How Dare You Bring God Into Your Sickness

There is nothing Christian about a movement that calls empathy a sin and cruelty a virtue. And there is nothing conservative about a president who demands worship of his power in the name of Christ.

When Christians Are Told Empathy Is a Sin

Over the last few years, a strange doctrine has taken root in parts of the MAGA evangelical world: empathy, we are told, is “toxic” or even sinful. Christian influencers, pastors, and self‑styled theologians now warn that caring too much about the suffering of immigrants, women, the poor, or political opponents will “soften” believers and compromise “hard truths.”

David French, a conservative Christian and Iraq War veteran, has described this clearly: prominent MAGA Christian voices have built an entire argument that secular progressives are “weaponizing” empathy to manipulate believers. The end result is a twisted moral algebra where cruelty is recast as courage, decency as weakness, and empathy as sin.

As a Christian, I cannot accept that. Empathy is not the enemy of truth; it is one of the ways we obey Christ’s command to love our neighbor. The New Testament does not portray Jesus as emotionally detached from human suffering. He “had compassion” on the crowds, touched lepers, wept at Lazarus’ tomb, fed the hungry, and told a story in which the hero is not the religious insider who passed by, but the despised outsider who stopped and felt the victim’s pain before lifting him up. To declare that basic moral impulse “toxic” is to attack the heart of Christian discipleship.​

How MAGA Evangelicalism Turned Cruelty Into a Virtue

French’s analysis exposes a sequence that many of us have watched with grief.

• First, Donald Trump normalizes insult, dehumanization, and the deliberate infliction of pain on enemies as a political brand.
• Second, many white evangelicals tie their political identity to Trump so tightly that they feel they cannot let go without losing power.
• Third, instead of letting Scripture correct their politics, they let their politics rewrite their theology:
  • Cruelty becomes “toughness” and “telling hard truths.”
  • Decency and civility become “weakness” and “respectability.”
  • Empathy becomes a spiritual liability, especially if it is directed toward the out‑groups targeted by their agenda.

French sums it up with chilling clarity: many in the MAGA movement “decided that cruelty was a virtue, decency a vice, and — worst of all — that empathy was a sin” and now “we live in the harsh new world they made.”​

That is not Christianity. That is Christian nationalism: the worship of power, ethnic nostalgia, and partisan victory, draped in Bible verses. Scholars of religion and politics have documented how “revivalist nationalism” in America steadily shifted from personal conversion to the project of “reviving” a mythic Christian America, culminating in the slogan “Make America Great Again.” It is a story where the cross is reduced to a campaign logo and the Sermon on the Mount is replaced by “own the libs.”

A Texas Christian Calls It What It Is

This is where Texas state representative James Talarico enters the picture. Talarico is a lifelong Presbyterian, a seminarian, and a progressive Democrat who has become one of the clearest voices against Christian nationalism.​

“There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he has said. “It is the worship of power — political power, social power, economic power — in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.” That is not hyperbole; it is diagnosis. When Trump and his allies imply that you cannot be a “real Christian” and vote for a Democrat, they are not preaching the gospel, they are enforcing party discipline.

Talarico has been explicit that Christian faith should lead to love of neighbor, including neighbors who pray differently or do not pray at all. In interviews and public appearances, he distinguishes between Christian nationalism (which weds the church to the state and to a single party) and Christian activism (which brings Christian values—love, justice, mercy—into public life without demanding state enforcement of religion).​

In other words, Talarico is articulating the same complaint many of us feel in our bones: what is being advertised as “Christian” in the MAGA universe bears little resemblance to the carpenter from Nazareth who identified himself with the hungry, the imprisoned, the stranger, and the poor.

Why the Constitution Keeps the Church Out of the Throne Room

There is a reason the Constitution separates church and state, and it goes directly to this abuse of faith. The First Amendment’s religion clauses—“no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—were designed to prevent the federal government from creating a national church or privileging one denomination over another.

Thomas Jefferson described this as building “a wall of separation between Church and State” in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, arguing that government must not entangle itself in religious authority. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, also authored by Jefferson, had already severed church and state in Virginia, declaring that no person should be compelled to support any religious worship or ministry.

The underlying logic is simple and brilliant:

• • When the state controls religion, it corrupts the church.
  • When the church controls the state, it oppresses those outside its tribe.
  • When both are fused, dissent becomes heresy and treason.

The founders were living downstream from centuries of religious wars and denominational persecution in Europe and the colonies. They understood that tying political loyalty to one “official” Christianity would destroy both religious liberty and civil peace. Today’s Christian nationalists either ignore that history or actively long for a return to religious establishment on their terms.

As a Christian, I’m grateful the Constitution keeps my church’s altar out of the state’s throne room. When Donald Trump stands up and hints that you cannot be a Christian and vote against him, he is not only blaspheming—he is attacking the constitutional order that protects all believers.

Debunking the MAGA “Theology” Point by Point

Let’s take the core MAGA evangelical talking points and test them against both Christian teaching and political reality.

