MAGA Replaced Jesus With Trump! (The Bible vs MAGA, Part 3)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Well, hey everybody. This is going to be kind of fun tonight because sure I am going to be criticizing Donald Trump in a really specific way. But tonight I get to criticize myself too and that's going to be fun, you know, because I'm going to correct something I got wrong last week. Specifically in the way that I talked about honor versus shame cultures. And uh quite a few people called me out on that either in the comments or in direct emails to me. And when I listened back to my own words in light of what they said, I immediately knew that, yeah, they're right. Uh, I know what I was trying to say, but it's not exactly what I said. So, this is kind of the fun part of mass communication, getting to admit an error in front of thousands of people. But that's really what this channel is about. So, it's kind of actually I'm happy to do it because this whole channel is based on the fact that I was an evangelical pastor for 20 years and I was raised as a Republican and I voted that way my whole life until Donald Trump came on the scene. So, this whole channel has been an exercise in demonstrating what it looks like to change your mind or to learn new things or in this case to get better at communicating about some really important ideas. I I am drawing on 20 years of experience as a local church pastor when I'm doing these videos, which means I was a generalist. I wore a lot of hats and and this work that I'm doing right now is taking me in directions that just go way beyond the things that I used to talk about. And so I get to spend a good portion of every day just learning new things. And every day I think, man, I wish I had known this 20 years ago. So, um, anyway, this will be fun tonight. This is the third week of my Sunday night series that I'm calling the Bible versus MAGA. And I'm getting the message really loud and clear that people want this information.

[00:01:58]So I do think that we're going to be doing this on Sunday nights for the foreseeable future. So if you're not subscribed to the channel, please subscribe to it because that'll ensure that you see the new videos, but it also tells the platforms out there that people want this kind of video. So the more people who subscribe, the more that it gets shared with other people. So thanks for doing that. And I'm looking again today now at the biatitudes from Jesus sermon on the mount. And I'm going to be using one specific post from Donald Trump today to contrast his values with the values that Jesus taught. And I'm going to correct myself along the way, like I said. So first though, on April 9th, Trump made a about a 500word post on Truth Social. And a lot of people have been laughing at it because he spent 500 words telling us that he doesn't care, which is unusual.

[00:02:54]And he says no one else cares either, but yet he wrote the post. So that is kind of funny. But the post was aimed at four people who had been big-time supporters of his in the past. Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones. And none of these are are my favorite people, but yet it's interesting. They're getting attacked for saying things that I probably would agree with a lot of what they said.

[00:03:20]Their offense was that they dared to criticize his war in Iran. And in the post that he that he made, Trump systematically destroyed every one of them as a loser. He said things like, "They've all been thrown off television and lost their shows and aren't even invited on TV because nobody cares about them." And he said, "They have low IQs.

[00:03:42]They're stupid people. They know it.

[00:03:44]their families know it and everyone else knows it too. And he said, "These so-called pundits are losers and they always will be." And now we're used to that sort of thing from Donald Trump obviously, but what got my attention for this specific series was near the end when he basically gave his creed or his mission statement. He gave us an explicit definition of what MAGA actually is when he wrote, "Mega is about winning and strength in not allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons.

[00:04:17]Mega is about making America great again." So MAGA, he says, is about winning and and strength. And for the purpose of this series, I want to point out that that's not just a political slogan. That's a statement of his values. Last week I talked about honor and shame. And this is another example of how how that works in Trump's MAGA movement. Trump is telling his audience what is honorable and what is shameful inside the MAGA worldview. He's telling us out loud, winners are honored, losers are shamed. And Trump gets to decide who is a winner and who's a loser. Tucker Carlson questioned the war. So now he's a loser. Candace Owens called him out.

[00:05:05]So now she's a loser. The criterion for honor is simple in this movement. Do you agree with Donald Trump? So that's where we're going with this. But now here's where I got to bring this correction from last week. And I'm going to spend some time on it. I think this is actually super important uh that I talk about this in order for these videos about the biatitudes to make sense. I got to get this right. And um I'm going to do a few more videos about the biatitudes and the sermon on the mount.

