- A spectacular gesture in a fractured context
- The staging of power
- A context of war, blasphemy, and Roman tensions
- The chosen passage: 2 Chronicles 7, an ambiguous verse
- The recurring temptation to instrumentalize Scripture
- An American story
- Christian nationalism, a heresy in disguise?
- When the word of God becomes an argument from authority
- The Church's response: prophecy and discernment
- The voice of Leo XIV as a ridge line
- Catholic tradition versus digital Caesaropapism
- A call for discernment among the faithful
- ✝ Biblical references
On Tuesday, April 21, 2026, from the Oval Office of the White House, Donald Trump read aloud from the Book of Chronicles. The scene was meticulously orchestrated: broadcast live on screens at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and streamed on the Great American Pure Flix platform to millions of evangelical viewers, it was part of the "America Reads the Bible" event—a complete reading of the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, spread over seven days to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States. This same president, who just days earlier had published an AI-generated image of himself as Christ, and who had just launched an unprecedentedly violent attack against Pope Leo XIV, was thus assuming the posture of a Christian, Bible open, from the very heart of the American democratic sanctuary. The question that then arises, with the quiet force of obviousness, is not whether Donald Trump believes in God. It is deeper and more urgent: what do we do to Scripture when we use it to legitimize power?
A spectacular gesture in a fractured context
The staging of power
The "America Reads the Bible" event was conceived by Bunni Pounds, president of Christians Engaged, after a visit to the Museum of the Bible in 2024 that she describes as a spiritually inspiring experience. The initial idea was beautiful in its simplicity: to bring together Christians from all walks of life to publicly read the Word of God from beginning to end. The event, held between April 18 and 25, 2026, took on a completely different character. Among the approximately 475 participants—pastors, senators, and evangelical Hollywood celebrities—were Franklin Graham, son of the famous Reverend Billy Graham and a staunch supporter of the White House; Jonathan Cahn, author of prophetic bestsellers very popular in conservative circles; Michele Bachmann, former Republican presidential candidate; and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, a loyal figure in the Trump administration. One hundred and twenty ministries were represented; The opening took place on a red carpet, with the solemnity of a national ceremony.
Donald Trump's participation was neither insignificant nor accidental. The organizers themselves acknowledged that the Tuesday evening time slot—prime time for evangelicals, one might say—had been reserved for him and special guests, and that the passage assigned to him had not been chosen at random. Trump read from 2 Chronicles 7:11-22, and in particular verse 14, famous in conservative evangelical circles: «If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.» This verse, recited by a sitting president from the Oval Office and broadcast via video on the screens of a museum dedicated to the Scriptures, carried a symbolic dimension whose full ambivalence its authors certainly had not grasped. For although prayer and humility are at the heart of Solomon's text, the image projected on the screen was anything but that of a leader who effaces himself.
A context of war, blasphemy, and Roman tensions
To understand the true significance of this biblical interpretation, it must be placed in its immediate context—a context that could be described, without exaggeration, as one of open spiritual rift. A few days before the event, Donald Trump had posted on social media an AI-generated image of himself in a Christ-like pose, crowned with golden light. The reaction within Christian communities was swift: numerous pastors, theologians, and Catholic and Protestant faithful denounced it as a blasphemous act. The Catholic Church, guardian of a long iconographic tradition regarding the respectful use of sacred images, could not remain indifferent to such a deliberate conflation of the figure of the Savior with that of a political leader.
Even more serious, and more structural, is the power struggle initiated by Trump against Pope Leo XIV. Pope Robert Francis Prevost, elected in 2025 and the first American pontiff in history, had dared to name the American president for his threats against the Iranian people and his bellicose rhetoric in the Middle East. "Even the holy name of God, the God of life, is dragged into the rhetoric of death," Leo XIV had declared. He had added, in a formula of prophetic rigor: "God blesses no conflict." Trump's response was swift: he called the pope "very progressive," accused him of being "in the service of the radical left," and declared, with rare audacity: "If I weren't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the Vatican." "To which the Pope had responded with the calm of a Church Father: 'I am not afraid of the Trump administration nor of saying the message of the Gospel.' It was in this context of open confrontation between the occupant of the White House and the Vicar of Christ that Donald Trump took the Bible in his hands — a gesture which, whether one likes it or not, resembled less an act of faith than an operation of symbolic reconquest among a Christian electorate destabilized by his own excesses.
