The fundamental question, therefore, is not whether Trump is a good or a bad president. The deeper question cuts further: what vision of humanity does Donald Trump embody, and how does that vision measure up against the Christian understanding of what it means to be human?
The Gospel does not weigh political power by election results, economic indicators or the sheer ability to impose one's will. It asks sharper questions: How does a person handle the truth? How does he wield power? How does he treat the weak? How does he speak of strangers? How does he treat his opponents? How does he understand peace, justice and responsibility?
Whoever wields political power, without exception, must answer to these questions.
Selling Salvation: The Religion of Success
One key to understanding Donald Trump lies in his early religious upbringing, shaped by Norman Vincent Peale. This Presbyterian preacher became one of the best-known apostles of positive thinking in the United States. His book The Power of Positive Thinking has since become a touchstone of American success spirituality.
In this brand of religiosity, the spotlight falls not on a sinful person standing before a holy God, but on a self-assured person staring down the possibilities of their own life. Faith, in this telling, means self-confidence, optimism, energy, drive and success above all else.
This worldview maps almost perfectly onto Trump's public persona. His is the language of winning. He sees the world in winners and losers, strength and weakness, triumph and defeat. Politics becomes a competition, a battlefield or a deal, where the point is always to come out ahead.
This stands in sharp contrast to the classical Christian view of humanity.
St Augustine opens his Confessions with the famous line: "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Here, man is not the sovereign architect of his own happiness, but a creature forever tethered to God. He lives not by his own perfection, but by God's grace alone. Humility, conversion and repentance are the bedrock of the spiritual life.
With Peale, the ground shifts. Human limitation gives way to human potential. Repentance and conversion fade behind optimism and success. The cross is no longer the center. Self-realization is.
Many of Trump's biographers point to this very "spirituality of success" as the key to his self-perception. And here the first crack with Christian tradition appears. For the Gospel does not open with the promise, "You can achieve anything". It opens with the call: "Repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15).
A World of Winners and Losers
Every politician betrays, through language alone, the image of humanity they carry inside them. Anyone who has followed Trump's speeches, interviews and public appearances over time will recognize the same words surfacing again and again: strength, victory, success, respect, loyalty, dominance and power.
Seen through this lens, the world becomes an arena of ceaseless competition. People are winners or losers. Companies are winners or losers. Nations are winners or losers. Politics hardens into a contest, and international relations curdle into a business transaction.
Under this logic, a weak person easily becomes a burden, a foreigner a risk, an opponent an enemy, and the poor a problem. A successful person, by contrast, becomes living proof of their own rightness.
The Christian understanding of the human person rests on a different foundation entirely. A person's worth is not measured by success, wealth or usefulness. It comes from the fact that God created them, willed them and loves them. Their dignity flows from being made in God's image, full stop.
That is also why the UFC cage on the White House grounds was never just an entertainment event. It carried symbolic weight. It distilled an entire worldview into a single image: the world as an arena, a person as a fighter, recognition earned through victory, respect built on strength.
The center of Christian symbolism, however, is not the arena but the cross. The arena crowns the victor. The cross dignifies even the defeated. The arena asks: Who will win? The Gospel asks: Who needs help?
Here a deep anthropological fault line opens up. Christianity does not start with the victor, but with the human person. That is why Jesus keeps turning his gaze toward those who count for little in the logic of success: the poor, the sick, sinners, strangers and the marginalized.
Where Trump asks, "Who will win?" the Gospel asks, "Who is suffering?"
Why the Devout Chose a Fighter
The greatest religious-historical surprise of the Trump era is not that he speaks the language of faith. Far more striking is that the very groups who consider themselves the most biblically faithful, the most conservative and the most devout have become his most loyal foot soldiers.
In the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, he drew support approaching 80% among white evangelical Christians.
At first glance, this looks like a contradiction. Much of Trump's biography and public conduct sits uneasily alongside traditional Christian virtues. His language is often sharp and wounding. His treatment of opponents frequently reads as combative. His self-presentation tips into self-aggrandizement. Humility, repentance and forgiveness rarely surface in his public speech.
So why do so many Christians stand behind him?
The answer lies less in his personal piety than in the political role he has come to play.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, many conservative Christians in the US have lived through sweeping cultural upheaval: the sexual revolution, the fight over abortion, the rise of feminism, LGBTI rights, debates over gender, secularization and the steady erosion of traditional social structures.
