Yves right here. Are People being indoctrinated to all develop into Zionists of a form, that anybody who will not be certainly one of us deserves oppression? This appears to be the intent of the additional perversion of the prosperity gospel model of Christianity, as recounted by theologian and minister Liz Theoharis beneath.
Tellingly, once I went to the Unitarian Universalist church across the nook from me that Sunday, the pastor, to my shock, additionally labored the necessity for a belligerent response into his sermon. I might have left however the church was packed and I used to be trapped in entrance, sitting in entrance of the pews.
So the turning of Christianity on its head, at the very least in American, has been within the making for a while.
It was a second considerably like this, 30 years in the past, that turned me right into a biblical scholar. Within the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and non secular leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down meals packages and kicking moms and their infants off public help. These leaders, a lot of them self-described Christians, selected to disregard the vast majority of passages within the Bible that preached “excellent news” to the poor and promised freedom to these captive to injustice and oppression. As an alternative, they put ahead unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial energy and punish the poor within the title of a warped morality.
Three many years later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working time beyond regulation, utilizing Jesus’s title and the Bible’s contents in much more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Division of Homeland Safety, utilizing the “Right here I’m, Lord. Ship me” citation from Isaiah — generally cited when ordaining religion leaders and together with express references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new brokers for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement company, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, due to Donald Trump’s “One Huge Lovely Invoice.”
Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even additional in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of those ICE raids?… The reply is sure.” He then added: “The Bible doesn’t require rich Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of getting a flourishing financial system and lifestyle, all proper? The Bible doesn’t allow the civil Justice of the Peace to steal cash from its residents to pay for overseas nationals to come back destroy our tradition.”
A month earlier, throughout a speech asserting the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on harmless households and youngsters): “And particularly, God, I need to simply say, we love you God, and we love our nice navy. Shield them. God bless the Center East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thanks very a lot. Thanks.”
And in Might, Speaker of the Home Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives shaped a prayer circle on the ground of the Home as they ready to codify the president’s Huge Lovely Invoice. After all, that very invoice threatens to chop off hundreds of thousands of People from life-saving meals and healthcare. (Contemplate it a weird counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and offering free well being care to lepers.)
The Antichrist
And if that weren’t sufficient twisting of the Bible to bless the wealthy and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the person backstage of a lot now happening in Washington. Although many People could also be more and more accustomed to him, his numerous firms, and his political influence, many people have missed the centrality of his model of Christianity and the enigmatic “spiritual” beliefs that go along with it.
In Vainness Honest this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasised the central function Thiel has already performed within the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I assure you,” one Christian entrepreneur informed her, “there are folks which are leveraging Christianity to get nearer to Peter Thiel.”
Certainly, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “If you don’t have a transcendent spiritual perception,” he stated, “you find yourself simply wanting round at different folks. And that’s the drawback with our atheist liberal world. It’s simply the insanity of crowds.” Bear in mind, this is similar Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, overtly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system the place energy could be concentrated amongst these with the experience to drive “progress” — a brand new model of the survival of the fittest within the data age. Such a worldview couldn’t distinction extra strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, the place Jesus demonstrates his preferential possibility for the poor and his perception in bottom-up methods somewhat than high down ones.
Extra not too long ago, Thiel has positioned himself “proper” in the midst of the Republican Get together. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first time period. Since then, he has convened and supported a brand new cohort of conservatives (a lot of whom additionally declare a right-wing Christianity), together with Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Coverage Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} getting Trump elected the second time round. Thiel can be near Curtis Yarvin, the guy who “jokingly” claimed that American society not wants poor folks and believes they need to as a substitute be become biofuel. (A worldview that merely couldn’t be extra incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)
Notably related to current political (and ideological) developments, particularly the navy occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel can be near Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founding father of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing suppose tank behind a coordinated assault on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s proper, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to maneuver out instantly… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an govt order facilitating the removing of housing encampments in Washington, a yr after the Supreme Court docket upheld a legislation making it against the law, in case you don’t have a house, to sleep and even breathe outdoors. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t simply answerable for these assaults on unhoused folks and “blue cities”; in addition they bear accountability for religion leaders being arrested and fined for his or her help of unhoused communities and their opposition, on spiritual grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.
On high of this troubling mixture of Christianity and billionaires, nonetheless, I discover myself notably chagrined that Thiel is providing an oversold four-part lecture sequence on the “antichrist” by way of a nonprofit known as ACTS 17 collective that’s to begin in September in San Francisco. Information tales concerning the ACTS 17 collective are likely to concentrate on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the will to place salvation by way of Jesus above private success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, particularly for these of us who take significantly the biblical command to cease depriving the poor of rights, to finish poverty on earth (as it’s in heaven), and defend the very folks the Bible prioritizes.
As an illustration, Trae Stephens (who labored at Palantir and is companions with Thiel in a enterprise capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founding father of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Occasions, Michelle Stephens describes how “we’re all the time taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I believe we’ve realized that, if something, the wealthy, the rich, the highly effective want Jesus simply as a lot.”
