Sometimes language fails in plain sight, and folk carry on as if it has not. This year’s Good Friday gathering at the White House offered one such moment. A number of Christian leaders stood alongside political power and spoke with certainty about what they believed they were witnessing. One voice, with great seriousness, drew a parallel between Donald Trump and Jesus Christ. That this occurred on Good Friday is not incidental.
It is difficult to accept any church leader would do such a thing. A day traditionally concerned with suffering, relinquishment and the refusal of power was set against a spectacle in which power was affirmed and, in its own way, sanctified.
By Easter Sunday the language shifted towards resurrection and triumph and the promise that death is not the end. For Trump’s Christian friends, the emphasis is not on transformation in the present, but on a deferred resolution. Justice will arrive later, at the second coming. In this framing, the demand to act well now disappears.
This expectation is not new. It has a long and distinct history in American Christianity. From the revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often described as the Great Awakenings, there emerged a recurring emphasis on imminence, on the sense that history itself was moving towards a decisive intervention. The world, in this telling, does not gradually improve. It is brought to account.
Over time this expectation has taken on a particular psychological force, producing urgency but also a form of detachment from the present. If resolution is always just beyond the horizon, if its agency is divine intervention, then the imperfections of the current order become easier to tolerate than they might otherwise be. The demand for justice shifts, not entirely but enough, from immediate responsibility to anticipated fulfilment.
In the twentieth century this current found new forms of expression. Televangelism translated revivalist intensity into broadcast form, extending its reach while sharpening its message. The language of salvation became intertwined with visibility, success, and scale. Belief was no longer only inward or communal. It became something that could be measured, or at least appeared to be.
This raises a more unsettling question, which is what conditions now make claims like those we saw on Good Friday not only possible, but persuasive.
Christianity has always had to negotiate its proximity to power. Augustine of Hippo understood this tension, drawing a distinction between the earthly city and the city of God. That distinction now appears, in some contexts, to have collapsed entirely. That collapse is not accidental. It rests on a theology that has, for some time, been reshaping the relationship between faith and success.
The prosperity gospel, a largely twentieth century American development, teaches that faith expresses itself in material blessing, that wealth and health are evidence of God’s favour. It does not merely accommodate wealth. It interprets it. Material success becomes visible proof, and economic outcomes are quietly converted into theological statements. In such a framework there is little need to wrestle with suffering or injustice. The answer, in a sense, has already been supplied. Those who prosper are blessed.
The ethical core of the Christian tradition has long resisted the identification of worth with possession. It has treated attachment to wealth and status as an obstacle that narrows perception and binds the self more tightly to its own interests. The prosperity gospel inverts this entirely. Accumulation is no longer a risk to be examined, but a sign to be trusted. Spiritual authority aligns with visibility, scale, and financial success. Humility becomes difficult to recognise, restraint less necessary. It is a theology that sits very comfortably within the logic of the market.
Seen in this light, its alignment with political power is not especially surprising. The same assumptions are at work in both. Success tends to justify itself. Power, once established, confirms its own legitimacy. Influence begins to function as its own argument.
In the United States, the contemporary religious landscape reflects this convergence in some quarters. The megachurch, organised around growth, branding and expansion, mirrors the corporate structures that surround it. Its language is carefully calibrated, its image polished to a high sheen. Its authority is often difficult to distinguish from that of the executive class. In such a context, proximity to political dominance is not a contradiction, but something closer to confirmation.
Søren Kierkegaard warned that Christianity becomes most dangerous when it becomes indistinguishable from the culture that surrounds it. In Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw, with greater urgency, what follows when that indistinguishability is taken up by power. He wrote not from abstraction, but from within a society in which the church had, in significant part, aligned itself with the state.
His distinction between cheap grace and costly grace was not rhetorical. Cheap grace asks very little. It offers reassurance without transformation. Costly grace demands a reordering of the self, one that may require resistance.
For that resistance he was imprisoned, and in April 1945 he was executed by the Nazi regime, only weeks before the end of the war. It is difficult to invoke him without recognising the distance between a faith that risks nothing and one that refuses to sanctify power, even when the cost is so great.
The figure of Jesus does not sit easily within the framework now being constructed around him. In the Gospel accounts, he resists the consolidation of power at every turn. He withdraws from it, unsettles it or reframes it in ways that render it unusable for personal advancement. He distinguishes between what belongs to political authority and what does not, and responds to injury not with retaliation but with a refusal to mirror it. His concern is not with status, but with perception, with the possibility of seeing without the distortions of fear, ambition, or self interest.
To align such a figure with political dominance is not simply an overstatement. It is something closer to a category error.
The argument for the separation of church and state is often made in political terms, as a protection against religious overreach. But the converse is also true. Separation protects religion from power. This is important because power does not merely govern. It appropriates. It looks for language, symbols and narratives that can secure its legitimacy. Religion, when drawn into that orbit, is cheapened and loses its integrity.
The events of this week revealed a trajectory that has been forming for some time. A religion that absorbs the logic of the market will tend to align itself with those who succeed within it. A theology shaped by expectation of imminent resolution struggles to remain fully attentive to the present. A faith that equates blessing with visibility gravitates towards those who command attention.
At Easter it is worth recalling that another tradition persists, though it is less visible. It does not announce itself through scale or certainty. It resists translation into metrics. It asks instead whether we can distinguish between what is valuable and what is merely rewarded. Whether we can recognise the subtle ways in which the self attaches itself to power, to success, to the appearance of righteousness.
There is nothing especially compelling about this in market terms. It produces no spectacle, confers no status, and offers no guarantee of success. What it offers is a form of attention, one that loosens the grip of the self, and makes it possible to encounter others without calculation.
Consilium 
Leave a comment