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WOE TO YOU WHO DEPRIVE THE POOR OF THEIR RIGHTS: A BATTLE OF
THEOLOGIES IN THE AGE OF TRUMP  
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Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
March 2, 2025
TomDispatch
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_ Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new
attacks on what the Bible calls, “the least of these,” it’s
important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the
past as well as the heroic moral organizing happening now. _

Poor People's Campaign: Mass Rally & Moral Revival. June 23, 2018.
Washington, DC., photo: United Church of Christ/Jessie Palatucci.

 

“There has almost always been an outright hostility that is shown
towards people of the Christian faith,” House Speaker Mike Johnson
said on a podcast
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He was talking with Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana lawmaker and
president of the Family Research Council, about freedom of religion
and the actions of the second Trump administration.

I have to admit that such a statement from this country’s third most
powerful politician and an avowed Christian nationalist almost takes
my breath away. Of _all_ the people facing hostility,
discrimination, and violence now and throughout history, Christians
like Mike Johnson rank low on the list. Still, his comment is
consistent with a disturbing religious trend in the country right now.

As an early act of his second administration, Donald Trump has created
an anti-Christian bias task force
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be chaired by Attorney General Pam Bondi. At the same time, he’s
slashing federal jobs and programs, threatening Medicaid, Head Start,
the Department of Education, affordable housing programs,
accommodations for the disabled, environmental protections, public
health and safety, Social Security, and Medicare, while scapegoating
immigrants and trans kids. It’s particularly ironic that Trump,
Johnson, and the people with them in the top echelons of power are
targeting those that the Bible is most concerned about — children,
the poor, immigrants, the sick and disabled, women, the vulnerable,
and the earth itself. Meanwhile,Elon Musk
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richest man ever to exist, who has built his wealth off exploiting the
poor, goes so far as to call the impoverished “parasites.” After
all, there are more than 2,000 Biblical passages
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speak about protecting the vulnerable, offering good news to the poor,
stewarding God’s creation, and bringing judgment down upon those
with wealth and power who make people suffer.

Pope Francis himself has weighed in on the regressive policies and
posture of the current administration. To America’s bishops
he wrote
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“The true common good is promoted when society and government, with
creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have
affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and
integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable.” Indeed, if
any Christians are under attack right now, it’s those included in
what liberation theologians have called “God’s
preferential option for the poor
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(the very creation for whom God has special love and care) and those
standing up with and for them.

The Pope hasn’t been the only one to challenge the use of religion
in the Trump administration. Since the inauguration, the actions of
Johnson, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and others have been opposed
and decried by people of faith of many persuasions. Remember Episcopal
Bishop Marian Budde
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President Trump to show mercy, especially to immigrants and LGBTQ+
people, at the Inaugural Prayer Service at the Washington National
Cathedral? Since her gentle reminder that the Bible teaches love,
truth, and mercy, she has received regular and credible death threats
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a daily basis, even as people have also flocked
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the Cathedral and other houses of worship in search of moral leaders
willing to stand up to the bullying tactics of Donald Trump, the
richest man on earth Elon Musk, and their cronies.

In response to Trump’s threats of mass detention and deportation,
especially removing “sensitive sites
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status from houses of worship, schools, and hospitals, while
threatening “sanctuary cities
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with a loss of federal funding, 27 religious groups
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sued the Trump administration for infringement of _their_ religious
liberty to honor and worship God by loving their immigrant neighbors.
Kelsi Corkran, a lawyer with the Georgetown University Law
Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection
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lawsuit, said
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plaintiffs joined the suit “because their scripture, teaching, and
traditions offer irrefutable unanimity on their religious obligation
to embrace and serve the refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in
their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.”

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Faith leaders are coming together to support and protect transgender
and nonbinary people now under attack by the Trump administration as
well. My colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses Hernandez-McGavin recently
penned an article for _Religion News Service_
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they affirmed the dignity of LGBTQ+ people, even as Christian
nationalists continue to build their influence and power by damning
LGBTQ+ communities, all while claiming to protect children and
traditional family values. “Gender diversity,” they wrote,