In an article on the Denison Discussion board, she’s much more particular about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the necessity to take care of these with extra somewhat than the poor. She writes, “Those that see Christ’s message to the poor and needy because the central pillar of the gospel make an identical mistake. Whereas social justice actions have performed a fantastic deal to level out our society’s longstanding sins and name believers to motion, it may be tempting for that message to develop into extra distinguished than our innate want for Jesus to save lots of us.” Such a press release jogs my memory of the decades-long theological pushback I lived by way of even earlier than the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.
A Battle for the Bible
After all, such a battle for the Bible is something however new in America. It reaches again lengthy earlier than the rise of a brand new model of Christianity in Silicon Valley. Within the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the guide of Philemon and features from St. Paul’s epistles to assert that slavery had been ordained by God, whereas ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. Throughout the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, church buildings and politicians alike preached what was known as a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of commercial capitalism. Many years later, segregationists continued to make use of stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, whereas the Ethical Majority, based in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a brand new era of Christian extremists in nationwide politics.
Over the previous many years, using the Bible to justify what passes for “legislation and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has solely intensified. In Donald Trump’s first time period, Legal professional Basic Jeff Periods defended the administration’s coverage of separating immigrant youngsters from their households on the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I might cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and sensible command in Romans 13, to obey the legal guidelines of the federal government as a result of God has ordained them for the aim of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and defend the weak and lawful.”
White Home Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the identical thought quickly after on this method: “It is extremely biblical to implement the legislation.” And in his first speech as speaker of the Home, Mike Johnson informed his colleagues, “I consider that Scripture, the Bible, may be very clear: that God is the one who raises up these in authority,” an echo of the New Testomony’s Epistle to the Romans, wherein Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”
Over the previous a number of years, Republican politicians and non secular leaders have continued to make use of biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify chopping folks off from healthcare and meals help. A galling instance got here when Consultant Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify growing work necessities for folks qualifying for the Supplemental Diet Help Program (SNAP). And that was simply certainly one of many Republican assaults on the low-income meals help program amid myriad makes an attempt to shred the social welfare system within the lead-up to President Trump’s “Huge Lovely Invoice,” the most important switch of wealth from the underside to the highest in American historical past and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Challenge 2025. Arrington stated: “However there’s additionally, , within the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even once we had been with you, we gave you this rule: if a person won’t work, he shall not eat.’ After which he goes on to say ‘We hear that some amongst you might be idle’… I believe it’s an inexpensive expectation that we now have work necessities.”
And Arrington has been something however alone. The identical passage, the truth is, had already been utilized by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify chopping meals stamps throughout a debate over an earlier farm invoice. And Consultant Mo Brooks (R-AL) used equally spiritual language, categorizing folks as deserving and undeserving, to argue in opposition to a healthcare plan that protects these of us with pre-existing situations. He insisted that solely “individuals who lead good lives” and “have performed the issues to maintain their our bodies wholesome” ought to obtain diminished prices for well being care.
Such “Christian” politicians frequently misuse Biblical passages guilty the impoverished for his or her poverty. There may be by no means a suggestion, after all, that the wealthy, who’ve functionally stolen folks’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any technique to blame.
A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This
Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everybody’s lives (besides, after all, the superrich), however particularly the poor. And — although you wouldn’t understand it from such Republicans — they’re counter to the primary themes of the Bible’s texts. The entire of the Christian Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending with the Guide of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historic equivalents of anti-poverty packages run by way of all of it.
That arc begins within the Guide of Exodus with manna (bread) that reveals up day after day, so nobody has an excessive amount of or too little. This can be a doubtless response to the Egyptian Pharaoh establishing a system the place a number of spiritual and political leaders amassed nice wealth on the expense of the folks. God’s plan, alternatively, was for society to be organized round assembly the wants of all folks, together with describing how political and non secular leaders are alleged to launch slaves, forgive money owed, pay folks what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues by way of the prophets who insist that the way in which to like and honor God is to advertise packages that uplift the poor and marginalized, whereas decrying these with energy who cloak oppression in spiritual phrases and heretical variations of Christian theology.
My very own political and ethical roots are within the welfare rights and homeless union survival actions, efforts led by poor and dispossessed folks organizing a “new underground railroad” and difficult Christianity to speak the discuss and stroll the stroll of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk on the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, together with the church, should transfer to the place that “poor individuals are not sinners, however poverty is a sin in opposition to God that might and needs to be ended.”
Delk’s phrases echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a pacesetter of the Nationwide Welfare Rights Group, the most important group of poor folks within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, spoke to the Nationwide Council of Church buildings. “I characterize all of these poor people who find themselves on welfare and plenty of who should not,” she stated, “individuals who consider within the Christian lifestyle… folks whose nickels and dimes and quarters have constructed the Christian church buildings of America. As a result of we consider in Christianity, we now have continued to help the Christian church buildings… We name upon you… to hitch with us within the Nationwide Welfare Rights Group. We ask to your ethical, private, and monetary help on this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our folks. If we fail in our battle, Christianity can have failed.”
In a Trumpian world, the place Christian extremism is turning into the norm, we should not let the phrases of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of numerous prophets and freedom fighters come true. Fairly, we should construct the power to make a theological and religious imaginative and prescient of everybody-in-nobody-out a actuality and create the capability, powered by religion, to make it so. Now could be the time. Might we make it so.
Copyright 2025 Liz Theoharis
