Whenever Trump slimes Christianity, as is his wanton wont these days, purporting to replace it with the Church of MAGA, I’m reminded of a line of dialogue delivered by a tempestuous artist in the film Hannah and Her Sisters:
“If Jesus came back, and saw what’s going on His name, He’d never stop throwing up.”
It's no surprise that a seriously disturbed individual afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder would devolve to the point where he thinks of himself as God - the number one symptom of NPD is “an unreasonably high sense of self-importance,” requiring “constant, excessive admiration” - and anyone who’s shocked that he’d jealously target the Pope has clearly failed to track his mental deterioration.
What this means, however, is that Trump and his toadies (like J.D. Vance, who has warned the Pope to “be careful”; like Pete Hegseth, who quoted a vengeful fake Bible passage written by Quentin Tarantino) have gifted the Democrats a golden opportunity to narrow the “God gap.” MAGA leaders have created an opening for Democrats that’s wider than the Strait of Hormuz.
The God gap is easily explained. People who worship a lot tend to vote Republican; people who worship a little or not at all tend to vote Democratic. It’s been that way, almost without exception, since the 1970s — mostly to the GOP’s advantage, given the fact (documented by the Pew Research Center) that roughly 70 percent of Americans identify themselves as religious and 62 percent identity as Christian. And here’s a noteworthy stat from 2024: Trump won 64 percent of the voters who attend religious services at least once a month.
You might be asking yourself, “Why in the world would 64 percent of regular worshipers vote for a convicted criminal and serial defiler of every conceivable moral tenet?” No doubt there were many reasons. Trump would cure inflation, Trump would never go to war, Kamala was a stand-in for woeful Joe, et cetera. Plus one perennial factor: Fairly or not, the Democratic party is widely perceived as godless.
It’s true in every exit poll that Dems do best with those who rarely or never worship. But if they want to reverse their decline, starting with the ‘26 midterms, they need to convince some skeptical voters of faith that the blue party hews to the traditional moral values that Trump’s crew has left in the dust. Stuff like compassion, empathy for the downtrodden, and loving thy neighbor.
Here’s how Democrats can make it work:
“Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I, and every one of our fellow believers, how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved - by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger…It was all about how you treat other people. I’ve said before, ‘Don’t tell me what you believe, show me how you treat other people and I tell you what you believe.’…Love thy neighbor regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or religious affiliation.”
That’s James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, who has raised more money nationwide than any other Senate hopeful. He’s also a Presbyterian seminarian — few ‘26 Democratic candidates have that credential - but anyone on a blue ticket this year would be wise to heed and echo his warnings about MAGA’s so-called “Christian nationalism.” Which he rightly condemns as extremism with a cross: “There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power…It is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth….What you’ve got now are people baptizing their partisanship and calling it Christianity.”
But Talarico is not alone; four years ago, Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow (who’s currently running for the U.S. Senate) fought back after a Republican colleague claimed that she wanted to “groom” schoolchildren for pedophiles. She did so by referencing her religious roots:
“My mom taught me at a very young age that Christianity and faith were being part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we can of service to others, especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less - often unfairly. I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing ‘Christian’ in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people…I am a straight, white Christian suburban mom. We cannot let hateful people scapegoat and distract from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives.”
How hard is that? Link your faith to humanistic values; affirmatively state the obvious, that social-justice Christianity is a potent force for good. Why more Democrats don’t do that, instead of curling into a fetal position, is beyond me. For decades they’ve ceded invocations of faith to an opposition that has deftly filled the vacuum. The classic Democratic moment came early in the 2004 race when candidate Howard Dean, queried about his faith, said that he switched from the Episcopal church to the Congregational church in the 1980s because the former wouldn’t give him land to build a bike path.
Granted, there’s no guarantee that Democratic bids to narrow the God gap would pay off. Back in the day, Al Gore and John Kerry quoted the scriptures while on the stump against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, but they lost regular worshipers anyway, by double digit margins. And today millions of devout voters will continue to spurn Democratic candidates at all levels, even Democrats of faith, because the party continues to support gay marriage and abortion rights.
But given the tight margins of so many elections, and the importance of the few competitive House races in this year’s midterms, any defections from Trump’s ‘24 coalition — especially among white Catholics (potentially turned off by his blasphemies) and Hispanic Catholics (mindful of Jesus’ compassion for the needy) — could prove politically fatal to the MAGA cult.
The divinity of Donald is on November ballots in all but name. The Bible prohibits the worship of false gods, and no doubt he dismissed that as a speed bump, but Republicans fighting to keep the Congress may well be punished for his sacrilege.