1. “Empathy is toxic; it makes you excuse sin.”

This is the line used to justify hardness toward immigrants, women in crisis pregnancies, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, and political opponents.

• • In reality, empathy is not moral relativism; it is the willingness to see another’s humanity before you judge their choices.​
  • Empathy does not require calling evil good. It requires refusing to dehumanize the person you believe is wrong.​
  • Without empathy, justice quickly becomes vengeance. With empathy, we can still say “no” to wrongdoing while resisting the urge to crush people made in God’s image.

The New Testament vision is not “blessed are the ruthless” but “blessed are the merciful” and “love your enemies.” Christian nationalism inverts that ethic by treating mercy toward certain groups as betrayal. That’s not orthodoxy; that’s a power play.

2. “We are defending ‘Christian America.’”

Historically, the language of “Christian America” has served as a cover for white, Protestant, cultural dominance. Scholars describe a post‑World War II “revivalist nationalism” that shifted from preaching conversion to mobilizing a political project to “take America back for God,” culminating in movements like the Moral Majority and, eventually, MAGA.

• • This project cherry‑picks Christian symbols (flags, slogans, “In God We Trust”) while ignoring the parts of Scripture that would challenge its racial hierarchy and economic priorities.
  • It treats any move toward pluralism—toward a country where Muslims, Jews, atheists, Catholics, evangelicals, and others all enjoy equal citizenship—as an attack on Christianity itself.

James Talarico is right: this is not Christianity, it is the “worship of power in the name of Christ.” That is idolatry, not discipleship.

3. “We just want religious freedom.”

In theory, religious freedom is a core Christian value. In practice, much of the Trump‑era Christian right treated “religious freedom” as a one‑way shield—broad protections for their own institutions, hostility toward the religious liberty of others.

• • During COVID‑19, some Christian nationalists framed basic public health measures as “persecution” while ignoring the real threats facing religious minorities worldwide.​
  • In rhetoric and policy, Trump’s alliance with Christian nationalism prioritized the interests of his loyal evangelical base over a principled defense of religious liberty for all.

This selective concern betrays the founding vision of free exercise and no establishment, just as it betrays the Christian call to love neighbor without partiality.

4. “We are winning for God.”

Here is where the “losing strategy” becomes obvious. Tying the credibility of the church to the fortunes of one deeply polarizing politician is spiritual malpractice.

• • Polling and scholarship show that the tight embrace of Trump has accelerated the exodus of younger Americans from evangelical churches, who see in this alliance not the beauty of Christ but the ugliness of partisan rage.
  • Trump’s own defeats and legal troubles have not produced repentance in many Christian nationalist circles; instead, they have birthed more grievance, more conspiracy, more justification for scorched‑earth politics.

In other words, MAGA Christianity is not only morally corrupted; it is strategically self‑destructive. It is trading the long‑term witness of the church for short‑term access to a man who will not be on any throne when history is done.

“How Dare You Bring God Into Your Sickness”

I struggle with this personally. I watch people who taught me memory verses now cheering when their political champion mocks the disabled, belittles the abused, or calls immigrants “animals,” and then I hear them say this is what “biblical boldness” looks like. I listen to preachers who once spoke with tears about the Good Samaritan now explaining why empathy for a pregnant teenager or a desperate asylum‑seeker is “sentimental” and “dangerous.”

How dare you drag God’s name through that mud.

Whether Donald Trump personally believes in God is, in one sense, beside the point. God is not on the ballot. God is watching. And if we believe the gospel at all, then we believe that we will give an account for every idle word, every soul harmed by our indifference, every time we baptized cruelty as courage and called that faithfulness.

The Bible is full of stories where Jesus moves toward those MAGA Christianity wants us to fear or despise: the foreigner, the outcast woman, the sick, the imprisoned, the tax collector, the enemy soldier. He does not excuse sin, but he never withholds compassion. He never calls empathy a sin. He reserves his fiercest words not for the broken but for the religious insiders who “tie up heavy burdens” and will not lift a finger to help.​

If your Christianity requires you to suppress empathy, rejoice in cruelty, and defend the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, it is not Christianity at all. It is a sickness that has stolen Christ’s name.

Reclaiming Faith From the Trump Altar

The path forward will not be easy, but it is simple.

• • We must insist, with voices like James Talarico’s, that the church’s first loyalty is to Christ, not to any party, platform, or strongman.
  • We must re‑teach basic Christian ethics: empathy as neighbor‑love, mercy as strength, truth married to compassion, justice that does not trample the poor.
  • We must defend the constitutional wall between church and state, not because we want a godless public square, but because we know what happens when Caesar and the church share a bed.

Most of all, we must repent of the ways we have allowed our fear, resentment, and hunger for cultural dominance to eclipse the simple, costly call of Jesus of Nazareth. The good news is that we are not the first generation of Christians to get lost in nationalism and power; the better news is that God has always raised up prophets—some in pulpits, some in state legislatures in Texas—to say, again, “This is not who we are supposed to be.”