Persecution Cometh?
Trump and the Unmaking of Christendom
The armageddon Trump promised for Tuesday night may have been delayed—and peace talks, at least for now, are underway, but even if the President hasn’t followed through with his most dire and vile threats for death and destruction, the last week has driven the final nail in the coffin of the illusion that Trump is some earthly savior or Christian prince.1
The president’s threats against the Iranian population and praise of “Allah” on Easter Sunday, no less, are merely the icing on the cake of an ever more blatant disregard for basic civilization and Christian morality, as Tucker Carlson argued in a recent monologue that remains incredibly relevant today:
As bad as the Iranian regime may be in the abstract, no one can support the continued willful targeting of Iranian civilians in whose defense this war was supposedly launched—nor the mentality behind it—nor those who proffer it—nor the celebration of death and destruction that we’re being encouraged to partake in.
The Gospel of the Anti-Gospel
We’re now not just committing violence on a broad scale, but celebrating it, triumphing in it, even while parodying, or worse, the message of the Resurrection:
Trump has surrounded himself with advisors, and, in his “faith team, " evangelical pastors who do nothing but praise and cheer him on, including violence, which, of course, is sometimes justified, but in this case, as with Paula White of the White House Faith Office, seemingly for its own sake:
Start with a self assured man like Trump, give him the world’s largest military force, a battle hardened cadre of supporters who’ve stuck with him for the last ten years through thick and thin, surround him with a circle of advisors who say he has a special divine mission to do whatever he wills to do, while comparing him to Jesus Christ, and you get a very dangerous combination any way you look at it.
Many of us wanted, just about as much as Trump, to believe in the best possible spin on his presidency. I, like many of you, have been willing, consciously or unconsciously, to look past a lot of flaws, like the President’s waffling on pro-life issues over the last few years, his support of IVF, the homosexual agenda (but slower than the other side), and his perpetuation of U.S. (and it’s allies’) murderous actions overseas.
And yes, the argument that many like Chris Jackson and others make in defense of the president still stands. The other side is worse, and the Kamala Harris 2026 timeline probably would have included all the same things that we’re seeing this year, but maybe with even more death. That still doesn’t justify the attitude the Trump administration is pushing.
The Art of the Deal defense that many of Trump’s claims, statements, and goals are just bluster for the sake of negotiation works as well to deflect some concern over the president’s moral choices. But even if Trump hasn’t gone through with all of his threats, the Overton Window of U.S. government action, and societal action more broadly, continues to shift towards death and away from Christ.
Trump preaches, on Easter, a gospel of death, or at the very least a gospel of anti-Resurrection.
How far will Trump go? How far and where will he take us? As long as I liked what I was seeing and considered myself a part of the “movement,” I, like so many of you, gloried in hopes that Trump would, in some way, become a new “Caesar” breaking the barriers of the sclerotic bureaucracies of the deep state that have held America and the world hostage. But with the version of Trump we’ve been seeing recently, as Tucker Carlson all but does in his monologue, the glorious revitalizaing spirit of “Make America Great Again” has been growing so increasingly dark and violent that it’s not far-fetched but to wonder whether a dark spirit, literally now animates the man who leads it, or at least those who advise him.
From Ben Shapiro’s “FAFO” approach to talking about violence against leftists and against civilians living in countries that are America and Israel’s enemies, to those who seemingly oppose him from a more hardcore right-wing disposition like the “Groypers”, to members of the Trump administration and its allies in the middle, violence, the idea that might makes right, or even worse, violence for its own sake are increasingly on the rise.
Even as many of the most trumpeting revellers of American power still claim a Christian faith, a pagan moral ethos has most definitely returned to the attitude and mind of many an American. None of us is exempt from this temptation, especially as after decades of modernism, managerialism, and psychological theories that are civilizationally destructive soft-on-crime, soft-on-evil pathologies tempt many of us towards an overcorrection in the other direction, seeking state violence both as a solution to our problems, and, when normalized, as entertainment.
