Christian Kayfabe: Why Does the Right Embrace Pretend Christianity?

It's mandatory for conservatives to profess a belief in Jesus, even if they're transparently lying

One of the wildest things to me about the Trump presidency, along with everything else about it, was always the ways in which they tried to square his existence with Christianity.

It is a truth universally accepted that you can’t even be considered for the job of US president if you are not a Christian—a rule unwritten in any law book, but true nonetheless. That said, though, once the assertion has been made to the electorate’s satisfaction, the candidate is under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to follow any tenet of the religion.

This is true for both Democratic and Republican presidents. No Democrat who rejected Christianity could be a serious contender. If anything they have to work harder to prove their piety as their party affiliation already renders them suspect.

A Republican president, however, is essentially regarded the American Pope—head of Church and State, the same dual role granted to the monarch of the United Kingdom, head of both the nation and the Church of England.

Henry VIII just had to have a divorce, so now this is what England has instead of a Pope.

So then you have Donald Trump, a man who has never expressed any religious belief, famously a sexual libertine who cheated on each of his wives with each subsequent wife, a man with no charitable tendency. The American right desperately wanted him to be president specifically because his demeanor was so un-Christian. They wanted a fiend, not someone who was held to self-limiting hand-wringing, not someone who would moralise to them. They knew their values, it was the moralists they wanted silenced. They wanted a human nuke.

Still the very minimum standard had to be maintained that he believed in God, specifically the version of God who manifested himself in flesh in Judea in the first century AD as a person we now call Jesus after a westernised two-millennia telephone game from an original pronunciation that also gives us the name Joshua (that’s right, Christians worship a guy named Josh).

Ideally the president, as head of the American church, is Protestant. Since JFK, Catholic is also warily acceptable, and in the desperation of 2012 the Republicans under duress were willing to take a Mormon, but the Jesus thing is absolute.

This is a non-negotiable standard. But it’s one that Trump absolutely had to be made to pass by the people who set that standard. Because it was also non-negotiable that he was to be the nominee for president, as it remains so again today. If he will not outwardly present himself as a Christian then it’s essential that they fake it.

Why?

It’s my contention that most Trump supporters either know that he’s not a Christian or don’t care if he is or not. The reconciling of Trump as head of the American church takes two forms generally. Either they lean super hard, hilariously, into his piousness as a saint figure or warrior angel who walks hand in hand with Christ…

…or else they go the “God works in mysterious ways” route, famously pointed out by George Carlin as the way Christians ultimately justify any event. God works sometimes through vastly imperfect vessels, expresses His perfect will through profoundly broken men. The test of faith, as always, is to not question it.

But here’s the thing—many of the people who hold political leaders to the standard that they must believe in Jesus are themselves hostage to the very same standard. Conservative enclaves, think tanks, caucuses and academic settings are notorious dens of sin, scandal, adultery, and closeted homosexuality. As the surveillance culture becomes more sophisticated it is ever more difficult for these people to hide how the God botherers get their freak on when they think their regulators aren’t watching. Look no further than the anti-Squad of American politics—Boebert, Greene, and Gaetz—and how each of them has been caught in an affair, a sex scandal, or a theatre handjob over the past twelve months.

How much of western politics, and conservative politics in particular, is made up of closeted skeptics, secularists, even atheists, policing each other’s faith for no real reason other than the fact that they, themselves, feel pressured to appear faithful to other closeted apostates? How deep does the absurdity go?

I am constantly plagued by the urge to pat Tim Pool on his grotesque bald head and soothingly tell him it’s okay that he tried.

Trump, for one, has been uniquely effective in exposing the pantomime if only because he gives the fewest fucks about it. He will throw a bone to Christians now and then if it suits him. Like the notorious Bible-holding photo stunt (he was not, as was rumoured, holding it upside-down).

But though he had figured out which way was up, he’s never opened that book. When he was asked at a university ceremony for his favourite Bible verse, he literally just cited one he’d seen etched on one of the buildings there, and rattled off “Two Corinthians 3:17.” That was a tell in itself, as anyone who’s passed within ten feet of a Sunday school in their lives can tell you the book of 2 Corinthians is always pronounced Second Corinthians.