“is a fact of human existence older than Scripture and is thoroughly
attested to in the Bible. Jesus’s teaching about eunuchs in the
Gospel of Matthew makes clear there are human beings who exist outside
of the gender binary from birth, as well as those who live outside the
gender binary ‘for the sake of the kingdom.’ In the story of the
Ethiopian eunuch’s baptism, the Book of Acts lifts up the spiritual
leadership of gender non-conforming people of African descent. In the
Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah, God affirms not only the sanctity but
the spiritual importance of people outside the gender binary,
promising us ‘a name better than sons and daughters.’ …The
Talmud reflects this affirmation of gender diversity, recognizing no
fewer than seven genders
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A BATTLE FOR THE BIBLE IN HISTORY

The battle of theologies taking place right now is anything but a new
phenomenon, even if it’s at an inflection point
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with life-and-death consequences for our democracy, Christianity
itself, and those who are God’s greatest concern. The Christian
nationalism, exceptionalism, and white supremacy ascendant
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Trump 2.0 has evolved from a long genealogy that has enabled an elite
strata of mostly white Christian men to rule society and amass
enormous wealth and power throughout American history.

Such Christians have always anointed themselves with the lie of divine
righteousness, while insisting that they are God’s chosen
representatives on Earth. To maintain this charade, they have
brandished the Bible like a cudgel, bludgeoning poor people, people of
color, the Indigenous, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others with tales of
their supposed sinfulness meant to distract, demean, divide, and
dispossess. Therefore, if we are truly serious about confronting and
countering the influence of such an authoritarian version of
Christianity under Trump, Vance, Johnson, and their associates and
followers, we must learn from how it’s been wielded (and challenged)
in other times in history.

The roots of such idolatry reach back centuries, even before the
founding of this nation, to the conquest of Indigenous lands by
European invaders. In 1493, after Spain first sent its ships to
islands in the Caribbean, Pope Alexander VI issued the Doctrine of
Discovery [[link removed]], a
series of papal bulls granting all newly “discovered” lands to
their Christian conquerors. Those church documents asserted the
supposed “godlessness” of Indigenous peoples, smoothing over the
ruthless colonial campaign of extermination being waged with a veneer
of moral virtue. Centuries later, the idea of “manifest destiny
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same religious underpinnings as the Doctrine of Discovery,
popularizing the belief that white Christians were destined by God to
control and therefore redeem the lands of the West. Manifest destiny
not only valorized the violence of westward expansion but sanctified
and made exceptional the emerging project of American imperialism.
God, the argument went, had chosen this nation to be a beacon of hope,
a city upon a hill for the whole world.

Alongside the dispossession and attempted extermination of Indigenous
peoples, invocations of God and the Bible were used to justify the
enslavement of African peoples and their descendants. Slaveholders
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passages from the book of Ephesians — “slaves obey your earthly
masters
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— and lines from other epistles of the Apostle Paul to claim
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slavery was ordained by God. They ripped out of the pages on the
Exodus from Egypt, huge sections of the prophets, and even Jesus’s
inaugural sermon praising the poor and dispossessed from the Bibles
they gave to their enslaved workers. Those “Slave Bibles
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would serve as evidence of just how dangerous the unadulterated gospel
was to the legitimacy of the slaveholding planter class.

They also twisted theology to serve their political needs by obscuring
the common interests of enslaved Black workers and poor Southern
whites. Readings of the Bible that claimed God had singled out Black
people for slave labor helped the Southern ruling class turn many of
the region’s majority of poor whites into zealous defenders of a
system that relegated them to marginal lands and poverty wages.

After the fall of the Confederacy, the Bible remained core to the new
racialized divide-and-conquer system in the South. Pro-segregationist
preachers, no longer able to use the Bible to defend slavery per se,
turned to stories like the Tower of Babel to claim that God desired
racial segregation and abhorred intermarriage across racial lines. In
1954, Baptist preacher Carey Daniel
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a pamphlet entitled _God the Original Segregationist_ in which he
explained: “When first He separated the black race from the white
and lighter skinned races He did not simply put them in different
parts of town. He did not even put them in different towns or states.
Nay, He did not even put them in adjoining countries.” The pamphlet
was distributed widely by White Citizens’ Councils and sold more
than a million copies.

Parallel to the theological justifications for the system of
segregation that came to be known as Jim Crow, a national theology of
industrial capitalism emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
During the Gilded Age, a prosperity gospel and its theology of
muscular Christianity flourished among the white upper class. Amid the
excesses of the Second Industrial Revolution, they celebrated their
own hard work and moral rectitude and bemoaned the personal failings
of the poor. When the economic bubble finally burst in 1929 with the
Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal
ushered in an unprecedented era of financial regulation and labor
protection, the nation’s corporate class turned once again to the
church to fight back and put a stamp of approval on its free-market
aspirations.