[00:05:38]So this is important foundation to get right. So last week I introduced the honor shame dynamic of the first century world and I used that honor shame dynamic to frame why the biatitudes matter in the context of talking about mega. And I stand by what I was trying to say, but I oversimplified it in some ways that I think ended up being misleading. And I know that because my listeners told me that. I got more push back on that video, last Sunday's video, than on any other video that I've made.

[00:06:13]And it was friendly push back. It was super helpful. It was educated. It came from anthropologists, historians, missionaries who've spent their careers working with this material. And so that was super humbling to realize that I get on here and push the button and talk and then people like this are listening to me who really know what they're talking about. And I'm so thankful that they that they said, "Hey, you need to flesh this out a little bit more." So, there are three emails in particular that I'm going to use to make it more clear what I what I'm trying to say here. And I'm not going to name the people who sent them, but they're all people who know a lot about the subject. So, here's the main point that I want to make very clear. If you don't hear anything else about this correction, that honor shame dynamic that I'm talking about is not the problem in and of itself. The problem is who gets to define what's honorable and what's shameful. And that's what I meant to say last week, but I need to say it more clearly tonight. So, I want to start with a quote from one of these people who sent me an email who's a very frequent commenter on the channel. And he wrote, "Honor shame is a legitimate worldview paradigm. To be sure, it is abused by the rich and powerful, but it was not invented by the rich and powerful." And then he talked about a framework that comes from mission scholarship. And according to this framework, all cultures in the world operate on one of three primary worldview paradigms. The first one is guilt versus innocence. And that's the dominant paradigm in the western world. That's what I grew up with. And so that guilt versus innocence worldview is filtered often through the lens of law, which is why I just instinctively talk all the time about the rule of law and and why that should matter and how Trump is doing away with the rule of law. And but then I also talk about how Trump is destroying the conscience of his followers because they know that they're supporting things that they can't defend. They know that that he's doing things that if they participate, they become guilty. So in order to keep supporting him, I've been saying for as long as I've been talking about this for many years that his followers have to actually change their very conscience in order to make room for what he's asking them to accept. You know, describing things like that that that just comes natural to me. You know, you're either guilty or you're not. And it doesn't matter who's watching. Your internal conscience is the arbiter of that. When you sin, you feel guilty regardless of whether anyone saw you do it. Or I would say if if for people who aren't um believers, you can still relate to this. When you go against your code, you feel guilty regardless of whether anyone else saw it. When people raised like me read the Bible, we kind of naturally see courtroom language in it, you know, like justification and a quiddle and atonement and and and that's the stream that I that I swam in of the faith for many years. And I'm learning all these new things in my post pastoral years and doing this work. But all that language about justification and atonement and a quiddle and all that, it's all in there, but it's just not the whole picture. And so, so I'm just I have a partial understanding and there's drawbacks to my own worldview. That's the first thing I want to say. And and I come from more of this guilt versus innocence paradigm, not the honor shame one that I was talking about. So um but the second paradigm is one that's fear versus power.

[00:10:21]And this one is dominant in animistic cultures where where people believe that the universe is populated by spiritual powers that that have to be appeased or even harnessed, you know, maybe through rituals or prayer. And I first came into contact with that way of seeing the universe when I got to know for instance the M people in my neighborhood in St. Paul. Uh they would be really familiar with this way of thinking. And in the same way that my worldview shapes how I understand my faith, their worldview shapes even their understanding of Christianity. These these world views go deep. So, uh, so that's interesting.

[00:11:02]That's some, you know, so this fear versus power. Um, that's that's one that I've had some experience with. And then the third way is seeing the world, the one that I talked about last week, is this honor versus shame way. And this is where I just needed to be more clear.

[00:11:18]Honor versus shame is the dominant worldview of about 65% of the world. And it was the dominant culture of the entire world in which the Bible was written. The Middle East, most of Asia, large parts of Africa and Latin America.

[00:11:36]Today, these cultures operate within an honor shame framework. By and large, and as my listener pointed out, there are a lot of beautiful aspects to that.