Even after four years as America’s Pope he never moved an inch closer to finding Christ and won’t even learn enough about the religion to lie about it. In a recent televised interview he was asked about his relationship with God and how he prays, and he prattled on forever about nothing, never even coming close to answering the question.

Most telling of all, in a recent speech when he was caught in the fervour of dropping Quiet Parts Out Loud about planning to try to cancel future elections, he let slip “I love Christians, I’m not a Christian, I love you.” Like he was trying to shoo away some Mormon door knockers without being rude about it.

His supporters and his party will desperately try to explain away all of this, funnily enough, by lampshading the fact that he’s a rambling old crackpot who stumbles over his words and sometimes accidentally says the opposite of what he means. Just think about that, though—Trump’s competence and lucidity are less important to his followers than that he believes in the Christian God, to the point that they are willing to sacrifice the former to reinforce the latter. “Don’t worry, when he sounds like he’s telling you to your face that he doesn’t believe in God, it’s just because he’s so soft in the head now that he can’t parse language at a third grade level. We need you to vote him for president.”

This is a paradox that drives me fucking nuts, because I can’t figure out the importance. Part of it’s because I’m an agnostic, no doubt, but I must reiterate, the philosophy and the practice of the Christian faith are not important or even desirable. They want Donald Trump as president, not Ned Flanders. If you want admission to the club of western conservatism then it’s both a necessary and sufficient condition that you express belief that a specific person from the town of Nazareth in the first century AD was a supernatural being who did in fact create all of time, space, and reality.

It's universal, it’s inescapable, and it is, from the top down, a completely fabricated and incomprehensibly dedicated kayfabe game of pretendsies.

The notable overlap between professional wrestling and American conservatism is actually more meaningful than you may have realized

When you realise this and get to know it, then you can’t unsee it. You’ll notice it every time some grifter with nebulous politics who believes in nothing decides to brand themselves as right wing. The awkward born-again revelation to the divine truth of Jesus quickly follows suit. It very rarely comes off as convincing, but it doesn’t feel like being convincing is as important as the ritual.

It was only a week or so after formally endorsing Donald Trump for president that Elon Musk had his own baffling, out-of-nowhere conversion. Like Trump, Musk is almost definitely an atheist. People of that calibre of ego usually are, if they’re unable to envision an entity greater than themselves. But Elon wants to be inducted into Donald’s circle and enjoy the full perks of a Heritage Foundation endorsement, so he has to do the waltz. And he did, clumsily, and under visible duress.

The GOP went frothing coo-coo bananas after the Paris Olympics opening ceremony had the audacity to involve a drag performance containing what they dubiously thought was Christian symbolism, so Musk was pressured to start dropping Jesus bombs so Jack Posobiec and Matt Walsh could see that he was dutifully standing up for the faith of the master race.

“I believe in the principles of Christianity like love thy neighbor as thyself (have empathy for all) and turn the other cheek (end the cycle of retribution)” he tweeted awkwardly when someone asked him point blank if he was down with the J-man now. And yes, this was non-committal waffling of the same type that Trump gables out when asked the same question directly. It’s also patently untrue, as Musk is one of the most openly vindictive men on the planet, shows no empathy whatsoever for great swaths of civilization, and also, he said that immediately after going on a tirade about how Christians need to get bloody revenge for the insult so that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

Interesting also to note that the profile picture that Musk is using here is of himself wearing a Halloween costume that, unlike the Olympics performance, was specifically supposed to provoke Christians at the time.

Again, it’s not enough to say that these people are bad Christians. A hell of a lot of them are, they’re kind of known for it, and it’s baked into the dogma—the fallen nature of man, all fall short, not one is worthy, and all that. No, these are transparently fake Christians, compelled to say they believe something by people who also don’t believe it and aren’t concerned by each other’s false witness. For whose benefit? Voters?

The other member of this unholy trinity is J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate and prospective vice president. Vance is speculated by many to have been a quid pro quo choice in exchange for the support of Peter Theil and, you guessed it, Elon Musk. He’s a thoroughly unlikeable human being whose social ineptitude almost rises to Musk’s level, so you can see why they get along.

