In keeping with a theme I’ve touched on plenty of times before, modern Christianity barely resembles what Jesus actually taught. And lately, it’s become even clearer that America has perfected one of its oldest traditions — dressing up hatred in holy language. Once again, we’re seeing people use scripture like a shield, twisting “God’s will” into an excuse for cruelty and racism.
This is exactly why I keep my distance from the label Christian. The word doesn’t mean what it used to — at least not in the public sense. It’s been hijacked by the loudest, angriest voices, the ones who seem to worship resentment more than love. To call myself a Christian these days feels like silently agreeing with all that noise. So I don’t. I’d rather call myself spiritual — not in the vague, trend-chasing way, but in the sense of believing there are timeless moral truths that no single religion owns. The ideas we associate with Jesus — compassion, humility, unity — predated him by hundreds of years. You can find them in Buddhism and countless other ancient paths. They are universal truths. “Spiritual” might sound broad, but at least it’s free from the tribalism that’s hollowed out so many organized faiths.
And then there’s the political side of all this. The rise of Trumpism didn’t invent religious hypocrisy, it just turned the volume up. The playbook is painfully familiar: rally a base, name a scapegoat, and wrap the whole thing in talk of “purity” and “God’s plan.” We’ve seen this before in history, and the similarities aren’t subtle. What’s most disturbing is how easily parts of American Christianity have embraced it. Persecuting outsiders has somehow become a point of pride, a sign of “faith.” A religion that once preached love for the stranger now cheers when that stranger is driven away. All from a religion that advocates and sees others as neighbors/brothers. Did they all purchase redacted versions of the bible? No, this all again an incredibly toxic idea within Christianity that as long as you’ve accepted Jesus as your savior, you have free license to think and do anything you want, despite the clear-cut guidelines established by Jesus they claim to be faithful to
What’s happening now isn’t some shocking break from our past, it’s the same story playing out with new names and faces. During the civil rights era, you had white Americans proudly marching under banners claiming segregation was “God’s will.” Go back even further, and that same twisted logic fueled the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the theft of their land, and the self-righteous myth we dressed up as “Manifest Destiny.” From the Puritans onward, America has had a bad habit of mistaking “God’s favor” for permission to dominate.
It’s a long, ugly tradition, what I would call ugly or simply unfaithful Christianity. A bastardization of the faith that confuses cruelty for conviction and power for piety. You can still see it today: militarized police tearing families apart in the middle of the night, brown-skinned men and women being punished simply for existing in the wrong place, under the wrong flag. It’s the same nightmare we’ve seen before, just dressed in modern clothes. And somehow, there are still people sitting in pews, watching it all unfold, whispering to themselves, “This is what Jesus would have wanted.” The same man who advocated for unity and oneness.
The above video was posted by Secretary Kristi Noem not to horrify her followers, a normal reaction, but to delight them. What ethical people would regard as disgusting, she offered as a source of pride for her followers. A glimpse into a moral universe where cruelty masquerades as strength.
So much for “Never Again.” That phrase, once a vow to never repeat one of humanity’s darkest mistakes, feels emptier every year as the same patterns keep showing up right in front of us. This, more than anything, is why I can’t call myself a Christian anymore due to what it now includes under its umbrella. Jesus talked about love, compassion, unity, but mainstream Christianity has become the exact opposite of what he taught. Jesus also taught abandoning labels as objectively divide us into separate groups when we are all in fact one.
The Christians preaching hate and discrimination have turned into the worst possible ambassadors of their faith. They’re bad salesmen pushing a product nobody understandably wants. If their God really reflects the small-minded, vengeful image they project, then any person with a working moral compass would be right to steer clear. Who would want to worship a God whose followers seem obsessed with dividing people and blessing their hatred with holy language?
And yet, here we are. This is where so much of modern Christianity has ended up — in a moral dead-end built on self-righteousness and fear. The loudest voices are the ones selling intolerance, plastering it on every billboard and calling it faith. Meanwhile, the small minority — the ones actually trying to live out Jesus’ teachings of love and humility, get drowned out by the noise. They exist quietly on the edges of their own religion, overlooked by a culture that’s too busy mistaking cruelty for holiness.
A recent social media example of a woman proudly bragging about how people who need financial help would no longer be getting government assistance to help pay for food, and as expected she had Jesus crosses as her earrings. So yes, this person is happy with taking away sustenance from desperate people despite Jesus explicitly instructing his followers to help them desperate. This is par for the course in modern Christianity. We see this all the time. It’s not uncommon to see examples on social media of people spewing hateful rhetoric and then looking at their profiles and seeing “Jesus is my lord, savior, or king” somewhere in there. I have no idea how these people juggle these two contrasting views but in their minds being hateful is totally compatible with calling themselves Christians.
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