Right now, Trump’s movement still somehow has a Christian veneer, even if the backend has seen Christian morality swapped out for a Nietzschean will to power. MAGA has been a reaction against the overly timid view of Christianity and Western Civilization, yes, but it has been, as Lois Miller argues well here, an overreaction:
It is true that, in recent decades, some forms of Western Christianity have erred in the opposite direction - becoming timid, overly therapeutic, feminized, even embarrassed by moral clarity. Faced with injustice, too many Christians have preferred silence to confrontation for too long. Faith in the 21st century has at times been recast as soft, private, and ineffectual.
But what we are witnessing now is not a correction of that weakness. It is a wild overcorrection.
This is a distortion of moral seriousness - a swing from passivity to brutality, from silence in the face of evil to the sanctification of violence against the innocent. A Christianity that once hesitated to speak has, in some quarters, become all too eager to strike indiscriminately - and to bless the striking.2
The City of Man, while clothing itself in the trappings of Christian symbolism, is, in fact, in a twisted parody of Christianity triumphing over pagan Rome, which appropriated and Christianized the Empire, appropriating and taking over as much of Christianity (or Christians) as it can to serve its own purposes. The unmaking of Christendom is before our eyes a dark parody or mirroring of the making of Christendom.3 A global empire and its ruler, while claiming to be Christian, at least in some ways, are leading the charge of stripping the veneer of Christian civilization from international affairs by the way it starts, conducts, and celebrates wars, death, and destruction, while flaunting violations of Christian morality more generally.
The Empire Against the Church
Even in the best-case scenario, where the Iran War resolves soon, the spirit of willful violence, pride, and anger that seems to animate the administration isn’t going away. The departure of our leaders and of our society from Christian morality, already so long ago begun and just now becoming impossible to ignore, is just going to come out in new ways.
If, as seems increasingly likely, Trump doesn’t get what he wants out of this Iran conflict, what will he do but blame those who have criticized or held him back from even greater levels of violence?
The Pope, bishops around the United States (of all stripes, not just the liberal ones, but even ones who are traditionalist heroes like Bishop Strickland) have all criticized the President over this latest war. Much of the opposition, more broadly, that the administration has received has been from Catholics, as evangelical Protestants have broadly gone along with cheering on the war, and the other, more forgotten slaughters of the innocent that accompany it elsewhere, as in Lebanon.
With an attitude like that which Trump has displayed over the last several days, going after so many of his former supporters and allies, and with Catholics being one of the only major voices against his actions, if Trump doesn’t get what he wants, no matter what he has said in the past in defense of Catholics, he will, out of pure rage and pride if not for other reasons, turn on us.4
And it’s not being paranoid to prognosticate that persecution cometh—especially since it’s already starting.
Persecution comes, eventually, for all, who fail to worship power, who fail to bow down before the “divine emperor”, and who fail to bow before his statue.
It may be soft, like the administration’s going after those inside it who haven’t gone along with the war, as with Joe Kent or Carrie Prejean Boller, edge cases where there may truly be more to the story than I know.
It could, as with what’s at this point more a likely possibility than a hard fact, be in other small ways, like there not being a Catholic liturgy for Good Friday in the Pentagon as there’s been in the past.
It could be through further Trump administration promotion of people like Protestant pastor Doug Wilson, a close friend of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has called for all Catholic processions and public profession of the Faith to be banned.
It could be, even if the story has been greatly exaggerated, through direct pressure on the Church, like the claimed threat that Trump’s Pentagon may have given to the Papal ambassdor to the United States about the Avignon papacy, which implied a threat to use U.S. power against the Church that’s the biggest thorn in the side of the U.S. empire’s will and whims.
Protestants, generally, at least those of the evangelical bent, and including some that I know personally, have gone on an all-out anti-Catholic bent like none that I’ve ever seen over the last week.
