between good and evil,” he said.
“When you cast it that way, the principles of war and what constitutes war crimes go out the window, because any means become justifiable if you’re fighting on the side of God.”
For Taylor, the Iran conflict is illuminating a more fundamental religious divide within the Maga movement. “Right now, I would argue there is a kind of low-grade civil war that’s going on rhetorically and ideologically within Trump’s coalition around anti-Semitism and support for Israel,” he said.
“You have very influential historical allies of Trump, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, who have been pulling away from Trump over the war in Iran,” Taylor said. “The other faction within Maga are those Christians who are kind of Israel do-or-die and are ardent supporters of Israel for theological reasons and have a theological agenda that they want to see enacted through Israel.”
While Trump has managed to hold together both sides in the past, there is now a fracturing between the two camps, with the people leading the prayer event this weekend firmly in the pro-Israel grouping, Taylor suggested.
He said the event also throws up serious questions about what – and who – comes after Trump.
“It really raises questions about how much this kind of Maga coalition can persist and what it will look like after Trump. Will there be a deeper fracture? I think Trump has the capacity to potentially anoint a successor but it’s unclear whether the whole Maga coalition would get behind that now.”
There is one person Taylor sees as being able to bridge the Maga divide and potentially capture the White House in 2028. “Tucker Carlson is that kind of a figure,” he said. “Very popular with a long history in Republican politics but who’s never been on the inside in terms of governance, and is more of a media figure, like Trump was.”
Taylor added: “I think the media figures tend to be better at straddling some of the contradictions and divides than the politicians are.”
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