Our Sunday Anglican liturgy includes Prayers of the People. It’s a chance to pray about our broken world, the church, our concerns, and to make requests. “Let us pray for the Church and the World,” it begins. We always pray for “Donald, our President.” The use of the first name is not a slight. The Book of Common Prayer sees all individuals as equal before God, and so even high leaders are referred to by their first name. When the Prayer leader, usually a deacon, ends each section with “Lord, in your mercy,” I am always eager to respond with the rest of the congregation, “Hear our prayer.”
We learned recently that President Trump was instrumental in bringing Hamas and Israel to an agreement. And that it provided for the exchange of hostages and prisoners. About which I say, “Good for you, Mr. President, good for you. A job well done, Mr. Trump.”
I understand from news reports that this exchange of hostages / prisoners is merely the first step in a process that is to end with a ceasefire. So, I eagerly pray that the following steps unfold as well, and as quickly, as this first one. And as I watched the unbridled joy of families—both Palestinian and Israeli—receiving their loved ones back, I say, again, thank you, Mr. Trump.
It is insufficient, however, to evaluate Mr. Trump’s time in office only by noting things he’s done right. His administration touches on so much more than that. As President he stands for so much more than that. And when we look more broadly and deeply, we easily see serious problems. Some are so serious as to be fatal, not necessarily for Mr. Trump but for vulnerable refugees that are caught up in ICE and Trump’s policy of mass deportations.
Sadly, this may be the point at which some readers will stop reading. Or stop thinking. I pray that isn’t so here. My only reason for writing this is to provide a basis for reasonable conversation and Christian discernment. Christian political philosophy has a noble and ancient legacy, stretching back to the likes of Tertullian, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Kuyper. And by God’s grace may Christ’s church—may we all—resist ideological captivity and seek a way to think and live faithfully under Christ’s Lordship.
I will begin not by raising criticisms myself, but by relying on voices of Christians who have far more expertise and experience in politics than I have. If our goal is honoring the Lord Christ who is the Truth, we need not fear facing difficult issues. And I would argue that the issues raised by them can not, and should not, be ignored by followers of Jesus.
So, let’s begin.
Peter Wehner.
Integrity is a virtue on which good character is built. Other virtues can be admirable but isolated. One can be courageous in the pursuit of injustice. A person can be honest but ungenerous, forgiving but lazy. Al Capone, after all, sponsored a soup kitchen during the Great Depression.
Integrity—whose root word, integer, means wholeness, a thing complete in itself—assimilates other virtues. A person of integrity possesses an inner harmony, a moral coherence. As the philosopher Robert C. Solomon put it: “Integrity is not itself a virtue so much as it is a synthesis of the virtues, working together to form a coherent whole…”
No other president, with the possible exception of Lincoln, was Washington’s equal. But for nearly the entirety of American history, up until a decade ago, Washington set the standard. Presidents had to at least appear to be better than they were, offering the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
No more. Donald Trump’s corruption is borderless, in ways we’ve never quite seen before. But what’s also precedent-shattering is that he doesn’t try to hide it. His depravity is all in the open.
That his supporters celebrate his bad behavior makes this even more discouraging. Many of them find his behavior thrilling, including large swaths of Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, men and women who worship Jesus with their lips while giving priority to Trump and the MAGA movement in their heart. Add to the mix the craven, across-the-board capitulation to Trump by one elite institution after another—law firms and tech giants, universities and entertainment companies, news networks and once-great newspapers.
All of this ramifies through society. Every day, in a thousand different ways, Trump’s corrosive ethic is validated and replicated. Cruelty is the coin of the realm; it’s the way to get ahead. Americans ask themselves, and one another, the inevitable questions: If the president can get away with it, why can’t we? If breaking the rules helps him, why shouldn’t it help us?
The only way out of this wreckage is to rewrite the cultural script, to make excellence in character admired again.
[From “The Virtue of Integrity,” by Peter Wehner in The Atlantic (August 13, 2025).
David Brooks.
Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here? The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations…
Although Trump’s actions across these various spheres may seem like separate policies, they are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.
[ From “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now” in The Atlantic (November 2025)] ()
David French
The Department of Justice is prosecuting a former director of the F.B.I., and it’s doing so not because there is clear evidence of a crime, but because there is clear evidence that the president wants revenge.
