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Following the violent murder of beloved director, actor, and producer Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer in December, President Donald Trump issued the by now expected screed of vitriol and hate. Reiner had been a critic of the president, and Trump is not one to let bygones be bygones. “He [Reiner] was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump,” the president claimed. He seemed to be implying, without evidence, that Reiner’s son, who has been charged in the killing, was somehow motivated by anger at his father’s opposition to MAGA.

Trump’s remarks were greeted with virtually universal condemnation, even from Republicans—even from the normally supine Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. And inevitably one common rebuke has been that Trump’s statements were not Christian.

LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano writes that the anti-Reiner post showed “how profoundly un-Christian Donald J. Trump is once and for all.” Conservative talk show host Erick Erickson said, “If we know Christians by their love, his [Trump’s] behavior doesn’t seem reflective of the faith.” New Orleans radio personality “Scoot” Paisant asked “how anyone who considers themselves a Christian could agree with President Trump on this matter.” Oklahoma congresswoman Stephanie Bice didn’t make the point quite so explicitly, but nonetheless contrasted Christian behavior with Trump’s actions: “We should be lifting the family up in prayer,” she said, “not making this about politics.”

Trump’s attack on Reiner was disgusting, and it’s good to see a wide range of people saying as much. It’s also worth asking, though, whether accusing the president of being “un-Christian” is the best way to express disapprobation.

Trump, after all, frequently and enthusiastically claims the mantle of Christianity. Moreover, he has overwhelming support from white Christian evangelicals. He has relentlessly catered to Christian nationalist ideals by, for example, creating new rules that empower Christian proselytizing in the Federal workplace and by making it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ and Jewish couples in adoptions. He has repeatedly attacked Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for her Somali ethnicity and her Muslim religion, mirroring and expanding on the Islamophobia that is rife in right-wing Christian circles.

Is Trump un-Christian when he spews vitriol at Rob Reiner, a Jewish man, after a tragedy, but Christian enough when he denies Jewish couples the right to adopt, or when he spews vitriol at Ilhan Omar? And if Trump is advancing one version of a Christian agenda, can we really defeat that by compulsively framing Christianity as the moral arbiter of public life? If the worst thing you can say about Trump is that he is not Christian, that presents some serious problems for those of us—like me, like Rob Reiner, like Ilhan Omar—who are not Christian and who are not interested in being Christian.

If we really want to challenge Christian nationalism and Trumpism, we need a more skeptical attitude towards Christianity as a whole, and some measures of public virtue that don’t depend on Christ or the Christian religion for their legitimacy.

The Bad Jesus

If you’re looking for skepticism about Christian ethics, a good place to start is with Hector Avalos’ iconoclastic 2015 book, The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics.

Avalos says he was inspired to write the book by “a recurrent and puzzling experience” he’d had as a scholar. “If one reads almost any treatise on Christian ethics written by academic biblical scholars, one finds something extremely peculiar: Jesus never does anything wrong [italics in original].”

Christian ethics, Avalos notes, is sometimes an effort to deduce ethical principles from Christ’s actions and is sometimes an effort to explain why Christ’s actions are ethical even when they look like they might not be. But, he says, biblical ethics rarely start from ethical principles and evaluate Jesus on the basis of them. There is never a possibility that Jesus will not measure up, because Christ is always the standard—just as Christianity in public discourse can never fail, but can only be failed.

Avalos sets out to rectify this approach. He notes, first of all, that all the information we have about Jesus is from many years after his death. Christian ethicists often explain away Jesus’ problematic statements or acts—for example, blighting a tree in a moment of anger— by saying they may be false accounts or misrepresentations. But you could say this about virtually everything and anything we know about Jesus. The accounts we have of his life are secondhand at best.

Having said that, Avalos notes that if you take the text as we have it, there are many instances of Jesus behaving in ways that are hard to reconcile with contemporary notions of kindness, decency, or virtue.

For instance, Avalos points to Matthew 25, in which Jesus curses with “eternal fire” those who failed to care for his “brethren.” Christians frequently claim the New Testament is more merciful than the Old, but in this instance, Avalos argues, Christ goes beyond the vengeance of God in the Jewish Bible. Jesus, Avalos says, “does not only wish to kill those who harmed his servants” but “wants to torture them eternally with fire, one of the most horrific ways to destroy a body.” Compared to this threat of eternal agony, Trump’s mockery of the dead seems like fairly small beer.

Avalos also discusses the story of the woman who anoints Jesus with expensive oils at Bethany in Mark 14. When bystanders protest that the ointment could have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor, Jesus responds, “For you always have the poor with you and whenever you will you can do good to them; but you will not always have me.” As Avalos says drily, “This is not a very ethical rationale to deny help to the poor.” On the contrary, in centering himself in other people’s hardship, Jesus sounds not entirely unlike our current president, who judges every tragedy on how it affects Trump.