[00:11:47]Hospitality is one of the supreme expressions of honor in these cultures.

[00:11:53]To welcome a guest is to honor them. To turn away a stranger is a form of shame.

[00:11:59]So my listener pointed out that the marriage supper of the lamb when God displays his glory through lavish hospitality toward humanity, that's an honor shame image. And it's beautiful.

[00:12:12]And what's funny is that I've read the scriptures through that lens of honor shame for years. I mean, I've preached sermons where I've helped people to understand passages from Paul, for example. Um, and yet I I didn't express it very clearly at all when I talked about last week. But like the Apostle Paul when he talks about you know a woman should have long hair or a woman should remain silent he explicitly says those sorts of things uh because in his culture he says those are ways that wives show honor to their husbands in that culture and I've pointed out that you know for years that what he's doing there is he's teaching a principle of showing honor and he's He's not telling women what hairstyles are supposed to be appropriate in all times and places. It, you know, so it's just good to understand this. It's not distorting the scriptures to read them through that kind of honor shame lens. That's the language that they were written in. And and I wish I had time to read the entire email that my listener sent because he gave a beautiful example of how the gospel addresses all three of those ways of thinking. the the fear versus power world or the the guilt versus innocence worldview that I grew up with or this honor shame worldview. You know, he he talked about how the gospel addresses all three of those ways of thinking. So hopefully I can deal with that in a later video because it's really it's really fascinating. But then the second email that I got reflected a lot of the same thoughts that the first email did, but this listener added in something else that I wanted to bring up here. Uh he said that the United States is primarily a guilt versus innocence culture like like I said and that matters for what we're watching happen with MAGA in a guilt versus innocence culture. You can be found not guilty by a court and still carry a guilty conscience around with you. That's kind of what I mentioned before because that internal moral standard is the judge, not the external verdict of it. So the individual in that case is the primary unit. The individual is accountable to the individual's moral standard and that transcends the group. And here's what my listener pointed out. He said, "Ma's running an honor shame logic inside of a guilt versus innocence culture. Trump isn't making moral arguments. He's not making legal arguments. He's doing what every honor shame authoritarian type figure does. He's assigning categories.

[00:14:58]You know, he's he's deciding who's a winner or a loser, who's honored or shamed, who's mega or not mega. And my listener made one more observation that I want to point out here. He said that honor shame cultures are typically more collectivist. The group is supreme. The individual gains identity and honor through belonging to the group. And this is just so important to get. You know, they you get your your your honor by belonging to the group and by defending the group.

[00:15:30]And in this way of thinking, betraying the group is a supreme dishonor. And Mega is just exactly like that. And I think it's a big reason that someone like myself can have so much trouble understanding how Christians can be part of a group like MAGA because from my point of view, nothing is more important than than my personal integrity and my conscience. And if any group asks me to sacrifice those things, I'm just going to leave that group. That's just how I am. And that extends even to my own family. And that's why people like me and a lot of people who listen to me, I think, feel so isolated from our former tribes because we chose our conscience over our various tribes. And in my video last week, I pointed out how that honor shame approach can get weaponized by authoritarian leaders. And I'm going to say that again in a minute. But my own approach, I mean, that's pretty radically individualistic to say I would even separate myself from my family over issues of my personal integrity. That radically individualistic approach has some real downsides, too. And people exploit that worldview in different ways. But I think it is important to understand that MAGA is operating in a different frame from what I'm used to.

[00:17:01]And the honor shame dynamic isn't the core problem of that frame. People find meaning where they find meaning in some ways. and belonging to a group can be a very good thing. But the core problem is that they've got a sociopath telling them what's honorable and what's dishonorable and who's in and who's out.

[00:17:24]To true believers in MAGA, the the group, the movement is everything and you don't want to lose that. So loyalty to the group as defined by Trump is the supreme virtue. So when Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens broke with the group on Iran, Trump immediately gave them the label that he gives everyone who leaves the group, losers.