The chosen passage: 2 Chronicles 7, an ambiguous verse
The choice of passage is not theologically innocent. 2 Chronicles 7:14 is one of the most frequently used—and most distorted—verses of the Old Testament in contemporary American politics. Originally, it was situated within a very specific context: the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem by Solomon, and God's response to the king's prayer. God promises to hear his people if they humble themselves and turn away from evil. This verse is addressed to Israel—a particular people, bound to God by a historical and theological covenant—and not to any modern nation. To make it say what it does not say is to betray the intention of the sacred author as much as the logic of revelation.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, one of the greatest contemporary Catholic theologians, has repeatedly emphasized that serious hermeneutics requires respecting the historical, literary, and canonical context of texts. Applying to 21st-century America a promise made to Israel under the Davidic monarchy is not only to commit a theological anachronism, but also—and this is where politics enters the picture—to construct a national mythology on shaky scriptural foundations. This is what the 19th-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called a «heresy» in its most precise sense: a way of thinking that has the appearance of Christianity but contradicts its essence. For although the verse in 2 Chronicles invites humility, prayer and conversion, the use made of it by American nationalist Christians is diametrically opposed to this invitation: it is not used to call for collective repentance, but to reinforce the conviction that America is a chosen nation, protected by God on condition of maintaining its "Christian values" — meaning, the values of the MAGA movement.
The recurring temptation to instrumentalize Scripture
An American story
This is not the first time the Bible has been invoked in service of an American political project. From this perspective, the history of the United States is almost disturbingly consistent. From its colonial beginnings, the Pilgrim Fathers envisioned themselves as a new people of Israel crossing the desert toward a Promised Land. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, delivered his famous sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," in which he described the new colony as "a city upon a hill"—borrowing the image from the Sermon on the Mount to legitimize a project of colonial domination. This motif of the "chosen nation" has never truly left the American political scene, circulating from administration to administration, changing its political leanings without altering its rhetorical structure.
Abraham Lincoln himself, in his Second Inaugural Address of 1865, invoked Scripture to give meaning to the Civil War. But Lincoln did so with remarkable humility: he refused to presuppose that God was on the side of the Union and acknowledged that the two sides could interpret the same Bible differently. This theological scruple, this hermeneutical prudence, is precisely what is lacking in Trump's use of sacred texts. Where Lincoln questioned, Trump asserts. Where Lincoln bowed, Trump reigns. The sociologist of religion Robert Bellah theorized this phenomenon as early as 1967 under the name of "American civil religion": a system of beliefs, rites, and symbols through which the American nation perceives itself as being under divine protection. This civil religion is distinct from institutional Christianity while borrowing its vocabulary, imagery, and texts. It becomes dangerous when it radicalizes into Christian nationalism: when the nation ceases to be under God's judgment and becomes the instrument of his will.
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Christian nationalism, a heresy in disguise?
This shift—from civil religion to Christian nationalism—is precisely what the greatest theological voices of our time denounce, with different emphases but the same concern. The American Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann, a specialist in the Old Testament, has for years warned against what he calls «sacred chauvinism»: the tendency to transform biblical election into a national privilege. This drift, he emphasizes, betrays the prophetic message of the Bible, which is fundamentally critical of any power that legitimizes itself through the sacred. The evangelical historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, whose work Jesus and John Wayne had the effect of an intellectual bombshell in Christian academic circles, documenting with relentless rigor how a certain warlike and nationalist masculinity gradually invaded American evangelical imaginations at the expense of the figure of Christ from the Gospels.
From the Catholic perspective, the Catechism of the Catholic Church warns against all forms of idolatry—including the idolatry of the nation. Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Centesimus Annus In 1991, he reminded us that «the State is not the primary and supreme source of human dignity» and that any attempt to make the State or the nation the object of quasi-religious devotion constitutes a distortion of faith. Benedict XVI, in his masterful address to the Bundestag in 2011, outlined the conditions for a healthy relationship between politics and ethical truth, emphasizing the fundamental distinction between the authority of natural law and the voluntarism of power. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York and a respected figure in American Catholicism, reminded us during the 2024 presidential campaign that «faith is not an electoral decoration.» These voices—diverse, sometimes in tension with one another—converge on one essential point: the Gospel cannot be domesticated by politics without being corrupted.
