Today’s American evangelical church is in deep danger, and doesn’t realize it. She thinks she is sitting astride the throne of power, finally able to impose her will on her society. But in reality, she’s sitting astride a filthy beast that is already turning to devour her, at the very command of God.
On January 10 2021, four days after the Capitol riots, my then-pastor preached a message sharply criticizing us for not listening to the prophetic voices telling us that Trump had won the 2020 election, that we needed to trust God, not our own knowledge. I now see spiritual abuse in that message, a gaslighting of our God-given conscience and deeply rational outrage about the absolute evil we’d just watched consume the Capitol, with God’s name on the lips of the rioters.
To this day I continue to be galled by the pastor’s insistence that our spiritual fitness was dependent on listening to a chorus of self-appointed, self-deceived “holy men” deeply disconnected from the true voice of God. His actions and the fallout from it led directly to me leaving that church, and in the following couple years, fully abandoning evangelicalism in favor of a progressive Christianity that I find much more closely follows the Way of Jesus.
My deep concern with Trump’s support in the American evangelical church has not waned in the months and years since. It is the fresh crystallization of such spiritual abuse across that segment of American church culture, to a far deeper extent than it had been already.
The Bible itself warns us of such things. The dire warning in Revelation 17, of the danger of the church prostituting herself to empire for political power and riches, ought to catch every evangelical’s breath. They love to preach Revelation, yet never see themselves in that woman in Chapter 17. They imagine that Revelation is written to warn them about all those other evil people. But it was actually written to warn the church about itself. And in the last few years, we watched exactly that scenario play itself out: the church surrendering to the siren call of a seat at the political table, riding atop the back of the beast, not realizing her shame, or the danger she faces.
Because what happens next, every time the church makes this mistake, just as it did in the 1930’s German empire, will be that the beast eventually turns on the church, having won its victory with her help and no longer needing her. So my heart mourns so deeply for these deceived people. They truly will believe that God did this great work, that God saved and anointed Trump for such a time as this, that they finally have the power to enact and enforce their brand of religion. But it’s fleeting, and they’ll be discarded all too soon, having been mere cannon fodder for a political machine that is utterly uninterested in them. Evangelicals were just a useful tool to be cast aside when the job is done.
Thus the next few verses in Revelation 17 ought to give us great pause: the entire world turns on the woman, hating her and devouring her utterly. It says: “The waters that you saw, where the whore is seated, are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages. And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the whore; they will make her desolate and naked; they will devour her flesh and burn her up with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by agreeing to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God will be fulfilled.“
And THAT is the exact persecution which the church fears.
Don’t miss the import of that last verse: God is the very one who causes it to happen, not the beast, not some evil spirit. There’s no great and powerful satan pulling the strings here. The evangelical so-called “prophets” missed it; they can’t see beyond the moment of perceived victory sitting astride the beast. They’ve so lost their connection with the divine, hearing only their own lust for power amid their circle of sycophants, that they cannot any longer hear God’s warning.
But God’s game is longer than we can imagine, and the bill MUST come due. God is far more interested in purifying the Church than giving it control over society. Anyone who reads the words of Jesus honestly would realize this. In fact, the very struggles of the church are what purify her. It’s interesting to observe that, despite His claim to the power of God and His clear demonstration of many miracles, Jesus never did anything at all about the systems that were oppressing the people He was healing and delivering and feeding. He didn’t confront the Romans and He directly rejected calls to be the warlike messiah that the people were expecting. Aside from flipping a few tables in the Temple, He didn’t do anything tangible about the oppressive religious systems of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Instead, Jesus’ entire ministry was to individuals in their pain and suffering. If anyone had been capable of a successful assault against the Roman system, it would have been Jesus. But He chose otherwise, instead calling people to pursue a heavenly Kingdom, and answering Pilate “My Kingdom is not of this world.” He expected that His followers would build an entirely new and separate Kingdom of Heaven, not take over the evil earthly systems.
So as we watch the heady intoxication among the evangelicals as they take over their corner of the world, mourn. Mourn for that church. Recognize that as she gains power, it inevitably corrupts her, and she becomes the very empire itself, that Babylon which Revelation warns about. And as it goes on to say in Chapter 18, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins and do not share in her plagues.” God’s people are NOT the empire; whoever constitutes the empire is no longer God’s people.
Perhaps it’s ironic, given my quotes from Revelation 17, that I no longer believe that Revelation is any kind of literal future prophecy. I think it’s not so much focused on our future as much as speaking wisdom to the early church about its relationship to the Roman empire.
But at the same time, the principles of humanity and its relationship with power and religion are timeless, and there’s deep value in the message even if I don’t find any particular need to try to correlate specific visions or characters in Revelation with current events or humans.
Incidentally, following the apparent assassination attempt during the late 2024 campaign, many so-called “prophetic” people associate Trump with Rev 13:3, which says “I saw that one of the heads of the beast seemed wounded beyond recovery – but the fatal wound was healed! The whole world marveled at this miracle and gave allegiance to the beast.“
And of course, many on the other side of politics and religion are painting Trump himself as The Antichrist. From their perspective, Trump is everything that opposes the works of Jesus.
However, while I do agree that Trump is actually opposed to true Christianity as I understand it, I believe the concepts of the beast and the antichrist are much larger than Trump: it’s the entire collection of worldly systems that stand in opposition to the true Kingdom. It’s massive, and spans the entire world of humanity, far bigger than any one human. By contrast, Trump is a small, sad, weak man far along into the aging and dementia process, who wouldn’t have won anything at all without the evangelical church propping him up. He likely won’t complete this term, I think, before the Party casts him aside via the 25th Amendment.
The church thought to ride Trump’s coattails in an attempt to harness that beast, and they did win temporary political power, but in reality Trump was riding their coattails, and is just a useful tool for a lot of other people. So Trump is hardly “the beast” or “The Antichrist.” Instead, it really does seem to me that the American evangelical church is doing a pretty good job of acting antichrist in this season.
And at some point, she’s going to be cast off by the world, as just another useful tool whose time has passed. She is in for a rude awakening, as she discovers that the thing she’s been riding is not a throne but a scaly red dragon which is turning around to suddenly devour her.
Mourn her, my friends. And as Revelation 18:4 warns, “come out of her.” Be willing to live in exile, in the wilderness, where we are protected and nurtured and we can build the Kingdom “as in heaven,” not as on earth.
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