I am currently writing a new book. The working title is “Jesus and Fascism: Donald Trump, the MAGA Republicans, and White Christian Nationalism.” For now, I’ll just share the introduction with you.

My unique contribution is the idea that Jesus faced a similar situation in his time as we are facing in the United States today with racially-pure Judean nationalists who wanted a strong-man leader to Make Israel Great Again.

introduction

Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.
— John Lewis (1940–2020)

Those who choose, even on a small scale, to love in the midst of hatred and fear are the people who offer true hope to our world.
— Henri Nouwen (1932–1996)

I awoke on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, 2024, to the realization that the twice-impeached and criminally-indicted former president Donald Trump was elected to the presidency once again. For a while, it was easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a fluke. Eight years later, that’s now impossible. Some observers might think Donald Trump’s first term represented rock bottom. Just wait. I think we are in for a tough fight.

At first, I could not believe it, nor could I understand it. I was shocked, confused, and utterly dismayed. Why would the American public vote this way? What did they see in this man? Firmly ensconced in my blue liberal bubble, I thought the majority of Americans were better than this. It appears I was wrong.

I recently heard Gillian Tett (b. 1967), a cultural anthropologist, interviewed on the Ezra Klein (b. 1984) podcast. She said:

One thing you learn is that every single person assumes that the intellectual framework they grew up with and built their careers around is natural, normal, inevitable and should be universal. That’s just the nature of being human. And everybody is wrong. Ideas change over time. They go in fashions or cycles, however you want to frame it.

So, I’ve seen it firsthand that intellectual frameworks can shift over time and collapse. And we can’t ever assume that the ideas we hold so dear—because we grew up with them, because we’re all creatures of our own intellectual environments—are going to be universal and permanent.

Just under 50 percent, nearly half of voters not only approve of Donald Trump, but they also see themselves in him. In the words of John Pavlovitz (b. 1969):

We are witnessing in real-time, a spectacular failure of the collective humanity of this nation: a defiant refusal to welcome in our better angels, a passionate embrace of the darkest recesses of our shadow sides . . . Despite so much evidence around us to the contrary over the past ten years, we strained to believe that this is not who we are: his unapologetic racism, his contempt for the different, his vile disregard for women, his unrepentant hatred.[1]

This moment feels like that Good Friday must have felt on that Spring afternoon in the first century. The crowd in Jerusalem had just voted to let Barabbas go free, no longer accountable for his crimes, shouting instead for the crucifixion of Jesus. Why? The people wanted a warrior king, a strong man, a man who would make Israel great again. Jesus was not that man, and so, the people of Judea let Rome kill him.

In this election, American voters have embraced a weak man who thinks he is a strong man and who admires strong men around the world: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Donald Trump told us in no uncertain terms what he is going to do, and a slim majority of voters encouraged him to do it. He has told us he will be a dictator from day one, and they cheered him on. His “America First” isolationist agenda and his far-right populism resulted in many of the electorate seeing him as America’s savior and, in a gross perversion of Christianity, as their personal savior.

He told us he would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances and would use the justice department to take revenge on his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants and replace them with people loyal to him. He would deport millions of immigrants in military style roundups. He would abandon NATO, our many other allies abroad, and particularly the people of Ukraine. He called global warming a hoax, turned a blind eye to environmental disasters, and promised to dramatically pare-back climate regulations. He told women he would be their protector whether they liked it or not. He bragged about being the person responsible for ending their reproductive rights, callously letting them die under draconian anti-abortion laws in many states. He said he would magically fix inflation, improve the economy, end crime in our cities, and close the borders. He said, “Only I can fix it,” and a majority of voters blindly trusted him. He said electing him would “fix every single problem our country faces and lead America, and indeed the whole world, to new heights of glory.” He asked the voters to give him the power to do all this, and they said an unqualified yes.

On August 19, 1934, seventeen days after the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg, a referendum on merging the posts of Chancellor and President was held in Nazi Germany. The German leadership sought to gain approval for Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s assumption of supreme power. The measure passed overwhelmingly, with nearly 90 percent of the vote. Hitler had effectively become a dictator. Germany welcomed in a strong man who vowed to make Germany great again. Eleven years later, the country lay in desolate ruins.

Adolf Hitler was a fascist, Benito Mussolini was a fascist, and Donald Trump aspires to be a fascist. “He’s fascist to the core,” said retired General Mark Milley, Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant, or dictator or wannabe dictator.” Retired General John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, said Trump “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.” He said, “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump.”

I fear for our nation. I fear for our immigrants, for the health of women, and for LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people. I fear the tidal wave of bigotry that is coming. I fear the unleashing of all the hate groups in America: the militias, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, white Christian supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and other far-right extremists who see in Donald Trump an avatar of their dark vision for America.

It is said that a country gets the government that it deserves, and the United States will have to suffer another four years of what many consider the worst American president in our history as a result.

