Donald Trump: The Most Anti-Christian President in American History?
The receipts don’t lie — and evangelical silence is deafening
Let us establish something at the outset that corporate media has been remarkably reluctant to state plainly.
Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry is well documented. From his December 2015 Muslim ban announcement—litigated all the way to a Supreme Court that ultimately allowed a version of it to stand—to his grotesquely ignorant claim that “Islam hates us,” to his reckless and demonstrably false assertion that Muslims in New Jersey “celebrated on 9/11,” his contempt for Islam and Muslims has never been ambiguous.
Trump’s antisemitism is equally well documented. He called Nazis “very fine people” in Charlottesville. He said he only wants Jewish people counting his money. He dined with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. The record is clear.
But there is a third religious community whose systematic dehumanization under Trump has gone almost entirely unreported. And that community is Christians.
Not Christian nationalists. Not white Evangelicals performing political theater in the name of a faith whose teachings they have largely abandoned. I mean Christians—the actual global body of believers whose lives, churches, communities, and ability to worship in peace are being actively destroyed by Donald Trump’s policies.
As a legal scholar and human rights lawyer who has studied the intersection of policy, power, and religious freedom, I am prepared to make the following argument with full evidentiary support: Donald Trump may be the most anti-Christian president the United States has ever had.
Let’s Address This.
The Performative Christianity Objection — And Why It Doesn’t Hold
Before I present the evidence, let me address the inevitable deflection. I’m not here to argue that because of Trump’s moral failings, he’s anti-Christian. That’s already well documented and even his staunchest allies acknowledge his hypocrisy.
Yes, Trump cannot cite a single Bible verse from memory. Yes, he referred to “Two Corinthians” instead of the properly cited Second Corinthians. Yes, he held a Bible upside down as a prop while his administration tear-gassed peaceful American citizens who happened to be standing in his path. Yes, he preaches morality while his documented history includes affairs with adult film performers, cheating on every one of his wives, and sexually assaulting at least 27 women, that we know of. Yes, he claims to protect children while appearing in the still-illegally-withheld Epstein files more than one million times. And yes, he claims to fight for working Americans while having pardoned dozens of fraudsters who stole billions from those same working people, and while being a 34X convicted felon for fraud, himself.
White evangelical supporters will wave all of this away with the theological contortion that God sends “a perfect message through an imperfect vessel.” For the record, that’s an insufferably weak argument, and moreover the word “imperfect” in that construction is doing more heavy lifting than Hercules himself could handle.
But again, I am not primarily arguing about Trump’s personal hypocrisy. What I am documenting is something far more consequential: deliberate policy choices that destroy the lives, communities, churches, and physical safety of Christians around the world.
As scholars like Tim Whitaker have rightly noted, the loyalty of white Christian nationalists to Trump derives not from the teachings of Jesus Christ or the Christian faith, but from Christian nationalism and white supremacy — a political ideology that has merely borrowed the aesthetic of Christianity while gutting its moral substance. That distinction matters enormously for what follows.
The Evidence: Trump’s War on Christians
1. Bombing Lebanon — Where One Third of the Population Is Christian
Trump continues to fund and support Israeli military operations in Lebanon, where approximately 33% of the population is Christian. The human cost of those operations has fallen heavily on Christian communities.
More chillingly, the New York Times has reported that Israeli military officials have been privately urging Christian and Druze communities in southern Lebanon to force out Shiite Muslim residents sheltering among them — with the implicit threat that failure to do so would result in those Christian communities being targeted as well. Human rights organizations have condemned this approach as ethnic cleansing. Trump has said nothing. His funding has not wavered, even as attacks continue.
Christian News reports:
Israeli troops have been filmed destroying solar panels in the same Christian village in southern Lebanon, where an IDF (Israel Defence Force) soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus earlier this month. The soldiers were seen destroying the panels with diggers in Debel on Saturday night. It’s reported that there has also been wider damage to homes, roads, an industrial vehicle and olive trees.
These are not isolated anti-Christian attacks, they’re systemic and organized.
