The Savior and Donald Trump
The Risen Christ is all we need.
Sometimes it's best not to look at social media. Or the news.
I’ve been a news junkie since I was in my teens. I used to love reading newspapers and watch the evening news. I tell myself to watch the news in order to be informed.
But in the time of Donald Trump, it is hard to watch the news these days and not panic. The same goes for social media. There is always talk about how we see the rise of fascism in the USA and how ICE is the new Gestapo, or how the new camp for migrants is really a concentration camp, and usually, there is angry talk about when America will wake up to the encroaching dictatorship.
When someone posts something like that on social media, I sometimes want to shout back, “What the hell should I be doing, then?” Of course, they don’t have a vocal answer. I tend to think what they want is for others to be as panicked as they are. I don’t know what that panic would do. It’s not going to stop Trump’s policies. It’s not going to force him out of office. His party has a lock on Congress and the White House, so there is not much that anyone opposed to him can do until at least the midterms in late 2026. People can go to all the “No Kings” protests they want, but that’s not going to stop all the bad things we see happening. This presidential administration will do bad things, and those bad things will affect us in ways that we can’t even yet imagine. No one is coming to save us.
But I don’t think all is lost. It just means we need to change our focus.
Shortly after Trump became President again in January, I started to wonder, how to do talk about this to the congregation? I live in a very politically “blue” area that is used to activism. I didn’t want to just parrot what might be on the news, but how do I handle some of the shocking things coming from Washington?
I asked a fellow pastor, an Episcopal priest in Florida, for advice. He planned to continue preaching the crucified Christ. He would continue to preach that God loves his people.
That might sound like crazy talk to many, but it made some sense to me. He wanted to make the main thing the main thing. My Anglican friend admitted this wasn’t easy, but the main thing is to focus on the love of God expressed in the crucified God.
Another friend and fellow pastor, Drew McIntyre, started a recent article with a quote from missiologist Leslie Newbigin. When asked if he was a pessimist or an optimist, he responded bluntly, "I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead."
Drew goes on to explain the quote:
Put differently, if the pessimist expects things to turn out badly, and the optimist expects things to turn out well, the resurrection of Jesus gives us not an expectation but an event in history. The miracle of Easter is not about what we expect to happen (for good or ill) but that the unexpected did happen. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is not an expectation, it is a foundation. As Newbigin so helpfully names, Easter grounds our lives in something that is deeper than both the cynicism that infects our culture and the optimism that plagues the church.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Do we realize how astounding that is? Do we realize how crazy this sounds?
It’s about as crazy as Paul and Silas singing songs after getting arrested. Or Paul writing an entire letter about joy from the happiest place on earth- not Disneyland, but another jail cell.
It feels like in these times we live in, we need to have a stance of both hope in the impossible and a deep joy that is present despite the circumstances. But it’s hope in a real event, that Jesus rose from the dead. Not metaphorically, but physically.
Why do we need to believe this? Because far too many Christians in America, our hope is placed on who wins political elections and who has an “R” or “D” next to their name. Especially if you are opposed to Donald Trump, you have to have hope in the Risen Jesus because otherwise, you’re putting hope in people who will let you down. Let me say this again, politicians are going to let you down. But God will not let us down.
What does it mean to believe that Jesus is risen from the dead in our time? McIntyre explains:
Death is real, sin is real, evil claims people, communities, institutions. Serious injustice and oppression exist in our world. Pain and tragedy and grief are real. These are brutal facts that must be confronted. Optimism is a lie, Good Friday is real. But Easter is the deeper reality.
The tomb is empty. This means that death and sin, chaos and pain, cancer and tragedy, brutality and greed do not get the last word with us, our loved ones, or our world. John 1 describes Jesus as the Word of God, the Logos made flesh. God's Word gets the last word. Easter is God's promise that God's Word writes the conclusion to our story.
I’m writing this on the day the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act was voted by the House, and will become law. Personally, I think this is a terrible bill that only passed because the President wanted it signed by July 4. It is not fiscally responsible, and it will hurt the poor. And by the looks of it on social media, there is a lot of anger over its passage, but it isn’t the righteous anger that launches people into action, but more people who lost a baseball game and are shouting at the other team, “Wait till next year!”
Donald Trump won this, and he will do other things that will make many of us angry because they will hurt people. But here is the important thing; we can face the crosses in our lives because we know the end of the story. We know there is Easter Sunday. Donald Trump doesn’t have the last word because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
As I said earlier, there isn’t much that can be done to stop some of the worst excesses of the Trump administration, no matter how many times people protest. Until things possibly change after the 2026 midterms, no one is coming to save us.
But none of this means we do nothing in the meantime. There are things we can do, but it means shifting our focus and having some humility in the face of a challenging situation.
In May, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about how to make it through this time with your spirit intact. He described the current culture led by Trump as “pagan,” meaning it celebrates ego, power, conquest, fame, and prowess as virtues. It is, in short, a tolerance of cruelty.
So, how do we guard our hearts and find a bit of hope? Brooks never says pointedly, but basically, the answer just might be, go to church. In one quote he talks about something many of us know, but need to take to heart these days:
For the Romans, the cross was a symbol of their power — their power to crucify. The early Christians took the cross as their symbol, too, but as a symbol for compassion, grace and self-sacrificial love. Christianity is built on a series of inversions that make paganism look pompous and soulless: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The last shall be first. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Jesus was perpetually performing outrageous acts of radical generosity, without calculating the cost.
Being part of a faith community can inoculate you against our paganizing culture. But the church can also present an alternative community against the zeitgeist of the culture. I learned long ago that the black church I grew up in were truly alternative communities, especially during Jim Crow, where black men and women who were disrespected during the week could come to church and be treated as a child of God. It’s a place where a grown man called by their first name or the epithet “boy” could come to church and be called “Brother so-and-so.” It was a place where people could feel a sense of what Rev. Martin Luther King called “somebodiness.”
Within our churches, we can do things to offer light in a time of encroaching darkness. Pastor and theologian David Fitch, shared several practices that individuals and faith communities can take part in which include providing social services to people in distress, standing with immigrants, taking part in town hall meetings, and hosting prayer meetings. You might think these acts don’t mean much in the face of what some might think is fascism. Fitch explains why these acts matter:
I like the way Bonhoeffer puts it in his famous 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question” because he recognizes that the church by its very presence can and should be a resistance to the evils of the state, not through direct violence, but through its daily faithfulness in the everyday matters of life. We do all these practices as out of our everyday life together as church. And in so doing, we do not “simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice”, but we “drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” It will be the church’s faithfulness as a social presence in the days that lie ahead that shall gum up the works of the machinery of evil, and make space for Christ to work. It is in this spirit of Bonhoeffer I offer these suggestions.
As I’ve said before, the next few years will be rough. But we believe Jesus Christ is Risen from the dead. No matter what happens, no matter what Donald Trump and others do, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and believing that, we can go and face down the forces that oppress.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and that changes everything in our world. Everything.