The following served as the basis for my book Jesus, You’re Fired!, now available on Amazon.

Evangelical Christians might as well have fired Jesus as their messiah and hired Donald Trump to replace him.

I’ve been saying for some time that American Christianity has become divided into two camps: one that focuses on the Jesus’ role as the messiah, and the other on his teachings. Evangelicals have long emphasized the former — which is why it might seem baffling that they should want a different messiah now.

Yet to all appearances, they seem to.

Donald Trump has never seemed interested in living up to Jesus’ teachings (or even becoming familiar with them), but that hasn’t stopped evangelicals from lining up behind him. Evangelicals and Trump have a lot in common. But here’s what’s interesting: Evangelicals haven’t just adopted Trump as one of their own, they’ve accepted him in the role they’ve long reserved for Jesus himself, as their messiah.

Oh, they still pay lip service to Jesus, but they put their energy into defending Trump.

The ‘failure’ of Jesus

Trump has long portrayed himself in messianic terms, declaring that he alone can “fix it” and that he knows more than anyone else about any subject you’d care to mention. He promises miracles and calls upon his followers to have faith in him personally.

Essentially, he’s been acting like Jesus, without all the inconvenient nice-guy talk about loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek. And that’s exactly what makes him more attractive to many evangelicals than their putative founder. They feel like victims, and they want to lash out. To fight back. And Trump’s “vengeance is mine” attitude gives them permission to do so, whatever Jesus himself might have said.

As I’ve written before, there’s evidence that Christianity has always been a political movement, even in the first century. The messiah was envisioned as a new king of Israel, someone who was going to throw off the yoke of foreign conquerors (the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans) and restore home rule. Jesus himself may have indulged these hopes: “I come not to bring peace, but a sword,” he is said to have warned.  

But other sayings attributed to Jesus suggest the opposite: that he wasn’t interested in fighting. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he stated. This may have been a practical way of looking at things: Realistically, no one was going to overthrow the Romans. It may also have been a call to spiritual enlightenment.

Either way, first-century Jews expecting a military savior were bound to be disappointed. Maybe that’s why they turned on him when Pilate presented him to them as a prisoner. He was a failure, so they disowned him.

Modern parallels

The same might be said of today’s evangelicals, who have increasingly turned away from Jesus’ “not of this world” attitude and pursued an aggressive strategy for achieving political power. Just as Jewish freedom fighters (zealots) pursued a nationalist agenda for a conquered kingdom of Israel, Republican nationalists aspire not to spread some abstract spiritual philosophy, but to impose their will upon their homeland.

The process began in the 1980s with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement and its alliance with the Reagan Republicans. It reached fruition with the party’s embrace of Trump, a self-styled messiah who could deliver them something Jesus couldn’t: an earthly kingdom.

It’s not about morals regarding “biblical principles” or anything else. Not even gun rights or opposition to abortion; like everything else, these things are just a means to an end. And that end is sheer, unadulterated power. It’s something Jesus was never able to claim on this earth, but it’s Trump’s specialty. Evangelicals didn’t compromise with Trump to achieve it, they embraced him unapologetically because they shared his ultimate goal: to rule the world (or at least the United States).

And in the process, they repudiated, rejected, and renounced the one they claimed was their messiah.

Because they’d found a new one. A better one.

Trump reflected their victim mentality and their grievance more than Jesus ever could, regardless of his con-man billionaire background. His ability to “game the system” made him a miracle-worker in their eyes. He epitomized everything they wanted to be, so they accepted him wholeheartedly, elbowing aside Jesus in the process. Trump might not be able to walk on water, but he can confound the liberals, which is, of course, so much better.

Say goodbye to the church of Jesus Christ. Welcome to the church of Trump.

Historical precedent

Make no mistake, this has happened before. In the fourth century, the Roman Empire transformed itself from a relatively tolerant collection of diverse provinces into a repressive “Christian” state. Seeking to manifest the earthly kingdom of God envisioned by Bishop Augustine of Hippo, Christians who had risen to power targeted unbelievers and “compelled them to come in” to the church. They replaced the teachings of Jesus with the “inerrant” word of the Roman bishop.

Is it any wonder that modern Republicans view the word of Trump as similarly sacrosanct — regardless of whether it had any basis in reality? He set them up for it, and they swallowed the bait.

But Rome provides a cautionary tale. The Roman state had endured for more than a millennium, and imperial Rome had been at the apex of civilization for nearly four centuries by the time Christianity usurped its power. Within a century and a half, the empire had fallen.

The United States has been around just 250 years to date, which makes it far less durable, and far more vulnerable.

Let’s hope history isn’t repeating itself.