Trump’s Truth Social post, in fact, could well be Exhibit A in a motion to dismiss the case. Or it could be one of the first pieces of evidence presented to a jury to show that this case has nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with obeying the orders of the most powerful man in the world.
But it’s even worse than that. Trump’s retribution isn’t just inflicting grave injustice on its innocent victims; it’s hollowing the Justice Department. As decent people resign, they’re replaced with people eager or at least willing to participate in Trump’s partisan inquisition.
When you put it all together, there can be no doubt: Trump’s attack on American justice has taken its next, and most ominous, turn.
“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Those infamous words are the hallmarks of a corrupt state. Trump is now openly mimicking the dictators he admires so much. He has shown Pam Bondi the man, and Bondi’s Department of Justice has manufactured the crime.
[From “Make No Mistake About Where We Are” by David French in The New York Times (Sept. 28, 2025)]
Paul D. Miller
MAGA Christianity is populist, anti-elitist, bottom-up, and fueled by emotion more than ideas. It is driven by charismatic movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, not the old, established denominations. (Southern Baptists may vote for Trump, but, for the most part, they are not manning the barricades and rarely go to his rallies). They use Christian language, cite Bible verses, and sing along with Christian hymns. If you only look on the surface, it can be hard to tell the difference between MAGA religion and historic Christianity. But while MAGA Christianity looks and talks a lot like historic Christianity, it departs from it in important ways.
That makes it all the more important to carefully sift and weigh the movement, to discern if it is truly Christian. MAGA Christianity is a political-religious movement with extraordinary power and appeal—yet it is also a movement with a strong and rising chorus of critics from both within and outside professing Christianity. Though some do, not all critics argue in bad faith, from anti-religious bigotry, or from the progressive left. Some are coming from sincere love for fellow believers, and “faithful are the wounds of a friend,” (Proverbs 27:6).
If we are to judge them by their fruits, then it is fair game to observe that MAGA Christianity is a movement that shouts, “We are on the side of God!” while joking about hating your enemies. It is a movement that couples the Lord’s prayer with images of American military prowess. It is a movement that storms the U.S. Capitol and violently beats up scores of police officers so that they can pause to pray in Jesus’ name in the chamber of the U.S. Senate. It is a movement that invokes biblical language about spiritual warfare to whip up partisan frenzy…
As a political scientist, I fear MAGA Christianity is a movement that holds extraordinary danger for the American republic. But more importantly, as a Christian, I fear that if you are in this movement and feel no discomfort whatsoever, it is a movement that holds extraordinary danger for your immortal soul. To many of those who say, “Lord, Lord,” Jesus replies: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”
[From “Is MAGA Christianity True Christianity?” by Paul D. Miller in Dispatch (October 12, 2025)
These are serious issues and challenges. Lack of character, rhetoric of hate, bullying, name calling, corruption, vengeance, greed, authoritarianism. Mr. Trump has demeaned the office of the Presidency and intentionally undercut the foundations of democracy in America. Those who support Trump will need to take some responsibility for the tidal wave of cruelty, political violence, hateful rhetoric, and unrighteousness sweeping through America society.
One more thing, though there is much more I could say. I have friends who support Trump because they are pro-life and will not vote for a Democrat. I have several problems with that position. Most obviously, you need not vote for an evil man to keep from voting for a Democrat. As well, to make anti-abortion the primary issue is to mistake it for a political rather than the moral-cultural one it actually is. We do not have Scriptural warrant for making the Sixth Commandment primary. And as Mr. Trump has repeatedly proven, there are plenty of means other than abortion to slaughter the innocent.
Christ will soon return, and his Kingdom is forever. And in the meantime, we can be faithful. God is clear about the right way to treat the refugee, the immigrant. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34). We may not be able to stop the wicked cruelty of ICE, with masked officers disappearing people off American streets, but we can find local means to stand with the vulnerable.
The nations and their leaders may rage, expressing hate in violent rhetoric and unleashing violence against the foreigner and the vulnerable, as the Psalmist says, (2:1-6) but the Lord remains King.
Why do the nations conspire,
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and his anointed, saying,
‘Let us burst their bonds asunder,
and cast their cords from us.’
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord has them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’
Photo credit: Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