A letter to the editors of The Washington Post after the election stated:

The facts of this election are simple: Mr. Trump won with an appeal to male supremacy and by offering a fearful people law and order. The leader of this cult of personality will assume power just one year shy of the 250th anniversary of our self-liberation from tyranny. In 2024, we have chosen the iron hand of authoritarianism over the messy, frustrating business of democratic self-governance.[2]

We are entering dangerous territory. The American people have broken faith with who we once were, or thought we were. They have voted to obliterate our politics, customs, alliances, and traditions. They have traded their economic anxiety for a reign of injustice. Only a broken and decaying society elects a man like Donald Trump. The price will be very heavy. Our constitutional democracy is at risk. American democracy simply wasn’t set up to deal with an aspiring autocrat, especially with such a willing electorate and a cowering Republican Congress. The people have invited a dictatorial leader to take control and reshape our nation. Welcome to the Fatherland and our new Führer.

In 2007, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021) penned a poem for our time. He called it “Pity the Nation.”

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty![3]

In spite of the reality facing us, we all have the capacity to choose hope in dark times like these. Not fear, not despair, not hate, not apathy, not resignation. In her concession speech the day after the election from the steps of Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall at Howard University, Kamala Harris (b. 1964) spoke words of hope and resistance.

You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. And so, to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together . . . There’s an adage a historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages. The adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.[4]

the intent of this book

Jesus lived in contentious times, much like our own. He was confronted by widespread Judean nationalism in his day, the search for a messiah who would end centuries of decline and subjugation and Make Israel Great Again. Judean society believed in a master race or ethnicity to rule their country. They demanded pure racial and ethnic purity, convinced that it was the will of God.

It was an “us versus them” society. The chosen versus the unchosen. The insiders versus the outcasts. The respectable versus the disreputable. The pure versus the defiled. The perfect versus the flawed. The clean versus the filthy. The holy versus the profane. The sacred versus the secular.

Jesus countered this stance with an alternative vision that he called the kingdom of God. It was a vision of a society created and governed by self-giving love. The society that Jesus proclaimed included the excluded people of Judean society—the destitute poor, the untouchables, the nobodies. It was an inclusive “we” society that welcomed all. Jesus knew the poor would embrace it, but the wealthy would not. The hungry and thirsty would be filled but the rich sent away empty. In his vision, the first would be last and the last would be first. And many of his parables bear witness to this.

The top one percent of the Jewish nation was amassing land with increasing regularity creating an imbalance of wealth—using indebtedness to throw peasants off their property and into poverty. Jesus called for the implementation of the Jubilee year; a kind of economic amnesty that stated every fifty years land lost through indebtedness would be returned to the original owners. In an agricultural economy, that means that wealthy landowners would have to willingly give up their acquired land and return it to the landless poor—a redistribution of wealth from the top down. Jesus knew that this was unlikely, but he called for it anyway. It was a confrontation with the power of a wealthy few.

Today, we are confronted by a messianic leader in Donald Trump, a cult-like MAGA movement of his devoted followers, and underlying it all, the dream of an all-white Christian nationalism. Whether in Judea in the first century or in America in the twenty-first century, the situations we face are essentially the same. Judaism was the national religion then and today Christian nationalists want to elevate conservative evangelical Christianity as the dominant religion in a largely secular America.

Jesus faced governments led by an imperial dictator in Rome, a despotic king in Galilee, and an oligarchy of wealthy and powerful rulers in Jerusalem. We are faced with an aspiring fascist dictator who would rule in unrestrained political corruption and retribution, abandoning the rule of law, and ushering in widespread criminality, corruption, and violence.

This book draws on material that I covered in some of my previous books, particularly A Conspiracy of Love: Following Jesus in a Postmodern World; People of the Way: Passion and Resistance in a Postmodern World; and Justice at the Margins: Jesus’ Parables of Defiance and Disruption.

We will begin by defining fascism. What is it and what are it’s characteristics? We will describe its rise in Europe under Mussolini and Hitler. We will then trace fascism’s American roots in the antebellum South and how it spread with various racist and antisemitic movements of the 1930s. Next, we will describe the rise of Donald Trump and the racist MAGA Republican party in the twenty-first century. And we will try to understand how white rural working-class economic anxiety and resentment fed this movement. Following that, we will discuss Christian nationalism. What is it and how does it relate to fascism? What are the overlaps and what are the differences? Finally, we will describe how Jesus confronted the racist Judean nationalism of his day and would probably confront the growing fascism and white Christian nationalism in America today.

 

 

[1] John Pavlovitz, “What the hell just happened, America?” johnpavlovitz.com, November 6, 2024.

[2] Washington Post, Letters to the Editor, November 6, 2024.

[3] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Pity the Nation (after Khalil Gibran),” 2007. Ferlinghetti wrote the poem in response to the George W. Bush presidency and based it on an earlier poem by Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) author of The Prophet (1923). The original can be found in the book posthumously published as The Garden of the Prophet (1933).

[4] Kamala Harris, “Concession Speech,” Time, November 7, 2024. https://time.com/7173617/kamala-harris-concession-speech-full-transcript/ Many commentators attribute “only when it is dark enough can you see the stars” to Martin Luther King, Jr. But he attributed it to Charles A. Beard, the historian that Harris mentions. However, Beard said the originator of the phrase was actually Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle in the 1843 book, Past and Present. Carlyle was suggesting important truths emerged during times of tribulation.