(Image source: Patrick Semansky/AP Photo)

The late Pope Francis was a staunch, outspoken critic of Donald Trump’s violent anti-immigrant policies. In February, he explicitly rebuked the president’s enthusiasm for mass deportations. The pontiff said, “the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”

Francis cited the experiences of the Jews who fled from Egypt and of Jesus to underline the plight of refugees. In the past, he also highlighted the fact that many of the people Trump’s deportation regime targets are Latin American Catholics, like the Pope himself. Francis presided over a mass at the U.S. Mexican border in 2016, on the eve of Trump’s first term, in which he referred to migrants as our “brothers and sisters.”

Christians are disproportionately represented among migrants globally; a 2024 survey found that Christians were 47% of immigrants worldwide, though they make up only 30% of the global population.

Some (including perhaps the former Pope) would no doubt argue that Trump’s policies are an indication that his far-right authoritarian Christianity, what some call Christofascism, is not really Christian—that he is betraying the true faith. However, as journalist Chrissy Stroop has pointed out, treating the bad parts of Christianity as somehow a deviation or a mistake maintains the idea that Christianity is by definition good no matter what’s done in its name.

Rather than arguing that Trump’s Christianity isn’t really Christian, then, I think it’s more useful to think about what Trump’s anti-Christian policies and rhetoric tell us about the scope, tenets, and construction of today’s Christofascism, or what others call Christian nationalism.

Specifically, Trump’s Christofascism is part of a long tradition of Christian supremacist politics—going back at least to Medieval times—which sees Christian identity as shaped not just by religious beliefs, but by nationality, race, and hierarchical privilege. Trump’s Christianity is not false Christianity. Instead, it’s a reminder—and a warning—of the way that Christianity in many contexts is less about theology, and more about power.

The Wrong Christians

European colonialism and conquests were largely justified on Christian grounds. God had given the whole globe to Christianity; non-Christians were there to be conquered and dispossessed, and they should be grateful for it. During the Crusades, European Christians developed the idea of the “Petrine mandate”—the idea that the Papacy had a duty to care for the souls of all, and that such care required the conquest of non-believers. In the 1200s, Pope Innocent IV codified this thinking by arguing that non-believers who worshipped idols or failed to follow European sexual mores were violating natural law and could be righteously conquered by Christian nations.

This Christian-supremacist consensus culminated in the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas, in which Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI divided the Americas into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, legitimizing conquest of non-Christians while affirming the property rights of Christians in the territories they stole.

While doctrines of Christian superiority justified conquest of non-Christians, large numbers of those conquered by Europeans converted to Christianity. How, then, did Christian supremacists rationalize the large-scale subjugation, enslavement, and murder of fellow believers?

As theologian Willie James Jennings argues, the Christian elevation of certain Christians over other Christians was accomplished by taking “the body of the European” as “the compass marking divine election.” Jennings points to the writing of Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), an Italian Jesuit missionary to Japan, who in his 1580 Sumario categorized different peoples on the basis of their fitness or ability to become good Christians.

Valignano believed the Japanese were effectively white and would make excellent Christians. Africans, on the other hand, he argued, were “a very untalented race…incapable of grasping our holy religion or practicing it, because of their naturally low intelligence.” This distinction, Jennings says, was built on preexisting mistrust of Muslim and Jewish converts, who many believed were in perpetual danger of returning to their former religion, and who could not be trusted with Church leadership.

There were, in short, Christians and Christians. White Europeans with a firm Christian pedigree, and those like them, were the natural, entitled leaders and rulers of religious and secular life. Everybody else was relegated to, at best, a secondary place. From this perspective, there was no contradiction between enslavement and conversion—or as Columbus said of the indigenous Taino people he met, enslaved, and murdered on his first voyage, “They ought to make good slaves…and I believe that they could very easily become Christians.”

In Columbus’ eyes, the fact that Taino people were good candidates for conversion did not make them potential equals. It merely confirmed the possibility of fitting them into their rightful place at the bottom of a European hierarchy.