2. Funding the Violent Displacement of Christians From the West Bank
Earlier this month The Guardian reported:
The Taybeh [Christian] community has survived crusaders and the Ottoman and British empires, but the latest attacks leave its future in question. Over the past year, the pressure has been turned up further. In July last year, settlers set fire to the grounds of the fifth–century Byzantine church, St Peter’s. Since then, bands of hilltop youth have raided the town four times, setting fire to cars, slashing tires and smashing windows. In the West Bank, the Christian population has shrunk from 5% of the total population in 1967 to roughly 1% today, about 45,000 people. The fierce religious nationalism that the Israeli government has cultivated in recent years has largely been directed at Palestinian Muslims but there has been a rising tide of anti-Christian incidents. The Religious Freedom Data Center (RFDC), an Israeli-run organisation that documents such incidents in Jerusalem, recorded a 65% rise in cases of harassment, many of them involving spitting on Christians.
Trump’s unconditional financial and diplomatic support for Israeli settlement expansion is directly funding the appropriation of land belonging to Palestinian Christians—some of the oldest Christian communities on Earth, with roots in the Holy Land predating nearly every Western Christian denomination by more than a millennium. These are not abstractions. These are families losing their land, their homes, and their ability to remain in the birthplace of their faith. Trump funds it. Evangelical America largely applauds.
3. Bombing Gaza — Hitting Christian Churches
Last July the Israeli government used American taxpayer funded bombs to destroy the only Catholic church in Gaza, killing three Palestinian Christians. Pope Leo reissued a painful appeal:
I renew my appeal to the international community to observe humanitarian law and to respect the obligation to protect civilians, as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force and the forced displacement of the population. I have profound sorrow for the Israeli army’s attack on the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City. I pray for the victims: Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad and Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud, and I am particularly close to their families and to all the parishioners. Sadly, this act adds to the continuous military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza.
Sadly, the Pope’s appeal fell on deaf ears as persecution of Christians in Gaza and the West Bank—at the hands of the Israeli military—continues unabated. All with Trump continuing to fund these atrocities.
4. Bombing Nigeria — Hitting Christian Areas
As I’ve previously written, Trump’s contempt for Nigerian Christians is palpable. While falsely claiming Nigerian Christians are suffering genocide as an excuse to bomb Nigeria, Trump directed Secretary of State Rubio to specifically ban Nigerians from seeking asylum in the United States. Meanwhile, Nigerian Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris Malagi declared:
Nigeria has a history of violent extremism that has created tension for us in the country, but I also want to point out that mostly they don’t discriminate between who is a Muslim or who is a Christian. Christian communities and Muslim communities have been attacked by these extremists. [He added that] claims Christians are being specifically targeted reflect a “lack of proper understanding of the diversity and complexity of the situation that we have in Nigeria”.
Still, that did not prevent Trump from bombing Nigeria, destroying farmland, and having nothing meaningful to show as a positive result. Instead, the same Nigerian Christians he falsely claims are suffering genocide are banned from seeking asylum in the United States.
5. Holding HIV/AIDS Medicine Hostage From a 98% Christian Nation
Zambia is 98% Christian. It is also one of the nations hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS crisis, dependent on USAID-funded antiretroviral medication to keep hundreds of thousands of patients alive. The New York Times and Esquire Magazine report that Donald Trump set April 30 as a deadline for the Zambian Government to accept Trump's new health funding agreement and maintain access to critical AIDS medications Zambians need to live. The new agreement also gives the United States expanded access to its precious mineral resources like copper, lithium, and cobalt. Last year the Trump regime already cut access to HIV AIDS medications and Zambians are already suffering as a result of that change. Now, Trump is further extorting the Zambian government to give up more control over its precious mineral deposits, or let its citizens die due to lack of vital AIDS medications.
Let us be precise about what this is: the United States is withholding life-saving medicine from a nearly entirely Christian nation and allowing people to die unless that nation surrenders its natural resources. This is not foreign policy. It is extortion. It is modern day colonizer mentality. And the victims are overwhelmingly Christian.
6. Threatening the Pope
Donald Trump has threatened the leader of the Roman Catholic Church—the spiritual head of 1.4 billion Christians worldwide.
When an internet troll surfaced a tweet that Pope Leo had retweeted in 2018—a tweet condemning Trump’s policy of caging migrant children at the border—Trump replied publicly: “Not good!!!”
