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As our president becomes more and more unhinged, I’m too nauseated by now to wade in and expend much energy offering more of my own commentary. So, once again, I share Moore’s weekly take on a wild week of strait jacket worthy rhetoric. Lord, have mercy, is all I can say.

Trump’s AI Jesus Might Be the Messiah We Need

by Russell Moore | CHRISTIANITY TODAY

In the past few weeks, the president has posted an Easter messagethat used profanity and threatened civilizational genocide, has issued threats to the pope, and has posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. (He now says he was portraying himself as a doctor.) After all this, even some of the president’s supporters feel humiliated and angry. I think it’s worth asking what exactly is coming to light in this moment and whether it could disrupt a means-to-an-end cultural Christianity. 

For years, some evangelicals have told us Donald Trump might be the disruptor we need to bring us back to Jesus. For the first time, I think they might be right—just not in the way they thought. Maybe “Trump AI Jesus” is what we’ve been waiting for to show us what we’ve become. And oddly, that just might be a point of hope.

After all, the now-deleted Truth Social post was not some break from the usual pattern. Just two weeks before, the senior adviser of the White House Faith Office compared the president to Jesus Christ, with specific references to his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. If that’s not blasphemy, the word has no meaning. But her comments were met with applause in the East Room and yawns most other places. A week or so before that, the president posted images of his proposed presidential library in Miami, including a gold statue of himself pictured before a crowd of attendees.

But the Trump-as-Jesus (excuse me, as Florence Nightingale) post was so tawdry and public that it was humiliating. The humiliation it caused was not about Trump. Who did not already know his high view of himself? It was about us: The president is so confident in evangelical and white Catholic support that he is willing to stand on Fifth Avenue and point the metaphorical gun at the first commandment, confident he will not lose any support.

Many times over the past decade, I’ve quoted an editorial in The Guardian, published shortly after the 2016 presidential election, that explains American evangelicalism to a secular British audience. “A religion that is responsive to the pressures of the market will end up profoundly fractured, with each denomination finding most hateful to God the sins that least tempt its members, while those sins that are most popular become redefined and even sanctified,” the editors wrote. “In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.”

Two thousand years of Christian history should have taught us the church needs to be both an institution and a movement, or else it becomes unmoored. During the Reformation, institutionalization was the problem. The church’s authority was so unquestioned it could use people’s fear of pain in purgatory to enrich itself with the selling of indulgences. That problem could not be corrected from the inside—it needed some theses nailed to the door. We need reformations and revivals to keep the church from becoming just one more institution. But we need institutions to keep the church from becoming an entrepreneurial populist mob tossed to and fro by the passions of the moment.

When the problem is ossified institutionalism, only an outsider—a Martin Luther or a Roger Williams—can address the problem, because those on the outside cannot be bought with position or power. But when the problem is market-driven populism, the opposite is sometimes the case: We need an institution to call out our wrongs.

Perhaps this is why Pope Leo has been able to speak in ways that don’t fit the “movements” of the moment—he’s pro-life on abortion and euthanasia, solid on the traditional Christian emphases on marriage and family, unflinching in opposition to the mistreatment of migrants and to unjust war-making and war crimes, and—perhaps most counterculturally—against the idolatry of politics. Maybe what enables him to hold all these views is that he knows he represents a 2,000-year-old structure that predates and will postdate all these political movements, including the American republic.

Quests for institution without renewal or for movements without structure ultimately lead to the same place: back toward whatever we already want, now reimagined as the gospel itself. And there will always be people who want to commandeer that kind of gospel, to mobilize voters or to sell products.

The problem is not that Trump can’t tell the difference between himself and Jesus. It’s that too many of us can’t. That’s why many people’s test of loyalty right now is not whether you hold to the gospel or to the mission or to the creeds or to the transformed life but whether you are sufficiently “in line” on politics. And almost every leader, in government and the church, knows that any show of ambiguity summons an angry mob of outrage.

But we’ve seen all this before.

In the Book of Acts, Paul went into Ephesus preaching the gospel, and that became a problem. He said handmade gods were no gods at all. The guild of silversmiths who made miniature shrines to the goddess Artemis—led by a man named Demetrius—saw their revenue stream was about to dry up. But Demetrius was savvy enough to know that “our profit margins are suffering” wasn’t going to fill the streets. So he reframed it, saying Paul was disrespecting and threatening the great goddess Artemis and the city’s identity as her dwelling place, the center of one of the most powerful cults of the ancient world (Acts 19:27). That framing worked. He mobilized the crowd.

The people were in the streets, chanting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (v. 28, ESV throughout) for hours. Acts notes that most of the people didn’t even know why they were there or why they were so impassioned (v. 32). They just knew what side they were on. The economic grifters counted on the tribalistic mob, and they knew the way to get at them was nationalist frenzy. These were not three separate things—they were one system, each element feeding the others, all of it needing an identity large enough to die for and an enemy visible enough to hate.

But the moment ended. A town clerk came to himself and said the frenzy had gone on too long and would destroy the city. This low-level Roman bureaucrat looked at what his city had become and flinched.

More importantly, Paul would later write to the city’s little, seemingly irrelevant church to tell them they were at the epicenter of the new thing God was doing: gathering all things together in Christ (Eph. 1:10), who is before all things and in whom all things hold together. Paul told them “the course of this world” and “the prince of the power of the air” and “the passions of our flesh” (2:1–3) are what Jesus came to undo.

Paul wrote that the dividing wall, the thing that makes tests of loyalty and tribal identity feel ultimate, has been broken down by a body, not a better politics (v. 14). He showed them that the real battle is against principalities and powers, not flesh and blood—which means chanting the name of any earthly figure, however loudly and however long, is fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons.

The mystery of Christ—hidden for ages, now made known—is that the answer to every Ephesus in every century is not a counter-mob or a reformed silversmith guild or a smarter political coalition. It is the same thing it always was: something that looks too small for the moment. Sometimes that starts with people who, while polishing silver, look into the dead eyes of an idol and ask, Is this what we’ve become? To see it close-up is humiliating. Sometimes the humiliation leads people to double down. But sometimes it leads back to what’s real.

Maybe we’re in that kind of moment. I don’t know. But perhaps the craziness and grossness of this blasphemous time will cause us to look at the Jesus images we’ve made for ourselves—to really look at them—and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”