These are small things, of course, at least for now, but the divide will grow as the anger of the City of Man turns against those in its midst who it sees as traitors, those who have chosen to serve God and the City of God rather than those of men.
We speak a lot about dual loyalties these days. Yes, there’s a problem with U.S. officials being loyal to foreign powers rather than to the nation. But there’s a larger dual-loyalty problem with regard to our true homeland. We owe our own loyalty to something higher than our nation, and especially so when the nation departs from God; we cannot choose loyalty to both the nation and the Church. Even if we’re tempted by corruption in the Church to choose the Empire, once the City of Man has chosen to depart from Christendom, the City of Man and the City of God, as it was before the conversion of Rome, are again openly at war, and one must choose a side.
The American Empire, the City of Man, though I admit its message and its glories had long tempted me, will always be opposed, and is especially so now, to the City of God. I supported Trump, including emphatically in my writing, through these false dreams he proffered of an earthly utopia, through force, but, more deeply, built on pride, envy, greed, lust, and anger, all of which, I, like so many of us, have willfully ignored because the other side, as is true, is worse.
As Jonathan Cioran recently noted in “On the Series Finale of the Trump Show.”
Trump was the villain all along. In this sense, the libs were right even if it was for the wrong reasons. He was a villain, but in an even deeper sense than they understood. Trump was far more than merely the two-bit con man and general scumbag he appeared to be to many liberals in the beginning. Of course, he was those things, but he was also far more. As Morgoth’s Review noted:
“It is the story of a supreme narcissist who came to believe that he could flout the laws of nature and physical constraints through sheer force of personality, like a wizard or an illusionist, conjuring memetic spells to hypnotize his legions of followers.”
Trump was not just any illusionist either. He was not merely a very charismatic, self-taught magician who just happened to get extremely lucky. No, Trump’s powers, on a very real level (in both the spiritual and literal senses), were granted to him, as was shown definitively by the incredible revelations of the ever-unfolding Epstein affair, by some kind of pact with foul and dark forces far beyond the comprehension of most. Like Thiel, Trump tried to make an ally of the great snake that lies ever half-awake at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled in folds of himself until he finally awakens in hunger (many such cases!).5
The early sufferers of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” may have misidentified the symptoms and cried wolf for so long that we’ve been blinded to this reality, inured that they could be right, but they got the cause right, I now admit. At the very least, Trump’s path is not the Gospel but a cult aimed at worshipping a man in place of everything else, including God himself.6 At the worst, well, even Tucker Carlson didn’t want to say it outright, but Trump has appeared, and still is seen as a savior or messiah to millions of people, including in more places than just America, and Scripture certainly warns of us figure(s) like this…
I can’t support him now, and I don’t see any solution to any of our problems through the City of Man. And of course I don’t. The City of God, says Augustine, begins in this world, but is not of it. No matter what we want to believe, neither Trump nor any other earthly prince will be our savior.
Quare Fremerunt Gentes
We can denounce where our leaders, so predictably, given the crimes against the dignity of God’s image in man, and against God himself, continue, and have in fact accelerated. We can speak. We can pray that our earthly leaders are swayed back from the brink of even greater violence against men and against the only supreme King.
Yes. It could all come crashing down to a level even worse than where we’re at today, with the left taking over America. But with a “right” like this, who needs a “left”?
Of course, even more importantly, we should put more effort into the nearness to Christ we need to have to be able to endure what’s coming, and less into understanding the City of Man that was obviously going to turn against us.7 Perhaps the true Christian, as Andrew Henry puts it, in our newly pagan age of “Mercury poisoning,” cannot live in a worldly way any longer? 8But of course, if we’re being honest, we always should have known this was coming.