Let us be clear about what was actually “not good” in that exchange. Caging children is not good. A moral leader condemning the caging of children is precisely what moral leadership looks like. Pope Leo’s position was not a political act. It was a Christian one—consistent with a papacy that has also condemned the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize a Palestinian state, spoken words of solidarity to the people of Lebanon using the Islamic greeting Asalamu Alaikum as Israeli bombs fell, and steadfastly refused to respond to Trump’s aggressive provocations with anything other than dignified silence.
The Vatican has since reported that the Pentagon militarily threatened the Pope for his criticism of Donald Trump.
The sitting President of the United States directed military threats against the head of the global Catholic Church. For condemning the caging of children.
White evangelical America has been largely silent.
7. Blocking Latino Christians From Asylum
Approximately 95% of Latin American asylum seekers are Christian—many of them fleeing gang violence, political persecution, and the very instability that decades of American foreign policy have helped produce. Trump’s systematic dismantling of the asylum system, his weaponization of immigration enforcement, and his dehumanization of Latino migrants is, by any demographic accounting, an assault on one of the largest and fastest-growing Christian populations in the Western hemisphere.
These are not criminals being kept out. These are, overwhelmingly, Christian families seeking the same refuge that the faith they practice commands nations to offer. And meanwhile, the DHS itself admits that up to 97.4% of the immigrants it has illegally rounded up have no criminal record and more than 90% are Latino and ostensibly Christian. Still, the Trump regime has zero regard for the persecution these Christians face—and instead is doubling down by building concentration camps.
Christian Nationalism Is Not Christianity
I want to make a distinction that is both theologically and politically essential.
The white evangelical movement that has attached itself to Trump with near-cultlike devotion is not, in any meaningful doctrinal sense, practicing the Christianity of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ healed the sick without demanding payment. He fed the hungry without means testing. He embraced the poor, the destitute, and the despised. He reserved his most withering contempt not for sinners but for the powerful and self-righteous who used religion to justify their own comfort and condemn everyone else.
By every measure of the actual teachings of Jesus Christ, Donald Trump’s policies are an affront to Christianity—not a fulfillment of it.
What white Christian nationalism offers is not Christianity. It is a political identity that has borrowed Christianity’s iconography while replacing its moral core with the worship of power, wealth, whiteness, and nationalist dominance. It is, in the most precise theological sense, idolatry—and the idol being worshipped is Donald Trump.
The Christians in Lebanon, Zambia, Nigeria, the West Bank, and Latin America—the ones whose lives are being directly destroyed by Trump’s policies—are not abstractions in a culture war. They are the actual global body of Christian believers. Sadly, none of them enjoy the complexion for protection, to quote Paul Mooney. And their suffering does not register in the white evangelical political imagination because Christian nationalism was never actually about Christianity. It was always about power.
Do Not Let the Culture War Distract You From the Fascism
Imagine being the person who watches Donald Trump bomb and kill Black and brown Christians in three different continents—and yet pretend his cause is noble. That person is a Christian nationalist, and who Trump hides behind to mask his hatred and contempt for Christianity and Christians. But to be sure, this argument—that Trump is the most anti-Christian president in American history—while true, documentable, and important, is not enough. Because the goal is not to win a theological argument.
The goal is to stop fascism.
Donald Trump is not a Christian president. He is not a defender of Christian values. He is a fascist who has successfully weaponized Christian identity as a tool of political control—and the Christians paying the highest price for that weaponization are the ones his supporters never think about. My ask of you is to see through the culture war. Name the fascism. And organize—across every line that divides us—to end it.
Because that is, as it happens, exactly what Jesus would do.
Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, religious freedom, and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.
It isn't coincidence that Trump uses religion as a tool. Other abusers use control as a tool as well--cult leaders, sexual abusers, scamsters in general. It's your identity group, it's "our little secret", only I understand you, don't talk to anyone but me. Isolation is so important to the abuser.
All very dangerous.
What an excellent article, Qasim.
None of so called Christians want to let go of their Great White Hope Dope. He's been the way in. It can be continued with Vassilating Vance. Complete dominance of Church and State. No diversity.
Lebanonese Christians aren't white, so they could care less. Control is the bottom line. Fanatics are a sickness within any religion.