Blaming 'Paganism' for Trump's Violence Fails to Reckon with Christian History
In a recent New York Times op-ed called “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” journalist and filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse highlights the apparent contradiction between the Trump administration’s violent “might makes right” mentality and Christian ethics that prioritize protecting the weak and oppressed. Woodhouse tells us that before Christianity “civilized” the West, Greeks and Romans—i.e., “pagans”—wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with harming people they had enslaved or allowing social outcasts to die. The Trump administration, in this portrayal, acts like pre-Christian and non-Christian people: brutish, unapologetic, savage—pagan.
This portrayal of the civilizing transformation of human morals as dependent on the spread of Christianity is a tale as old as time—but it just isn’t accurate. Christians have often been, and still are, involved in the forceful oppression of people across the globe; a fact that many don’t see as an abdication of Christian values, but rather its fulfillment. Alongside this reality, claiming that Christians universalized the moral message of the Jewish God, or civilized Greeks and Romans who enslaved, murdered, and raped those they conquered, furthers age-old narratives of Christian supremacy.
As scholars of religion (on RD and elsewhere) have been screaming from the mountaintops for years, religion is what people do; there’s no monolithic “Christianity” that we can point to that transformed the world. The narrative of a single, essential, universal Christianity is itself a myth, often deployed by Christians hoping to absolve Christianity of any wrongdoing, or by those in power seeking to enforce a specific “orthodoxy.” Christian proximity to, and exploitation of, power stretches from its origins to today. Other Christians may disagree vehemently, but that doesn’t mean they’re “doing Christianity wrong.”
We’ve seen this recently, when—echoing Trump’s first-term Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—Speaker of the House Mike Johnson evoked Romans 13—a famous passage from the Apostle Paul that encouraged his Roman audience to be subject to the imperial government. By claiming that immigrants are “expected to assimilate” and that “borders and walls are biblical,” Johnson wasn’t being un-Christian as so many have claimed; rather, he was enacting one of many strands of Christian thought and practice that already has a long history.
Christians in political power have often not sought to end oppression of the weak, but instead to legalize and justify Christian supremacy. The famous North African theologian Augustine, in his City of God, argued that empire was necessary and permitted by God so as to keep order until the end times. Laws enacted in the late Roman Empire by Christian emperors like Theodosius and Justinian restricted non-Christians and anyone else considered “unorthodox” from making wills, inheriting property, or seeking justice in court—unless they became a Christian. Christian Roman elites sought to do exactly what the Trump administration aims to do: urge cultural and religious assimilation, demonize perceived outsiders, and make a flourishing life impossible for those they deem un-Christian.
To claim that pre-Christian Greeks or Romans would have been bewildered by Christians telling them not to abuse enslaved persons, for example, overlooks important historical realities. Christians didn’t become abolitionists overnight, and most Christians were, in fact, deeply complicit in the perpetuation of slavery for centuries without seeing it as antithetical to Christian morality. Christian Roman emperors like Constantine passed laws allowing, for example, enslavers to murder their enslaved persons with impunity if they were abusing them in an attempt to improve their behavior.
If MAGA Christians are deemed heretics and treated as though they exist outside of the religious tradition, it becomes easier to dismiss their Christianities and overlook how they build their religious justifications or practices on a long, variegated, and (perhaps most importantly) shared Christian history.
Moving forward will likely require a reckoning with the racist and violent Christian histories that made our current political moment possible.
https://religiondispatches.org/2026/02/1...an-history
In a recent New York Times op-ed called “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” journalist and filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse highlights the apparent contradiction between the Trump administration’s violent “might makes right” mentality and Christian ethics that prioritize protecting the weak and oppressed. Woodhouse tells us that before Christianity “civilized” the West, Greeks and Romans—i.e., “pagans”—wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with harming people they had enslaved or allowing social outcasts to die. The Trump administration, in this portrayal, acts like pre-Christian and non-Christian people: brutish, unapologetic, savage—pagan.
This portrayal of the civilizing transformation of human morals as dependent on the spread of Christianity is a tale as old as time—but it just isn’t accurate. Christians have often been, and still are, involved in the forceful oppression of people across the globe; a fact that many don’t see as an abdication of Christian values, but rather its fulfillment. Alongside this reality, claiming that Christians universalized the moral message of the Jewish God, or civilized Greeks and Romans who enslaved, murdered, and raped those they conquered, furthers age-old narratives of Christian supremacy.
As scholars of religion (on RD and elsewhere) have been screaming from the mountaintops for years, religion is what people do; there’s no monolithic “Christianity” that we can point to that transformed the world. The narrative of a single, essential, universal Christianity is itself a myth, often deployed by Christians hoping to absolve Christianity of any wrongdoing, or by those in power seeking to enforce a specific “orthodoxy.” Christian proximity to, and exploitation of, power stretches from its origins to today. Other Christians may disagree vehemently, but that doesn’t mean they’re “doing Christianity wrong.”
We’ve seen this recently, when—echoing Trump’s first-term Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—Speaker of the House Mike Johnson evoked Romans 13—a famous passage from the Apostle Paul that encouraged his Roman audience to be subject to the imperial government. By claiming that immigrants are “expected to assimilate” and that “borders and walls are biblical,” Johnson wasn’t being un-Christian as so many have claimed; rather, he was enacting one of many strands of Christian thought and practice that already has a long history.
Christians in political power have often not sought to end oppression of the weak, but instead to legalize and justify Christian supremacy. The famous North African theologian Augustine, in his City of God, argued that empire was necessary and permitted by God so as to keep order until the end times. Laws enacted in the late Roman Empire by Christian emperors like Theodosius and Justinian restricted non-Christians and anyone else considered “unorthodox” from making wills, inheriting property, or seeking justice in court—unless they became a Christian. Christian Roman elites sought to do exactly what the Trump administration aims to do: urge cultural and religious assimilation, demonize perceived outsiders, and make a flourishing life impossible for those they deem un-Christian.
To claim that pre-Christian Greeks or Romans would have been bewildered by Christians telling them not to abuse enslaved persons, for example, overlooks important historical realities. Christians didn’t become abolitionists overnight, and most Christians were, in fact, deeply complicit in the perpetuation of slavery for centuries without seeing it as antithetical to Christian morality. Christian Roman emperors like Constantine passed laws allowing, for example, enslavers to murder their enslaved persons with impunity if they were abusing them in an attempt to improve their behavior.
If MAGA Christians are deemed heretics and treated as though they exist outside of the religious tradition, it becomes easier to dismiss their Christianities and overlook how they build their religious justifications or practices on a long, variegated, and (perhaps most importantly) shared Christian history.
Moving forward will likely require a reckoning with the racist and violent Christian histories that made our current political moment possible.
https://religiondispatches.org/2026/02/1...an-history
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