Of course, New Testament ethicists have spent a great deal of time and effort explaining why this passage in fact highlights Jesus’ concern for the poor. They’ve also written at length about why burning someone in eternal fire for unknowingly mistreating their servants is either a metaphor or a reasonable ethical stance. Avalos carefully takes up and refutes each objection in turn, which is an entertaining, if occasionally exhausting, read.

The point here, though, isn’t really whether Christians or non-Christians find any of Avalos’ individual arguments more or less convincing. The point is that, if you don’t take Jesus’ divinity as a given, many of Jesus’ actions do not automatically serve as an obvious model of virtue. In that context, can we really say that Christians are always unchristian when they do bad things—like, say, murdering Jews during the Inquisition, or committing genocides of non-Christians, or enslaving generations of people, or collaborating with Hitler, or invading Iraq, or targeting Somali immigrants, or denying healthcare to trans people?

Jesus’ actions and words often seem to condone egocentrism, violence, callousness, and revenge; Christians have often perpetrated bigotry, hate, and slaughter. When Christians say that unethical actions or words are unchristian, they claim to be calling people back to “true” Christian principles. But in many cases, they are just defending Christians from their own mixed legacy—and thereby shoring up Christian nationalism and its conviction that Christians have a unique relationship to virtue and therefore a unique right to rule.

The Good That Isn’t Jesus

Rather than compulsively referencing Christ as the arbiter of public virtue, maybe we should consider other ethical resources and other approaches. If we don’t look to Jesus for ethics, where can we look?

Many people who responded to Trump’s attack on Reiner did not directly mention Christianity, but instead referred to a vague, collective sense of common decency. Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, called Trump’s comments “classless.”

Appealing to some sort of elevated patrician standard of conduct, however, has the downside of suggesting that working-class people are innately less decent than the wealthy and powerful, when (as Trump demonstrates) the reverse is often the case. And of course Greene herself is a vile bigot and a school shooting conspiracy theorist who is obsessed with banning health care for trans people If standards of decency are flexible enough that she can wield them without reservation, we’re talking about so much glass there isn’t even a house.

Another possibility when looking for ethical guidance is to turn to the beliefs, ideals, and identity of people who are being targeted or to whom harm is being done. Rob Reiner and his wife were Jewish, and Reiner often said that his political and social commitments—to education, to “thinking for yourself,” came from “our [Jewish] social legacy.” He also said, “Jewish people have always been real good about helping the underprivileged, about standing up for human rights.”

There are certainly caveats there too—the Jewish government of Israel has been doing the opposite of standing up for human rights in Gaza over the last years. But it’s worth remembering when Trump cruelly attacks a person who is not a Christian, that other traditions—Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist—have a history of and a commitment to public virtue as well. It might be better to refute Trump by granting the non-Christians he hates the dignity of their own ethical traditions, rather than reasserting by default that the Christian view is the only one that counts.

It also seems important to point out in the case of the Reiners that Trump’s attacks on them are in line with his own history of sneering at and insulting Jewish people who don’t support him. That kind of mix of Christian condescension and threat echoes longstanding Christian claims that Jewish faith and people exist for the purpose of Christians rather than for themselves—as in the supercessionist doctrine which holds that the Jewish covenant with God has been overwritten and inherited by Christians. Such claims have historically dovetailed with the idea that (as in the Inquisition) Jewish people need to be subjugated to Christian rule where they are not simply eliminated. In this sense, you could say Trump’s attack was not so much unchristian as it was the expression of a certain kind of intolerant Christian nationalism that Trump and others have often directed at Jewish people.

Beyond his commitments to progressive Jewish causes, Reiner was also an artist and creator, and at his passing many people have looked to his work as a way to think about and condemn Trumpism. Film critic Scott Tobias, for example, has a thoughtful piece about how Reiner’s 1993 film A Few Good Men foreshadows and critiques the kind of lawless, militarized, perpetual-emergency government by the few which Trump has taken as his signature style. Trump, like Jack Nicholson in the film, thinks that his personal greatness and supersmarts give him the right to break whatever rule needs breaking—including rules of personal conduct. In addition, one could point to the recent Reiner-produced documentary on Christian nationalism God & Country as a way to understand and condemn Trump’s belief that anyone who criticizes him deserves to be bullied and destroyed.

Undoing the Unchristian

I’m not saying Christians can’t reference their traditions when they talk about virtue in public life. But I do think it’s important to recognize that public life, and virtue, are currently being viciously attacked by an organized, powerful, and frightening Christian nationalist movement.

When Trump’s opponents claim he is betraying Christianity, or suggest that Christianity is a pure and transcendent source of ethical guidance for all, they often end up reasserting that we are or should be a Christian country, and that Christians, when they follow the tenets of their faith, can do no wrong.

If we do not want Christian nationalism to be the arbiter of our collective ethics, we need to entertain the idea that there is a bad Jesus, and that people other than Jesus can do good.

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His poetry collection Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024) is about Jewish diaspora; his newsletter Everything Is Horrible is about politics, culture, and how everything is horrible.