Vance was an atheist until 2018 when he decided to go into politics and—that’s right—almost immediately discovered his love for Jesus. This doesn’t appear to be a slow awakening, his transition from Hillbilly Sam Harris to Cardinal Richelieu seems to have occurred over a much shorter time than your average conversion.

For his part, Vance does seem to have studied his religion much more deeply than either his running mate or his Silicon Valley benefactors. He doesn’t mumble and frantically try to dredge up old Veggie Tales episodes from his childhood memory when someone asks him a question about theology. Vance will tell you all about Augustine and René Girard with a depth of lore that shows it would genuinely bother him to get fact checked. But James David Vance—or James Donald Bowman to use his real name—is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Journalists fawn over the touching and well-rehearsed story of his conversion without a hint of skepticism, and why not? Religion and faith is a deeply personal journey, is it not?

“Hey man, huge fan. You’re gonna hear some stories about me calling you Hitler and also that I’m an atheist who fucked a couch, but that wasn’t me, that was some guy named Bowman.”

Vance also slammed his current running mate as the next Hitler just a few years ago. You will forgive me if I am slow to trust a man with clearly monumental ambition who changes his views on politics, science, society, and religion so drastically and rapidly to match whatever best eases his upward trajectory.

There is a temptation to believe, if we’re talking capital-P Politics, that the most straight-forward explanation for all of this is that they are just trying to appeal to an electorate. An atheist voter is going to be much less turned off by a Christian politician than a Christian is going be turned off by an atheist politician. There’s a kind of political Pascal’s Wager happening here.

But that’s not the complete story here. It can’t be, because the strong compulsion to virtue signal Christianity seems to happen to anyone who shifts to the right in their politics even if they’re not up for election to anything. The transparency of the charade and the enthusiasm of its delivery seem to depend entirely on the level of self-respect that people have.

Does anyone seriously believe this guy is a devout Christian?

Jordan Peterson is notoriously mush-mouthed when it comes to this question, and depending on who is asking and any number of contexts his answer will lie anywhere on the spectrum from devout Christian to traditional Christian to philosophical Christian to Deist to “what do you mean by belief?”

Even, if you can believe it, Richard Dawkins now calls himself a Christian after some years tumbling down sinkholes of antifeminism, white ethnonationalism, and the “anti-woke” movement. He isn’t (yet) proclaiming that he’s open to the divinity of Christ, but he gives the same mealy-mouthed apologia for it that you hear from many political rightists who have no true love for religion but seem almost held hostage by it now. It seems a stunning revelation from a man whose entry to the zeitgeist was writing a book about how religion has been a net negative on our civilization. Sometimes I really wish Christopher Hitchens was here to slap a bitch down.

And I would of course be completely remiss not to mention Russell Brand, the former progressive life-long sex pest who gradually swimmy-wimmied his way down the QAnon pipeline to full kooky ketamine MAGA, was credibly accused of rape, and instantly decided that he believes in Jesus now.

What a story!

My theory, for what it’s worth, is that Christianity has just become part of the general overall gamification of politics. For many, the profession of belief in a supernatural deity has less to do with a real genuine metaphysical position than it is simply a declaration of “the side I’m on.” The declaration itself is what matters, not the fully optional philosophy that comes with it. It’s like wearing a sports jersey.

We in our western liberal democracies have become entrenched in an all-encompassing dichotomy wherein all possible views and positions are either on one side or the other. This of course doesn’t come anywhere close to covering the incredibly vast spectrum of human ideas, but on a broad enough scale, this is what it averages out to.

You’re a Democrat, or you’re a Republican. You’re an Apple guy, or you’re an Android guy. You’re a Ford guy, or you’re a Ferrari guy. You’re a Yankees guy, or you’re a Red Sox guy. You might never go to a game, you might never follow the sport. But people know whose side you’re on because you wear the jersey. You wear the hat.

Someone like Trump or just about any other of these right wing politicians and influencers may not have ever seen a Bible outside of a hotel bedside drawer, and they may be more familiar with Jesus as the name of their gardener they call “one of the good ones,” but the important thing is they wear the jersey. They wear the hat.