“We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).
There are moments when a single image reveals more than its maker intends. That was my experience when I saw the image President Trump posted of himself rendered in the visual language of sanctity and healing: bathed in light, elevated above ordinary humanity, surrounded by the symbols of national myth and force.
It was not subtle. It did not need to be. It borrowed imagery associated, in the Christian imagination, with mercy, healing, radiance and transcendence, and wrapped those meanings around political power.
That is why it struck me as more than offensive. It was theological.
The image did not simply flatter a leader. It suggested redemptive significance.
It invited viewers to see national strength as sacred purpose and a political figure as something more than political. In that sense, it did not stand alone. It belonged to a larger pattern in American public life: the merging of religious symbolism, nationalism, grievance and power into a kind of false devotion.
Some will dismiss that claim as overstated. They will say such imagery is trolling, branding, or just another piece of online spectacle.
Others will find it distasteful but harmless. Still others will welcome it openly because they have already come to believe that swagger is strength and domination is clarity.
But for Christians shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus, the distortion is hard to miss.
The Jesus of the gospels does not gather glory by threatening enemies. He does not turn suffering into stagecraft. He does not cloak force in sacred light and call it righteousness.
He stands among the vulnerable without turning them into props. He heals without self-exaltation. He tells the truth without spectacle. He refuses the seduction of power that demands reverence in return.
This is why the crisis before us is not only political. It is moral and spiritual.
We are living through a long training in false glory. Day after day, citizens are being taught to mistake aggression for courage, cruelty for truth, nationalism for faith, and domination for salvation.
The lesson is relentless, and so is the damage.
I write this as a pastor in Waco, Texas, and also as someone who has remained too quiet for too long. I know the seductions of caution.
I know the instinct to avoid adding one more alarmed voice to an already inflamed public square. I know the thought that perhaps this outrage, too, will pass.
But silence teaches too. Silence leaves people unguided in moments that require moral clarity. Silence can make what is spiritually dangerous appear normal.
That normalization is one of the deepest harms of Christian nationalism. It does not usually ask people to reject Jesus outright. It simply revises him.
It makes him more useful to power: less merciful, less disruptive, less concerned with enemies and strangers, less threatening to hierarchy and wealth. It keeps the name while hollowing out the way. That is why this matters.
No president, no party, no flag, no military triumph, no nation can bear the weight of the holy. That burden belongs to God alone.
And when political power borrows the light that belongs to mercy—when a ruler is framed in the iconography of healing and redemption—the church should not look away.
Not because Christians have always gotten this right. We have not.
Not because the church is pure. It is not.
But because truth still matters. Because false worship still wounds. Because public faithfulness still requires people willing to say, plainly, what they see.
What I see is this: The church’s calling is not to baptize power or make peace with idolatry. It is to tell the truth, defend the vulnerable, resist the seductions of false glory, and remember the one it claims to follow.
Not a mascot for empire.
Not a prop for strongmen.
But the Teacher who still calls us into a new way of mercy, truth, and peace.
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