Drawing a Line in the Sand: Why We Reject MAGA as a Christian Movement
A theological reflection from our Rochester affinity church plant — biblical, historical, and Reformed
9/12/26 - By Jomo K. Johnson


Why I'm Writing This
I don't write this lightly. Many people we love — family, friends, even people who worship alongside us — identify with MAGA. Some do so out of genuine, prayerful conviction about issues like abortion, religious liberty, or family life. I am not writing to mock them, question their salvation, or pretend this is a simple issue. I am writing because we believe the church has a responsibility to speak clearly when a political identity begins to wear the clothing of the Gospel — and I believe MAGA, as a movement and Christian theology (distinct from any individual voter), has done exactly that.

This is a long piece. We ask you to read it in full before you respond to it.

1. The Biblical Problem: Confusing Kingdom and Nation
Scripture is relentlessly suspicious of political power that asks for ultimate loyalty. When Israel demanded a king "like all the other nations" in 1 Samuel 8, God told Samuel plainly: they have not rejected you, they have rejected me. The request for a strongman to unify and protect the nation was, at its root, a rejection of God's kingship.
Jesus inherited and intensified this suspicion. When Satan offered him "all the kingdoms of the world" in Matthew 4, Jesus refused — not because the offer was fake, but because worship of God and the pursuit of worldly dominion are, in Jesus's own framing, mutually exclusive paths. When his own disciples tried to make him king by force after the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:15), he withdrew alone into the hills. When Pilate asked him directly whether he was a king, Jesus answered: my kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) — not "my kingdom has no relevance to this world," but that it does not draw its power, methods, or identity from the same well as Rome's.

This matters because a slogan like "Make America Great Again" is not, on its face, a Christian claim. It's a claim about national restoration, national strength, and (implicitly) national greatness as a good to be pursued and protected. When that project is fused with Christian symbolism — crosses at rallies, prayers invoking divine sanction for electoral victory, the language of spiritual warfare applied to political opponents — you get what historians and theologians call Christian nationalism: the belief that America has (or had) a covenantal, God-ordained identity, and that political power should be used to defend or restore that identity.
That is a different thing than Christians voting their conscience. It is the fusing of national identity with divine mandate — and Scripture calls that idolatry, not devotion.

2. The Historical Warning: We Have Been Here Before
The clearest historical parallel — one that should make any thoughtful Christian deeply uneasy — is the Deutsche Christen ("German Christians") movement of the 1930s. This was not a fringe cult. It was a mainstream, popular movement within the German Protestant church that fused Christian faith with nationalist restoration, framing Hitler's rise as a providential answer to national humiliation and decline. Pastors preached national renewal from the pulpit. Congregations sang hymns to the Volk alongside hymns to Christ. It felt, to millions of sincere German Christians, like revival.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church — a minority, not a majority — who recognized what was happening and said, in effect: this is not a political disagreement, this is a status confessionis — a moment where the truth of the Gospel itself is at stake, and silence is complicity. The 1934 Barmen Declaration, largely authored in the Reformed tradition by Karl Barth, rejected the claim that "we would have to recognize another proclamation, other events and powers, personalities and truths, as divine revelation" alongside Jesus Christ. It was written specifically against a nationalist corruption of the Gospel.

We are not claiming a one-to-one equivalence between 1930s Germany and 2020s America — that comparison, made carelessly, is itself a failure of nuance. But the pattern — a nation in perceived decline, a leader offered as a providential answer, Christian symbols pressed into service of national restoration, and dissenting Christians treated as unfaithful rather than merely wrong — is a pattern the church has seen before, and one our own tradition explicitly warned us to watch for.

3. The Reformed Lens: Christ's Kingship Over Every Sphere
We plant our conviction here specifically in the Reformed tradition, because Reformed theology has always taken seriously both the lordship of Christ over all of life and the danger of confusing any earthly power with that lordship.

Abraham Kuyper's famous line — "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'" — is often quoted by Christians to justify political engagement. Rightly understood, it does justify political engagement. But Kuyper's point cuts the other way just as sharply: if Christ is sovereign over every square inch, then no political party, no candidate, no nation gets to borrow his authority for itself. Kuyper's sphere sovereignty was explicitly meant to limit the state's claims, not to sacralize a national restoration project.

Reformed political theology, going back through Calvin, has also always insisted that civil government is a common-grace institution — necessary, legitimate, but penultimate. It restrains evil; it does not usher in the Kingdom. When a political movement asks Christians to treat electoral victory as spiritual victory, or a candidate as a chosen instrument of national salvation, it is asking Christians to grant the state an ultimacy that Reformed theology has always refused it.

4. Where We Land — and Where We Draw the Line
We do not draw the line at conservative political views. We do not draw the line at people who voted for Donald Trump out of conviction on specific policy issues. We draw the line at the fusion — where nationalism, personal loyalty to a leader, and Christian identity become functionally indistinguishable; where dissent is treated as spiritual betrayal; where "owning the libs" becomes a fruit of the Spirit; and where the language of spiritual warfare is applied to fellow citizens rather than to sin, death, and the powers Paul actually names in Ephesians 6.


That fusion is not a "true form of Christianity" wearing conservative clothes. It is a civil religion wearing Christian clothes.

And here is where we land, and where we ask you to sit with us: we believe God has used this moment to clarify something the American church had let go blurry. For generations, many of us conflated national identity with Christian identity so thoroughly that we couldn't see the seam between them. MAGA, by pushing that fusion to its most explicit and unapologetic form, has — paradoxically — done the church a service. It has forced the question into the open: is our ultimate allegiance to a nation, a leader, and a cultural restoration project, or to a crucified and risen King whose kingdom explicitly does not work like the kingdoms of this world?


We think that's a gift, even though it doesn't feel like one. It's an opportunity to draw a clean line — not against our neighbors, but against a confusion of categories that has quietly corroded the church's witness for a long time. That's the line we're drawing.

5. What We Are Not Saying
Because nuance matters to us, we want to be explicit about the limits of this argument:

• We are not saying that Christians who vote conservative, or who supported Trump for specific policy reasons (abortion, judicial appointments, religious liberty protections), have abandoned the faith. Prudential political judgments are not heresy.

• We are not saying the political left is exempt from the same danger. Civil religion has a progressive form too — where national or cultural progress is sacralized, and dissent is treated as moral failure. We believe that deserves its own reckoning, and we intend to write about it.

• We are not claiming certainty about every individual heart. Only God judges that. We are making a claim about a movement's public theology and rhetoric, not a verdict on any single person's relationship with Christ.

• We recognize thoughtful Reformed and evangelical scholars disagree with parts of this analysis — some argue Christian nationalism is being defined too broadly and applied uncharitably to ordinary patriotism; others argue the historical parallels we've drawn are overstated. We think that pushback deserves a real hearing, not a dismissal, and we'd genuinely welcome it in the comments or in person.

Join the Conversation
We're not writing this to end a conversation — we're writing it to start one, in person, over scripture. Join us for our Bible study, Christian Nationalism vs. the Gospel, where we'll dig into these texts together, wrestle honestly, and let you push back on everything above.

90 minutes · $10 suggested donation (covers lights & refreshments) · Open to all — activists, skeptics, and the curious welcome.