Before he depicted himself as Jesus Christ healing the sick, Donald Trump assailed Pope Leo XIV as “weak” and told him to “get his act together.” Months earlier, the White House posted an AI-generated image of Trump as the head of the Catholic church before the president declared, “I’d like to be pope.”
Trump’s latest posts were immediately met with a wave of criticism from Christian allies who have thus far aligned with the president’s volatile agenda. The comments were swift and explicit: “grotesquely wrong,” “dangerous,” “rank blasphemy.”
But the already-fragile right-wing Christian alliance among Catholics and evangelicals has been gradually fracturing over Trump’s increasing hostility towards Catholic leadership and the administration’s characterization of war with Iran as divinely ordained.
“This moment tests more than just the Catholic-evangelical alliance,” said Landon Schnabel, an associate professor of sociology at Cornell University studying religion and social change. “For many religious Americans, faith leads and politics follows — their beliefs and values shape their political positions.
“But when a president posts himself as Christ,” said Schnabel, “he asks believers to start with political loyalty and backfill the theology.” In the face of conflicting commitments to religious convictions and political loyalties, “something has to give,” he said.
Trump and his allies have shaped a Christian nationalist movement — driven by a belief that Christianity is and should be embedded in all aspects of law and society — into a critical voting bloc, and evangelical groups spent millions of dollars campaigning for him.
The movement has spent decades gaining influence in media and in federal, state and local governments while right-wing special interest groups turned anti-abortion voters into a powerful GOP base that has been critical to putting Trump in the White House twice.
Trump administration officials and federal agencies are now increasingly using their official government social media accounts to share explicitly religious messages and declare Jesus the nation’s savior — drawing warnings from First Amendment advocates fearing a critical breach of the church-and-state firewall.
But where conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians may have agreed on a whole-of-government approach to ending abortion, a decades-in-the-making political project that radically reshaped the federal judiciary and overturned Roe v Wade at the Supreme Court, the president is forcing his supporters to confront deeper religious questions framed as politics.
Trump’s latest posts are “neither new nor surprising,” according to Rev. Dr. Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America.
“These latest displays are simply a continuation of that pattern,” she told The Independent. “This abhorrent mockery of our Savior reflects the core of Christian nationalism, twisting sacred imagery to serve domination rather than liberation. Jesus proclaimed a radically different vision: a counter-empire rooted in justice, compassion and love, standing in direct opposition to the powers of his time.”
A majority of Republicans — roughly 56 percent — qualify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers, according to recent nationwide polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. Overall, roughly one-third of Americans could be considered adherents or sympathizers.
“For another year, our survey reveals the continued hold that Christian nationalism has on the Republican Party and its white evangelical base,” according to PRRI president Robert P. Jones. “While Americans overall reject this worldview by a margin of two to one, its dominance among these groups amplify it into an ongoing threat to our pluralistic democracy.”
That dominance does not appear to be going anywhere.
Despite the backlash to Trump’s post, many influential evangelical figures have not publicly weighed in at all, declined to comment, or withdrew their previous criticism after the president incredulously called the AI-generated picture of him in a white robe “me as a doctor.”
Other leading evangelical and Christian nationalist figures have opened the door for Trump to consider the episode a teachable moment.
Pastor Robert Jeffress, a longtime religious adviser to Trump who leads First Baptist Church in Dallas, declined to comment to Religious News Service about the AI-generated image.
But he defended Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo, saying there was “no need” for Trump to apologize to the pontiff. First Baptist did not return The Independent’s request for comment.
John Yep, the president of Trump-aligned group Catholics for Catholics, called the president’s post “as dangerous as it is scandalous to all Christians.”
But in the same statement, Yep also condemned what he characterized as a “well-organized attempt by the left to sever the Catholic base from the Republican Party” and swiped at “left-leaning ‘Catholics in name only’” who “are determined to swing the Catholic vote back in the other direction.”
“Catholic patriots ought to be prudently aware of who is behind these provocations,” according to Yep.
Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, told Fox News that the pope should “stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church.”
“And let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy,” he said Monday. “When they are in conflict, they are in conflict. I don’t worry about it too much.”
Tennessee state Rep. Jeremy Faison, chair of the state’s House GOP, wrote that he “never imagined we’d reach a point where politicians would compare themselves to the Savior.”
“Regardless of your opinion on the president, that post is wrong,” he wrote on X.
After Trump claimed the image depicted him “as a doctor,” Faison deleted his post.
Asked why he took it down, Faison said he found the president’s answer “plausible.”
Bonnie Kristian, a staff editor at the Billy Graham-founded evangelical Christian media magazine Christianity Today, wrote that Trump is “grotesquely wrong to elevate himself to the level of Christ and claim for himself authority over Christ’s church.”
“The elevation in that image is not debatable,” she wrote. “It’s not generic self-aggrandizement. It’s not a classic political cartoon. It’s not, as Trump implausibly claimed, ‘me as a doctor, making people better.’”
Former Southern Baptist Convention president Bart Barber said he typically takes “every effort” to avoid criticizing the president but implored him “not to do things like this.”
“Forget the politics. Forget the backlash or affirmations it generated,” Barber wrote. “Someday you will stand before God and will have to defend this. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
Pastor Doug Wilson, a leading figure in the Christian nationalist movement, said he was “very grateful to see how many conservative Christians immediately denounced the blasphemous” image of Trump as a Christ-like figure.
But it was “accidental blasphemy,” he told The Washington Examiner. “He has to do better either way.”
Trump’s DOJ to toss Jan 6 convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers
Joe Rogan loses it over Trump’s claim AI-picture was him as a doctor not Jesus
Dems file bill to push for use of 25th Amendment to remove Trump despite long odds
Democrats seek to overturn Trump's new rules for student loan forgiveness
Federal charges filed against man shot by ICE agents during raid
JD Vance weighs in after Trump removes ‘Jesus’ Truth Social post