[00:17:46]And this just isn't new behavior. This is this is ancient behavior. It's just running in a 21st century American context right now. So when I talked about this last week, the point I was trying to make is that this particular cultural system has a downside. Just like my own guilt versus innocence culture has downsides, you know, like the extreme individualism I just mentioned, the downside in this honor shame culture that I was pointing out last week is that corrupt leaders can exploit that honor shame system in an abusive authoritarian way. And so in the biatitudes and the sermon on the mount, Jesus was calling out those leaders in that kind of context. and he was telling his listeners the things that God finds honorable. And he shows the values of the kingdom of God and how they're the opposite of the values of the kingdom of this world. They're the opposite of what the authoritarian leaders in Jesus' day were teaching. And so that brings me to the third email from a listener. And I was super happy to get this one. I needed it because this listener encouraged me that I am on the right track.

[00:18:59]I'm glad I got this one because it shows I I did sort of make my point last week.

[00:19:04]So, this listener is a historian who was raised as a Southern Baptist, but she's in a different stream of the Christian faith right now than that, but she wrote to introduce me to a book that I haven't ever read by Bertram Wyatt Brown. It's called Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. The summary of this book reads, "By claiming honor and dreading shame, the southern elite controlled their slaves, ruled their households, established the social rankings of themselves, kinfolk, and neighbors, and responded ferociously against perceived threats. In either case, honor required men to demonstrate their prowess and engage in fierce defense of individual, family, community, and regional reputation by duel or physical encounter or war. And subordination of African-Americans was uppermost in this southern ethic. And this is what I'm getting at here. This is the weaponization of honor and shame.

[00:20:09]The use of honor and shame as tools of social control that's that's never disappeared. And my listener wrote, "While Southerners probably don't want to hear a motan say it, the honor culture in my part of the country is rooted in slavery and racism, and the very foundations of the Southern Baptist denomination trace there as well." And that's where I'm going with all this.

[00:20:34]That's just historical fact about America and about the church in America.

[00:20:40]And the weaponization of honor and shame, that's just a recurring human pattern that shows up in Rome, ancient Rome. It shows up in Herod's court. It shows up in the temple establishment back then, and it shows up in the antibbellum south. And the evidence is overwhelming that it's showing up right now in Mara Lago. So now we're back where we started because what I just described, this weaponization of honor and shame, the way powerful people build systems where they define what's honorable and they assign shame. That's exactly what Trump is doing in this post. So let's look at it. He's assigning shame. Trump doesn't critique Tucker Carlson's argument. He doesn't engage Megan Kelly's reasoning. He doesn't refute Alex Jones's logic. He just gives them these shameful labels.

[00:21:36]Loser, nut job, low IQ, third rate.

[00:21:39]That's not an argument. He's just labeling these people and then he's throwing them away. So that's the shame part. But here's the honor part. He writes, "Mega agrees with me." And that's the key sentence. Not mega agrees with a set of principles. Not mega agrees with a platform. Trump is the standard. MAGA equals Trump. And honor in this system entirely depends on Trump's current mood. Tucker was honored when he agreed with Trump and he's shamed now because he disagreed. And I've talked about this before from a biblical perspective when I've said many times that Jesus claimed that he would be a sword that divides a son from his father and a mother from her daughter.

[00:22:30]Following Jesus, he said, would bring division within families and tribes. And now knowing how important those relationships are in an honor shame culture, it shows just how much of a sacrifice it could be to follow Jesus in that time and place. It meant shame for those who left their families and their tribes to follow him. But in the mega worldview, it's not faith in Jesus that determines who's in or out. It's faith in Trump. And if your faith in Jesus causes you to disagree with Trump and you say that out loud, then you're called a fake Christian and you're cast out of the movement. And Trump goes on in this post, "As president, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don't return their calls." So Trump is signaling to his base, I have the power. They want access to my honor, but I'm shunning them. You know, if you're in my camp though, you'll share in my power and you'll share in my honor. And that's the same psychology I was pointing out last week when I talked about, you know, a televangelist private jet. Even if that charlatan ripped off his followers of their last dollar, I said when he's flying over their heads in that jet, on some level, they're flying up there with him. they get some kind of reflected honor by being associated with the guy in the jet. And so that's the same psychology at work. And so back to this post, Trump summarizes it all when he says MAGA is about winning and strength.