Speaking on a car drive this past Easter Sunday with one of several friends I had spent the Sacred Triduum with about all this, one of them could only quote from Psalm 2 of Tenebrae on Good Friday: “Quare Fremerunt Gentes?” or “Why do the nations conspire?” And it’s the perfect encapsulation of our political moment, one where the struggle between the City of God and the City of Man is finally becoming too obvious to ignore:
Why do the nations conspire,
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and his anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds asunder,
and cast their cords from us.”He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord has them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“I have set my king
on Zion, my holy hill.”I will tell of the decree of the Lord:
He said to me, “You are my son,
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
with trembling kiss his feet,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way;
for his wrath is quickly kindled.Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
May the Lord have mercy on the President, on America, and on us, and give us the strength to persevere come what may.
Over time the internet and social media became more and more overbearing in our lives. By the late 2010’s the internet was no longer just part of western culture but the center of it. We listened to the same music, knew the same memes, heard all the same celebrity drama whether we care or not. Youth subcultures like skaters, goths, jocks, nerds slowly died out as the internet created a monoculture. I think the “Great Meme War” of 2016 could serve as the symbolic climax of this story, when we elected our Mercurial, trickster President, Donald Trump.
Like a chiastic structure
Some early examples (yes, it is from a popesplainer, but he’s right in this case)
Tucker Carlson’s monologue again remains excellent, even where he speculates, as with pointing to Trump’s refusal to put his hand on the Bible at his Second Inauguration as evidence that it should have been clear to us for a while that things are off morally with this presidency, and especially so after Trump invaded Venezuela.
For me, at least, I’m not going to bother with writing about politics except maybe as a warning against them and the moral compromises they engender, and I’ve taken down many of my old articles on these subjects due to my problematic stances toward the City of Man.
I may be writing a lot less in total as well, but I felt that I had to write this because of my past support and writing in support of the president.
The argument seems preposterous at first, but the conclusion is incredible and proves it was all worth it!
I think that this is an excellent article. I've had two thoughts:
1. The American tradition seems pretty unanimous in seeing its history and founding as a kind of covenant relationship with God in which the United States brings the light of self-government and liberty to an oppressed mankind. Justice and righteousness are inherent to America's vision of itself. What this means is that departing from a magnanimous and just view of what is right and honorable to a demonic attitude of "get that bag" at all moral costs will inflict a horrible wound on the American psyche. It would be an apostasy from our covenant with God. The greatest Americans have always felt guided by Providence: Washington and the founders more generally, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Lincoln. We must not worship a golden calf. Superpower status and naked force did not bring us out of slavery to Britain.
2. Shelby Foote says in his history of the Civil War that it was the gift or burden those times that every man was sifted and tested. Every man got to discover his worth. Many were lacking, but many more were not. Perhaps another such time is coming, in the form of some great crisis, although not necessarily a civil war. You know, James, that I augur ill beyond the Trump administration. I do not think Trump is the man for the evil that is possible, but I fear who will arise in his stead. It has become clear that we cannot spare anyone in the public arena. Who will carry the light of the Gospel if not the illumined? Who will govern in a Christian way if not a Christian?
I suppose, however, that Trump himself may create a backlash for decency and morality. The American people I believe are still fundamentally concerned with justice and are still the rulers of this country. The ruler sets the regime. If the people be not corrupted, no leader can permanently harm the system of government. Sententia mea.
I am happy I never voted for Trump, and happier that I didn't vote for Biden or Harris. None of them are 'my guys' that I feel that I have to defend now or attack their opponents. I never expected much from Trump, and have occasionally been pleasantly surprised. Not when it comes to this war though.
If the Democrats come into power again they will certainly not be fond of Catholics. They will never forgive us for what happened on abortion. If we stand up even a little bit to Trump he will not be fond of Catholics either. If we don't shout that this is the bestest justest just war ever he's going to have a fit. And it's not the bestest justest just war ever.
I'd put my money on the future being either Democrats or Republicans in charge, even though I've tried mightily to get an American Solidarity Party candidate elected. And so I think your query about persecution is well founded.
Is that video of Paula White doctored or did she really rave on like that? In an age of IA video manipulation it's hard to know. If it's real, it's scary beyond all.