The temptation is all the more insidious because it is seductive. For the millions of evangelical Americans who support Trump, his reading of the Bible is not a cynical calculation: it is a confirmation. Proof that their president shares their faith, that God is with them, that America is walking the path of divine blessing. This popular sincerity, this real but misguided faith, is precisely what political manipulators know how to exploit with the greatest mastery. This is why the historian Mark Noll, in his famous essay The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, As early as 1994, he lamented the lack of a sufficiently robust theological culture within the American evangelical world to resist the allure of political sacredness. This structural weakness, sometimes deliberately fostered, creates a space into which religious populism rushes with disconcerting ease.
When the word of God becomes an argument from authority
There is a fundamental difference between quote the Bible and live The Bible. To quote the Bible is to extract a verse from its context and apply it to a pre-existing cause, like sticking a label on an already filled bottle. To inhabit the Bible is to allow oneself to be transformed by it, to accept being judged by it before brandishing it. The Apostle Paul, in his Second Letter to Timothy, wrote: «All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness» (2 Timothy 3:16). The use of Scripture that Paul describes is demanding: it begins with correction and education, not with confirmation and self-congratulation.
This is precisely what Pope Leo XIV was pointing to when he declared: «The message of the Gospel is not meant to be abused.» This statement, made in the context of a direct confrontation with the American administration, possesses a remarkable theological depth. It does not say that Trump is acting in bad faith—the Pope does not judge consciences. It says that the Gospel has its own logic, an internal coherence, an ethical orientation that resists any attempt at political co-optation. The Gospel speaks of blessed poverty, gentleness, mercy, service, and forgiveness of enemies. It says, through the mouth of Christ himself in the Sermon on the Mount: «Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God» (Matthew 5:9). A president who, in the same month, reads the Bible in public and threatens a foreign people with war creates a contradiction that the Christian faith cannot absorb without protest.
The Church's response: prophecy and discernment
The voice of Leo XIV as a ridge line
It would be inaccurate to reduce Leo XIV to a mere figure of opposition to Donald Trump. Pope Prevost was a man of profound faith, Augustinian in his formation, a missionary at heart, and a profound scholar of Scripture and patristic tradition. His resistance to Trumpian rhetoric was not ideological in the partisan sense of the term; it was properly evangelical, in that it was rooted in a faithful reading of the Gospel. When he declared, "Enough with war!" in response to American threats against Iran, he was not engaging in geopolitics. He was extending a prophetic line clearly drawn by his predecessors: John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963), Paul VI at the UN (1965) with his resounding "Never war, never again war!", John Paul II during the 2003 Iraq crisis, Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate (2009), and François in Laudato Si'’ And Fratelli Tutti, which place peace within an integral vision of creation and human fraternity.
This nascent pontificate thus found itself confronted, from its very first months, with a revealing test: maintaining the Church's prophetic stance without being drawn into political polarization, neither left nor right. Leo XIV chose the middle ground. He spoke of war, the exploitation of the poor, the abuse of the divine name—and he did so by invoking the Gospel, not a partisan agenda. In doing so, he accomplished precisely what the great theologian Karl Barth assigned to the Church in the mid-20th century: to be the place where the Word of God resists the powers of the age, not through its own power, but through unwavering fidelity to its Lord.
Catholic tradition versus digital Caesaropapism
What we are experiencing with Trump and the Bible is, in many respects, a new form of a very old phenomenon: Caesaropapism. The history of the Church is riddled with this temptation—that of the Byzantine emperors, Charlemagne, Philip the Fair, and Henry VIII—which consists of seizing the sacred to place it at the service of temporal power. The Church Fathers understood this very early on. Saint Ambrose of Milan, in the 4th century, did not hesitate to publicly repent to Emperor Theodosius I to remind him that even the most powerful sovereign remains subject to God's judgment. Gelasius I, pope at the end of the 5th century, theorized the distinction between the two powers—spiritual and temporal—in a formulation that would structure medieval political thought for centuries.