Many evangelicals and conservative Catholics did not experience these shifts as mere social change, but as the loss of their cultural home. Trump promised to halt the slide. They did not embrace him as a saint, but enlisted him as a warrior.
For many, his slogan "Make America Great Again" hardened into a story of return, a homecoming to a lost identity that carried not just cultural but, in part, religious weight. The unspoken message ran deep: America had wandered from its founding mission and must find its way back.
Anyone who waves away Trump's support among Christians as mere irrationality has not reckoned with American reality.
Many saw in him a president who finally said out loud what the political, media and academic elites had, in their view, ignored for decades. That sentiment is understandable, even for those who reject most of Trump's actual solutions.
A Pagan King for a Modern President
It was precisely in this climate that a striking theological framework took hold: "Cyrus theology". Many evangelical authors and preachers began comparing Trump to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, a pagan ruler who, despite his foreign gods, becomes an instrument of divine providence in the Old Testament.
The logic was simple: Trump does not have to be a saint. He does not have to be a spiritual teacher. What matters is that God is using him.
In this telling, he need not be humble. It is enough that he fights. He need not be meek. It is enough that he wins. He need not be a spiritual role model. It is enough that he defends the right side.
This line of thinking accounts for much of the religious loyalty Trump commands. But it carries a hidden cost. The measure of the man shifts from character to political utility.
The question "Are his actions Christian?" quietly gives way to a different one: "Does he serve our cause?"
Christian tradition has never denied that God can work through imperfect people. The Bible is full of such figures. But it has always insisted, just as firmly, on the duty to hold every political authority to account.
The prophet Nathan confronts King David. Elijah stands against Ahab. John the Baptist denounces Herod.
The Church courts danger the moment it prizes political loyalty above prophetic criticism. That is the point at which Christianity quietly mutates. It stops being the following of Christ and hardens into a cultural identity. The Gospel no longer shapes politics. Political struggle decides instead which parts of the Gospel get amplified and which get quietly set aside.
Faith curdles into loyalty. The Church shrinks into a social group. Confession turns into a culture war. And Christ is reduced to a symbol of national affirmation.
When the Flag Outshines the Cross
This brings us to the idea without which Trumpism cannot be understood: Christian nationalism. This has nothing to do with ordinary patriotism. It is entirely natural for a Christian to love their country, to take up political responsibility and to work for the good of their nation.
The danger sets in when nation, religion and political identity fuse so tightly that one's own nation comes to look like God's chosen instrument, and political opponents are recast as enemies of His plan. At that point, the opponent is no longer merely a rival. He becomes an enemy of God Himself. Democracy loses its moral center. Compromise reads as betrayal. Pluralism reads as decline.
Trump did not invent this phenomenon, but he has become its loudest megaphone. He has handed Christian nationalism a voice, a face and a story.
The roots run deep in American soil. Even the Puritan settlers of New England saw themselves as a "city on a hill", a people singled out by God. Over time, this hardened into what is known as America's civic religion: a fusion of nation, freedom, democracy, self-sacrifice and religious mission.
Trump did not create this tradition. He resurrected it and turned up the heat. Many of his supporters came to see political conflicts not as ordinary democratic contests, but as a battle for the nation's very soul. And that is precisely where the greatest danger lies.
Christianity is universal to its core. The Church bows to no favored nation. It recognizes no special election running alongside the election of all nations in Christ. It can value patriotism and encourage devotion to one's homeland, but it must never mistake the nation for the Kingdom of God. This is exactly why Christian nationalism sits in deep tension with the Catholic understanding of the Church.
The Church is not American, German, Russian or Ukrainian. It is Catholic. That means it is universal. It crosses every national border, cuts every political power down to size and reminds each nation that it is not God.
That is where the question of Trump and Christianity becomes most acute: at the point where faith, nation and political loyalty begin to look almost indistinguishable.
The second part of the essay is titled Donald Trump: The Limits of a Christian Alliance.
First published on DoKostola.sk, a Slovak Catholic website.
Archimandrite Dr Andreas Abraham Thiermeyer is a German Roman Catholic priest and scholar of the Eastern Churches, best known as the founding rector of Eichstätt’s Collegium Orientale, which he led from 1998 to 2008.
