By Russell Moore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the past few weeks, the president has posted\u00a0an Easter message\u00a0that used profanity and threatened civilizational genocide, has\u00a0issued threats\u00a0to the pope, and has\u00a0posted an AI-generated image\u00a0of himself as Jesus. (He\u00a0now says\u00a0he was portraying himself as a doctor.) After all this, even some of the president\u2019s supporters feel humiliated and angry. I think it\u2019s worth asking what exactly is coming to light in this moment and whether it could disrupt a means-to-an-end cultural Christianity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For years, some evangelicals\u00a0have told us\u00a0Donald Trump might be the disruptor we need to bring us back to Jesus. For the first time, I think they might be right\u2014just not in the way they thought. Maybe \u201cTrump AI Jesus\u201d is what we\u2019ve been waiting for to show us what we\u2019ve become. And oddly, that just might be a point of hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After all, the now-deleted Truth Social post was not some break from the usual pattern. Just two weeks before, the senior adviser of the White House Faith Office\u00a0compared\u00a0the president to Jesus Christ, with specific references to his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. If that\u2019s not blasphemy, the word has no meaning. But her comments were met with applause in the East Room and yawns most other places. A week or so before that, the president\u00a0posted\u00a0images of his proposed presidential library in Miami, including a gold statue of himself pictured before a crowd of attendees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the Trump-as-Jesus (excuse me, as Florence Nightingale) post was so tawdry and public that it was humiliating. The humiliation it caused was not about Trump. Who did not already know his high view of himself? It was about us: The president is so confident in evangelical and white Catholic support that he is willing to stand on Fifth Avenue and point the metaphorical gun at the first commandment, confident he will not lose any support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many times over the past decade, I\u2019ve quoted\u00a0an editorial in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>, published shortly after the 2016 presidential election, that explains American evangelicalism to a secular British audience. \u201cA religion that is responsive to the pressures of the market will end up profoundly fractured, with each denomination finding most hateful to God the sins that least tempt its members, while those sins that are most popular become redefined and even sanctified,\u201d the editors wrote. \u201cIn the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two thousand years of Christian history should have taught us the church needs to be both an institution and a movement, or else it becomes unmoored. During the Reformation, institutionalization was the problem. The church\u2019s authority was so unquestioned it could use people\u2019s fear of pain in purgatory to enrich itself with the selling of indulgences. That problem could not be corrected from the inside\u2014it needed some theses nailed to the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need reformations and revivals to keep the church from becoming just one more institution. But we need institutions to keep the church from becoming an entrepreneurial populist mob tossed to and fro by the passions of the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the problem is ossified institutionalism, only an outsider\u2014a Martin Luther or a Roger Williams\u2014can address the problem, because those on the outside cannot be bought with position or power. But when the problem is market-driven populism, the opposite is sometimes the case: We need an institution to call out our wrongs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n