I’m still thinking about Trump’s posting of himself as Jesus. It’s a memorable picture, and there’s still a lot to unpack.
Up until 2025, the association between Trump and Jesus came from supporters who viewed him as supported by Jesus himself.
The guiding idea was that God had blessed and ordained this man to lead the nation. These pictures were considered outrageous by some yet fully relevant and “on point” by supporters.
Since 2016, church leaders who began learning about research on the relationship between regular church attendance and political radicalization found the overwhelming pattern of new data to be overblown. In conversations at the time, many rejected the emerging patterns, saying that researchers were exaggerating — until the growing partisan commitment became undeniable. Some pastors began to address this openly. As the extent of the pattern was revealed in their own churches, the depth of commitment not just to a political party but to this particular person, they wrestled with how to respond.
By 2018, usually through encounters with their own members, pastors became genuinely frightened. “If I say anything against Trump from the pulpit,” some say, “I’ll lose half my congregation.” What pastors described was not a crisis of courage. It was a crisis of spiritual formation. Somewhere, something has gone wrong long before they entered the pulpit.
Will McCorkle’s recent piece in Baptist News Global names one of the architects of that something: Franklin Graham. Professor McCorkle’s argument is direct: Trump’s messiah complex did not emerge from a vacuum. It was cultivated by religious leaders who imparted a theological vocabulary, specifically a prophetic framing, effectively providing the moral cover that made an openly passionate support for Trump possible.
Now Trump, building on that religious affirmation, has posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, openly mocked a sitting pope, and accepted comparisons to a crucified savior. He even reposted a picture of Jesus hugging him. Graham attempted to diffuse Jesus-like image, insisted Trump “didn’t mean to portray himself as Jesus,” then called him the most pro-Christian, pro-life president of his lifetime. On another recent occasion, Paula White, among the boldest in connecting this president to divine ordination, told her religious peers that Trump, like Jesus, was “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused.” These are not incidental statements. They constitute a sustained theological project.
McCorkle makes a great point. But I want to go further, because what we are watching has consequences that extend well beyond Trump and well beyond Christian leaders like Graham and White. What we are watching is the institutional absorption of the church into unquestioned partisan priorities. The vehicle for doing so is through the sanctifying praise of a singular person.
Court Prophets and Wilderness Prophets
The Hebrew prophetic literature offers an ancient and clarifying distinction. There were, in the royal courts of Israel and Judah, two kinds of prophets. The court prophets stood near power, spoke its language, and blessed its wars. They told the king what the king wanted to hear.
And then there were wilderness prophets (like Amos, Micah, Isaiah) who kept deliberate distance from royal favor. Their authority came precisely from that distance. The moment a prophet needed the king more than the king needed the prophet, the prophecy was over. What Franklin Graham has done, for years now, is to position himself firmly among the court prophets — a point made clearly by historian John Fea during Trump’s first presidency.
Franklin has called Trump’s bombing of Iran “God’s will.” He has compared Trump to the biblical Esther, raised up by God “for a time such as this.” We have not seen anything like this in modern American history.
Max Weber developed the concept of charismatic authority: authority derived not from tradition or law but from the magnetic, perceived supernatural qualities of a leader. Weber knew it was the most volatile form of authority. It cannot be encapsulated in stable organizational processes or fully institutionalized. It often cannot survive the death or discrediting of the leader. And here is what concerns me most as a sociologist: Franklin Graham is not simply lending Trump religious legitimacy. He is teaching millions of Christians to locate spiritual authority in a single charismatic political figure by asserting the legitimacy of the sacred as a reflection of raw power to accomplish politically partisan ends.
Will Trumpism persist as a charismatic community? More importantly, will church leaders be among the leaders that legitimate and sanction that community?
Although charismatic authority rests in a person, it is sociologically possible, once that person has passed on, to establish a charismatic community — one that carries forward the zealous intent of the founder. The community points back to the founder as a potent symbol to carry forward their intent, with a combination of loyalty and severity, through commitments characterized by strong emotional intensity.