As historian Kevin Kruse writes in _One Nation Under God: How
Corporate America Invented Christian America_
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in the 1930s and 1940s, “corporate titans enlisted conservative
clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in
the phrase ‘freedom under God.’ As the private correspondence and
public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new
ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared
most — not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample
funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and
business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new
evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized
as ‘Christian libertarianism.’”

The phrase “freedom under God” captures the tension at the heart
of the long battle over the Bible in this country in which there have
always been two diametrically opposed visions of freedom: on one side,
the freedom of the vast majority of the people to enjoy the fruits of
their labor and live with dignity and self-determination; on the other
side, the freedom of the wealthy to control society, sow division, and
hoard the planet’s (and in Elon Musk’s case, the galaxy’s)
abundance for themselves. Poor people, disproportionately poor people
of color, have always been on the front lines of this battle, as both
canaries in the coal mine and prophetic leaders. Think of it this way
in the age of Trump: As their lives go, so goes the nation.

_ORDO AMORIS_ AND OTHER THEOLOGIES OF THE DAY

This age-old debate is playing out in JD Vance’s recent statement
about “_ordo amoris_” (or “rightly-ordered love
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Weighing in on cutting both domestic and global aid as well as
scapegoating immigrants, the vice president wrote
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social media, “You love your family, and then you love your
neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your
fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can
focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Pope Francis offered a fitting rebuttal to Vance’s statement and the
actions of the second Trump administration by summing up its deeply
heretical nature and echoing a historic prophetic tradition of
increasing importance again today. In his letter to the American
bishops, urging them to reject Vance’s theology of isolationism and
egotism, Pope Francis wrote
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“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that
little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words:
the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with
some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with
dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all,
especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and
vocation. The true _ordo amoris_ that must be promoted is that which
we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good
Samaritan’ (cf. _Lk_ 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love
that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

As this statement from the Pope reminds us, history is replete with
examples of people from many religions who have grounded their
struggles for justice in the holy word and the spirit of God, not just
extremists trying to claim and justify their lust for power and
avarice for wealth. Abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers,
student protestors, civil rights leaders, and various representatives
of poor and oppressed people have insisted that divinity cannot be
reduced to private matters of the soul and salvation. They have
affirmed that truth, love, and justice, starting with the most
vulnerable and marginalized, are what matter the most to God. They
have insisted that the worship of God must be concerned with the
building of a society in which all life is cared for and treated with
dignity. In every previous era, there were courageous people for whom
protest and public action were a form of prayer, even as the religious
leaders and institutions of their day hid behind sanctuary walls —
walls currently being torn down again to release forces devastating to
the most vulnerable among us and to the planet itself.

Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new attacks
daily on what the Bible calls, “the least of these,” it’s
important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the
past as well as the heroic, if often unnoticed, moral organizing
happening now. I return to my colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses
Hernandez-McGavin who sum up
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sentiment of many people of faith in our society today: “God’s
love and truth are alive whether elected officials seek to legislate
them out of existence or not. God’s Word continues to call for
justice and mercy for all people regardless of the distortions of the
Word by religious and political leaders obsessed with the worship of
their own power. They are not God. And God will not, and cannot, be
stopped.“

As they conclude, offering a message of hope and encouragement in
these dark and dangerous days: “God’s liberating action will break
through in this world through the steadfast work and witness of people
of goodwill who are beholden to a higher law, who refuse to comply
with unjust executive orders, who continue to defend the vulnerable
against abuses of the powerful in courtrooms and school buildings and
hospitals and in the streets across the country.”

The question then is: In the second age of Donald Trump, which side
will you choose?

_LIZ THEOHARIS, a TomDispatch regular
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ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos
Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice
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Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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forthcoming book You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take:
Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty
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 Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor
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Follow her on BlueSky at @liztheo
[[link removed]]haris.kairoscenter.org._

_Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in October 2001 as an informal
listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global
media to a select group of friends and colleagues. In November 2002,
it gained its name and, as a project of the Nation Institute (now the
Type Media Center), became a web-based publication aimed at providing
“a regular antidote to the mainstream media.”_

* Poor People's Campaign
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* Christianity
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* faith leaders
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* Christian right
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* poverty
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* Pope Francis
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