The novelty of our time is that this Caesaropapism now operates not in cathedrals but on screens. The staging of Trump reading the Bible doesn't need episcopal anointing to produce its effects: it has the power of algorithms, Christian streaming platforms, and a network of pastor-influencers who transform every presidential image into a sign of divine election. The American Catholic theologian Catherine Mowry LaCugna, a specialist in Trinitarian theology, reminded us in her work that the Christian faith is essentially relational, founded on the kenotic humility of the Son—that is, on a God who empties himself, who does not "seize" his divinity as if it were plunder (Philippians 2:6). In a sense, this is the perfect antithesis of the posture of omnipotence cultivated by the religious nationalisms of our time.
The discernment that the Catholic Church must exercise in this context is all the more delicate given that some members of its own body—including bishops and cardinals—are susceptible to the allure of Trumpian political conservatism. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading figure of the traditionalist wing, has, for example, expressed sympathies for a vision of Christian America that resonates with nationalist ideology. Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, on the other hand, have taken positions much closer to the papal line on issues of war, migration, and social justice. These internal tensions within American Catholicism are not a weakness: they are the sign of a vibrant Church that, like any body, strives to find its proper place in a complex world.
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Access the folder →A call for discernment among the faithful
Faced with this situation, what can and should a faithful Catholic do? The answer is neither simple nor straightforward, but it does have a structure. The first step is discernment—that virtue at the heart of Ignatian spirituality, which consists of distinguishing what comes from God from what comes from opposing forces. Ignatius of Loyola taught that evil spirits often disguise themselves as angels of light: they borrow the language of goodness, faith, and patriotism to lead the soul toward disordered attachment. The rule of discernment, applied to the Trump-Bible situation, leads us to ask: does this action produce fruits of justice, peace, and mercy? Does it strengthen the poorest or the most powerful? Does it invite conversion or reinforce prejudices?
The second act is that of formation. The Church—its priests, catechists, and Catholic intellectuals—has the responsibility to train the faithful in a mature and free reading of the Bible. The Second Vatican Council, in its constitution Dei Verbum, He emphasized the need for a hermeneutic that holds together faith, historical reason, and the living tradition of the Church. This training is a bulwark against manipulation: a believer who knows how to read 2 Chronicles 7 in its context will not be easily swayed by a presidential reading during prime time.
The third act—perhaps the most difficult—is that of parrhesia, the Greek word the Apostle Paul used to describe the courage to speak the truth in all circumstances, without calculation or fear. The Acts of the Apostles recounts that Peter and John, questioned by the Sanhedrin authorities who ordered them to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, replied: «Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God» (Acts 4:19). This apostolic parrhesia is the model of all prophetic resistance. It is not political insolence; it is the purest form of evangelical fidelity. It is this that Leo XIV embodies today in the face of Washington, with a restraint that commands respect, regardless of the reader's political leanings.
The «America Reads the Bible» event could have been a beautiful gesture of national faith, a sincere invitation to rediscover the Scriptures in a country drifting away from them. Donald Trump’s reading transformed it into something else: a revealer of the state of American religious consciousness, and an indirect call to all Christians worldwide to remember that the Bible belongs to no party, no nation, no empire. It belongs to the One who is its original author—and who, with infinite patience, waits for his servants to stop appropriating it and begin to live it.
Sources
- Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, Crossroad Publishing, New York, 2012
- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1956-1975
- Robert Bellah, «Civil Religion in America,», Daedalus, vol. 96, no. 1, 1967
- Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Liveright Publishing, New York, 2020
- Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1994
- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2001
- Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1991
- Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, 1965
- John Paul II, Encyclical Centesimus Annus, 1991
- Benedict XVI, Address to the Bundestag, Berlin, 2011
- Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual exercises, Rules for discerning spirits, 16th century
- Pope Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost), public statements, April 2026
✝ Biblical references
4 passages · 4 books
If my people submit, pray, and seek my face… I will forgive. (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching. (2 Tim 3:16)
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