Will the American church become the charismatic appendage to Tumpism’s political machinery?
The long term consequences are not hard to imagine. In my own writing, I trace how regular church attendance has become an increasingly reliable predictor of conservative political attitudes and oppositional racial attitudes, especially among white and Hispanic Christians. What was once a more complex relationship between faith practice and civic life has flattened. Similarly, the gap between what pastors privately believe and what their pews demand — especially white Christians and Latine Protestants — has grown to a noticeable chasm.
McCorkle draws a pointed historical comparison: Graham will be remembered in the company of politically flattering clergy who offered theological blessing to Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, and Hitler. That statement will make some readers flinch. But those clergymen were not all cynics. These were church leaders who genuinely believed that they were protecting the church by aligning with power. They believed that proximity to authority was the price of influence and influence was how you protected the faithful. History has judged that bargain harshly.
Billy Graham, whatever his considerable failings, eventually expressed regret for his entanglement with Nixon — even though he himself had questionable attitudes (something many Christians refuse to recognize). Even though his father showed some awareness of his being an appendage to power, Franklin Graham and other court prophets have shown no such awareness. And that contrast reflects a systemic problem. When there are no structures of accountability apart from the spheres of political power, no openness to hear from differing voices outside of one’s political circle, these court prophets becomes entrenched.
When court prophets dominate, flattery becomes doctrine.
The danger, I would add, is not only in what court prophets say but in what they have normalized. Their stance is hurting churches across the board. Evangelical giving to local churches dropped 18 percent between 2020 and 2024. It has stabilized somewhat since, but remains far below pre-Trump-era levels. The church is paying a material cost for its political entanglement: in dollars, yes, but more consequentially in the slow erosion of credibility with younger people and with those who might otherwise have been drawn toward communities of genuine faith. (By the way, this broader pattern of decline has me deeply questioning the validity of recent stories touting the “revival” of religion among young men; I’m not so sure, but still thinking about how best to address this.)
From Political Platforms to Spiritually Responsive Persons
So where does this leave pastors who tell me about their anxieties? What about clergy who fear for losing their pulpit? What do they do on Sunday morning?
I do not think the answer is primarily political. Pastors who choose to make their pulpits into platforms for progressive counter-messaging may fall into similar traps of limiting messages to political mobilization. The answer of just avoiding politics and “focusing on the Kingdom of God” is also insufficient, committing a different error. I encourage us to think together about this…after all, our current politics is unlikely to fade soon.
One answer, I think, is a recovery of the prophetic tradition as a theological discipline, not a political one. Prophets spoke truth about power because they were accountable to something larger than power. They knew that once you needed the monarch’s approval to speak, you could no longer speak to the monarch. And approval (or disapproval) from the monarch cannot dictate the extent (or limits) of the message. (A good case study would be to revisit January 2026’s message by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC with Trump in the congregation.)
What the church needs from its leaders is not more statements on social media. It needs pastors willing to invest in the long, slow, costly relational work of orienting their communities toward the formation of spiritually caring and responsive persons — responsive not to news headlines but to the needs of people. These are people whose identity is not derivative of political sentiments, and, especially, who can hold their convictions without needing a charismatic savior to validate them. That work is harder than a sermon series. It requires building an expansive congregational community in partnership with other pastors, staff, and lay leaders to engage in a kind of institutional patience that our current moment, full of flashes and pops of headlines and posturing, makes nearly impossible.
It is tempting to be a court prophet. Proximity to power brings access and prestige. Secular influence and its accompanying gifts become self-affirming. The ability to command larger donations, honorariums, and speaking fees are nice. I’m sure the food is pretty good too. Yet, in terms of formation, the pastoral leaders who will matter most over the years are the ones who refuse the short term gimmicks of flattery. They choose instead the wilderness. Not because it is politically safer. It is not. But because the alternative is to hand the church over entirely to the court, and courts, as history keeps insisting, do not last.
Of course, the church will survive this moment. It will. But the question for us is what kind of church survives, and who will have the discernment to shape it.
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