[00:24:09]And there it is. That's the gospel of MAGA. Not charity, not justice, not mercy, not peace, winning and strength.

[00:24:20]I pointed that out last night in my video about Pete Hegsth. He fits the same pattern perfectly. Winning and strength are the supreme virtues of the mega honor system. And now I know that I promised to go deeper into the biatitudes this week. I said last week I'll go deeper into the biatitudes this week. But I feel like I needed to do this. I needed to do a better job of laying out this mega value system before I go deep into the biatitudes, you know.

[00:24:49]So for tonight, I just want to say this much.

[00:24:53]Jesus didn't dismantle honor versus shame as a cultural system. He was a first century Palestinian Jew. You know, honor and shame.

[00:25:03]That was the water that he swam in. And he understood that system completely.

[00:25:09]What Jesus did was far more radical than than than overturning that system. He subverted the definitions of who was shameful and who was honorable. What was shameful and what was honorable. And that's what makes the beatitude so groundbreaking. He didn't say honor and shame don't matter. He showed his followers, you know, he held up these categories that the culture accepted as being honorable and and he turned those categories upside down to the world that he lived in. To be blessed meant to be wealthy, you know, to be blessed meant to be popular or to have military might or to be ritually pure or to have a lot of family connections, you know, not to be somebody who grieved, not to associate with losers. But Donald Trump says they've all been thrown off television and they've all lost their shows. He said this in the tweet and but Jesus says, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness and justice's sake." And by the way, I hope it does go without saying that I do have huge problems with all the four people that Trump mentioned in his post, but he's calling them out for actually taking a stand against him. And I won't pretend to know if they were actually motivated to take that stand based on righteousness or justice. But I do know that thousands of people who listen to this channel have taken a stand against Trump and his movement because we're pursuing righteousness and justice. And we've all been treated the same way.

[00:26:46]Trump said in his post, "Ma is about winning and strength." Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek." And I'm sorry, like I've said, no matter how much we might want to dress up that word meek to call it something like strength exercised wisely or something like that, it basically meant in that in that context that you're a loser. You know, in a world that honors the winner, you're a loser. You know, the the world, especially nowadays, it seems the world honors people who put themselves forward. and meek people don't make it into the inner sanctum at Mara Lago. So when Trump says in this post that they're losers and they always will be, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor," or in this case, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And and what Trump says and what Jesus said aren't two different political opinions. These are two different gospels, two different accounts of what really matters. What what is truly honorable? It's two different ways of looking at it. And here's the key point. They're also two different ways of seeing who really is at the center of the universe. And I think any honest observer of Donald Trump knows who Donald Trump believes is at the center of the universe. Donald Trump. He has a fundamentally disordered understanding of the universe.

[00:28:21]And once he's no longer in power, I think history is going to have no trouble identifying him as a narcissistic sociopath.

[00:28:28]And that's a little bit troubling because in order for people to stay in his orbit, his followers have to agree that he's at the center of the universe.

[00:28:40]And I'll just say if you're a follower of Trump and you doubt me on this, here's something I'd like to ask you to do. I want to ask you to list 10 things that Donald Trump teaches that are fundamentally opposed to the way of Jesus. And when I say teaches, I mean through the words that he uses every day and through his actions. And it's not going to be hard to come up with 10 if you're honest. Okay? 10 ways that Donald Trump is is showing a very different way of being than what Jesus shows. Okay?

[00:29:12]Then I want you to go on social media and post those things. Call them out in the name of Jesus.

[00:29:20]If you do that, you're going to find out immediately that in your circles, Jesus is not the standard. Jesus is not the sword that divides. Donald Trump is.

[00:29:33]And when you start to get the backlash from your friends and family for simply pointing out the truth, rejoice and be glad because great is your reward in heaven. For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. So thanks for listening.