You can see a similar dynamic in American justifications of enslaving Black people—including, of course, Black Christians. Christian apologists insisted for 500 years that Black people were the descendants of Ham, Noah’s son. Noah cursed Ham to perpetual slavery for the crime of seeing him naked.

Black skin became perceived as a visible theological marker, an outward symbol that differentiated Christian identity among both Black and white Americans. Christian identity was not just a function of beliefs, but inhered in certain bodies. Christianity supremacy meant that Christians ruled, but it also meant that Christianity was a hierarchy, in which certain (white) Christians were more fit to rule than other (non-white) Christians.

White Christian Privilege

Christian nationalism, then, is in part an ideology of Christian superiority, and an ideological justification for establishing and enforcing hierarchies among Christians themselves. For those who support Christian nationalism, Christian identity isn’t a yes or no question, but a sliding scale that depends on racial and national markers.

Another way to think about this is through the lens of what scholar Khyati Y. Joshi refers to as White Christian privilege. As Joshi writes, “Christian privilege in the United States has always been entangled with notions of White supremacy. Indeed, throughout US history Christian, English, free, and White have been superimposed to form mutually supporting advantages based on the co-construction of religion, race, and national origin.”

(Image source: Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA Press/National Catholic Reporter)

Joshi argues that White Christian privilege helps explain the birther conspiracy theories around Barack Obama—conspiracy theories enthusiastically embraced by then reality television star Donald Trump.

Obama is a Christian, and certainly a more devout and practicing Christian than Trump. But, as Joshi notes, Christian privilege is not simply a matter of devotion or faith. It is linked to notions of race, national identity, and background. Obama’s father was Kenyan; his middle name is Hussein; he spent a good portion of his childhood in Indonesia. Moreover, his Christian faith was linked to the Black church—still viewed with suspicion by many white Christians.

“Despite the Christian belief in salvation or conversion,” Joshi concludes, “even people who might have preached about their own moment of being ‘born again’ could not believe that Barack Obama really meant it when he called himself Christian.” For many white Christians, Christian identity is intertwined with national and racial identities, and those identities exclude Americans with African, Asian, Muslim, and/or Black roots. Obama could not be eligible for President because he challenges the intuitive hierarchy of white Christian privilege—the sense that only certain Christians should rule.

Joshi also traces white Christian privilege through the history of U.S. immigration law, examining how sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting understandings of white and Christian identities affected who was accepted into, and as, an American.

In 1922, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, a Japanese English-speaking Christian man who lived in the U.S. for 20 years, was not eligible for citizenship because Japan was not Christian (even though Ozawa himself was) and because Ozawa was not Caucasian. In another case of the time, the Supreme Court ruled that Bhagat Singh Thind, a U.S. army veteran and Punjab-born Sikh, was ineligible for citizenship because of his religion and race, even though according to the pseudoscience of the time South Asians were “Aryans” and technically Caucasians.

Definitions of Christianity influenced definitions of whiteness, and vice versa, while both were used as mutually reinforcing filters to deny citizenship to those framed as outsiders. Christian Europeans—including people who were Catholic or Eastern Orthodox—generally had a much easier time gaining citizenship than people who were not white and Christian, or who were only one or the other. It took a Civil War to get citizenship for Black Christians. Franklin Roosevelt did not round up white Christian, German-Americans or Christian Italian-Americans and put them in camps; that was reserved for Japanese-Americans, who were seen as non-white and non-Christian, and therefore as permanent enemy outsiders, no matter their citizenship status or actual loyalties.

The Christianity of Exclusion

Trump’s Christianity is in line with this European-American Christian tradition in which Christianity acts as a politics of identity and exclusion that is intertwined with whiteness and xenophobia. And again, this brand of Christian supremacism is sometimes most vivid when it is wielded against other Christians.

One iconic example is Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests for racial justice in June 2020. Protestors, including priests and clergy, were demonstrating in the park near the White House when national guardsmen and police forcibly cleared them from the area by using gas and rubber bullets. Immediately afterwards, Trump walked out of the White House to nearby St. John’s Church, where he posed for a photo op with a Bible.

Much of the controversy around the incident focused on whether protestors were violently attacked by police in order to allow Trump to stage photos. A federal probe found that the photo did not provoke the attacks. But that doesn’t change the fact that Trump wanted to be seen as a Christian president in the context of repudiating racial justice protestors, many of whom were Christian leaders.

The photo-op was a forcible statement that Christian witness by Black people, or in the name of Black people, is illegitimate. Trump, as president, and crucially as a white man, was claiming the mantle of Christian identity for whites, and the mantle of whiteness for Christian identity. He was sacralizing a violent federal assault on the wrong Christians, and in doing so cementing his own vision of white Christian nationalist American identity.

Earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance attempted to provide a theological justification for Trump’s gutter racist instincts—and for Christofascism more generally— by musing on Aquinas’ concept of “ordo amoris,” or “order of love.” According to Vance, there is a clear order to love: “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”

Christian community, for Vance, means caring for people who are like you first; you need to protect your own, and only after that is done can you maybe consider helping others. For Vance, this is justification for ending foreign aid, as billionaire Trump aid Elon Musk has done. Musk’s shuttering of USAID is expected to result in 25 million deaths over the next 15 years. Vance did not explain how mass slaughter of mostly non-white people, many of them children, many of them Christian, materially benefits his family or his neighbors. Maybe it just gives him a warm glow, and that’s sufficient.

Pope Francis notably objected to this cramped, cruel vision of Christianity and community. “[T]he true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37),” he wrote to the U.S. bishops, “that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

It seems likely that Pope Francis had a better understanding of Catholic doctrine than J.D. Vance. And yet, Vance seems more in tune with Christianity as it is currently practiced in the United States: a 2024 poll found that Christians were much more likely than non-Christians to believe that migrants seeking entry to the U.S. was a “crisis.” 70% of white evangelical Protestants agreed with the term “crisis,” 64% of white Catholics, only 32% of Black protestants, and only 27% of nones (atheists, agnostics, and those with no religious affiliation).

Who is Authentically Christian? 

Christian antipathy to mostly Christian immigrants is, again, not really a contradiction. Nor does it mean that American Christians are hypocrites or illegitimate Christians. Rather, it reflects a vision of Christianity obsessed with authenticity and belonging.

White Christianity in the U.S. has for centuries focused on policing boundaries: national, racial, confessional. The Trump administration, in its indifference to the plight of Palestinian Christians; in its eagerness to attack clergy who refuse to bend the knee; in its determination to make immigration arrests in houses of worship, is simply reiterating the longstanding logic of arguably the most influential strand of Christian practice and Christian identity in the country.

In this vision of Christian nationalism, Christianity is not, and not intended to be, a guide to moral action or to Christlike behavior. It’s not a spur to spread the circle of love. It’s not a spur to love at all. Instead, Christianity tells you who has the imprimatur of heaven, which is to say who has the right to dispossess, enslave, subjugate, and murder everyone else. Certain people—cisgender, straight, white, Christian male leaders—embody and enforce Christian identity. No one else has any God-given right to criticize, to belong, or to exist.

Trump’s current, ongoing assault on the Constitution is in some ways an unprecedented break with American democratic traditions. Yet at the same time his administration can be seen as a return to, or a continuation of, American antidemocratic impulses. The U.S. has often set itself up as a bulwark to protect and expand white Christian dominance, by policing non-white people, by policing non-Christians, and, not least, by policing who gets to call themselves real Christians, and who does not.

In that context, arguing over what Christianity really is or is not can end up buttressing Christian nationalism rather than undermining it. Christian nationalism wants you to be focused on whose identity is more valid, on who belongs and who doesn’t. That’s the logic of Trumpism. If we want to get beyond it, we need to pledge solidarity to all our neighbors everywhere, whatever their relationship to Christianity, or lack thereof.

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer. His books of poetry include Gnarly Thumbs, Brevity, Meaning Is Embarrassing, and Not Akhmatova. His newsletter is Everything Is Horrible.