Opinion
On April 13, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image that seemed to depict him as Jesus Christ. There was immediate backlash, even among those who have been Trump’s staunchest allies. “This should be deleted immediately,” wrote Trump ally and conservative activist Sean Feucht on social media. So severe was the backlash that Trump deleted the post.
Later, Trump denied he was portraying himself as Jesus, saying that he thought it showed him as a “doctor.” Still, many were quick to denounce his actions as a bridge too far. What seems most clear is that Trump’s sharing of the image caught many by surprise.
President Donald Trump has been playing Russian roulette with genocide. Ninety minutes before his own deadline expired, the man in charge of the most powerful and lethal military force in the world decided not to destroy a civilization. And the global response was simply a sigh of relief. There wasn’t a bullet in the chamber, at least this time.
At the beginning of 2026, President Donald Trump said that his New Year’s resolution was to accomplish “peace on earth.” As he asserted last year with his aggressive campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House dubbing him “THE PEACE PRESIDENT” on X, Trump was convinced that he would be the one to fulfill it with “no new wars.” But just two days after issuing this resolution, Trump had Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro kidnapped.
It is a pattern that has continued deep into 2026—promises of “peace” followed by bloodshed and violence. In January, Trump announced the Board of Peace, an international effort to “stop generations of hatred and bloodshed.” A month later, a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike hit an Iranian all-girls elementary school as a result of outdated intel, killing at least 168 people, most of whom were children.
On April 7, Trump threatened the people of Iran if the government refused to reopen the contested Strait of Hormuz, a trade route through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump threatened on his social media platform.
The Heritage Foundation brought you Project 2025 in order to completely transform the U.S. federal government. Now, it’s rolling out a new plan to save the American family.
To ring in 2026, the conservative think tank that provided the blueprints for the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump released a new 168-page policy plan titled Saving America by Saving the Family. The Heritage Foundation’s plan claims that its goal is to encourage more “fertile” men and women to marry younger and have more children. But curiously, this plan for America’s families recommends programs like marriage boot camps and“community rest” laws, not policies that have been empirically shown to encourage family growth and stability—such as the expansion of paid parental leave and flexible work schedules.
As we journey through Holy Week, I’m meditating less on Jesus on the cross—I see that every day—and am instead meditating on Jesus razing hell.
Israel’s displacement and killing of Palestinians continues; the U.S. continues to escalate the war with Iran; and immigrants are still being hunted down by cowards in masks. Every day we see Christ crucified. What does the hope offered by Jesus, that these forces of evil can be stopped, look like? What are the lessons for us on the road from the crucifixion to the resurrection?
I want to talk about a Christian response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign, and to do that, we need to start with Batman.
As a pastor, I don’t use the word “hell” lightly, but I think it’s time. The war against Iran has oil and gas facilities across the Middle East burning. Three million Iranians and a million Lebanese citizens are displaced. Black rain laden with toxic chemicals is falling in Tehran, Iran, likely ensuring a legacy of cancer and birth defects that will rival or surpass the health legacy of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.
The third No Kings Day this Saturday is shaping up to be the largest day of nonviolent protests in American history. There were more than 2,000 protests during the first No Kings Day in June 2025 and more than 2,700 at the second No Kings Day in October 2025. More than 3,000 events are already planned for this third edition.
“All I want is freedom for the people,” President Donald Trump told The Washington Post on Feb. 28. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” But as missiles rain down on Tehran—and reports state that every major city in Iran has been bombed—Christians must be wise enough to discern that the destruction of a country does not make it safe.
The New York Times’ report on allegations of sexual abuse by labor organizer César Chávez has been devastating to many people, me included. The news reminds me that long before I learned about power, faith, and movements from a church stage or a history book, I learned about them from an abuelita.
It has been a joy to deconstruct my religious trauma alongside 32-year-old comedian Taylor Tomlinson. Four years ago, as I was coming out as queer to my family, I found her Netflix special Taylor Tomlinson: Look at You to be a warm welcome into the community of formerly Christian queer kids and purity culture survivors. Dark humor gave all of us a silly sort of grace, a space where we could grieve and grow.
Tomlinson, who was raised in a conservative Christian household in Temecula, Calif., got her start in stand-up through the church comedy circuit. But as she grew up, she began deconstructing how her conservative Christian upbringing was hurting her mental health and sexual development, deciding instead to be a “secular” comic.
Across the country, thousands of men and women wake before dawn, put on a neck gaiter, sunglasses, and a baseball cap, and drive to work to separate families. They do this in the name of “law and order,” a phrase that sounds sturdy enough to be moral, and vague enough to hide what it requires. Under the current administration, that looks like intensified immigration crackdowns and scapegoating immigrants as the source of the country’s problems. It’s part of a long American tradition of fusing public safety rhetoric with racist and xenophobic policies. “Law and order” has always depended on certain people carrying out actions the rest of the public prefers to ignore.
On Feb. 15, Israel’s Cabinet approved a measure that would allow the state to exert more control over the occupied West Bank. The measure makes it easier for settlers to occupy Palestinian territory.
Last spring, I traveled to Sebastia, an ancient Palestinian village outside Nablus in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. It is among the oldest continuously inhabited places in the region. Beginning over 5,000 years ago during the second Iron Age, the residents of Sebastia have lived through the ancient Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman eras. Sebastia is home to significant religious sites for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, including a Byzantine church and mosque said to be the burial site of St. John the Baptist, also known as the Prophet Yahya.
As for-profit technology platforms grow, they increasingly transform into representations of what Catholic theologian, philosopher, and critic Ivan Illich referred to as “radical monopolies”—an inescapable infrastructure that dominates every aspect of social organization.
Up against the machinations of platform capitalism, people are conditioned to embrace the faulty idea that their intrinsic value comes from how well they can meld into the profit margins of corporate algorithms operated by the likes of Meta, X, Reddit, and others. Brandon Rickabaugh, writing for the Center for Christianity and Public Life, describes this process of melding as “[t]he liturgy of mechanization, of depersonalization,” where demand for scalability and monetization online outweighs the practice of virtues like patience and generosity.
Queer liberation theology has largely been ignored in many Catholic circles. It’s often treated as something external to the church, disconnected from Catholic history, or framed as a political identity that is incompatible with one’s identity in Christ. This has a lot to do with the Catholic voices that are deemed trustworthy and authoritative (especially on social media). Today, these voices dictate what questions we’re allowed to ask, and which sexual experiences are considered theologically orthodox (hint: the straight ones).
But as I recently wrote for National Catholic Reporter, queer liberation theology can help the Catholic church remember itself, recovering a tradition of radical solidarity that transcends our culture wars.
I’ve been listening to Solomon Ray’s music on and off for the past few weeks. Ray, for those unaware, is an artificially generated “Mississippi-made soul singer” created by self-proclaimed “TPUSA contributor” Christopher “Topher” Townsend topping the Christian and Gospel charts.
After I saw that President Donald Trump had ordered attacks on Iran, I thought about the passage in 1 Samuel in which the Israelite elders get fed up with being run by a series of judges and ask for a king. The prophet Samuel, after praying over the matter, urges them to rethink the request, reciting a laundry list of all the things a king will do to the people.
It might seem like the mission to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement is unique, but there are important parallels between this movement and the 19th-century fight to abolish slavery. As we seek to follow the gospel and make a new world, it is worth turning to abolitionists from the 19th century as we look for examples of how to win the fight against tyranny and wickedness, even if it takes longer than our lifetime.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required U.S. marshals in free states to capture people who were attempting to liberate themselves from slavery. While the act was meant to assuage the Southern malcontent at the admission of California as a free state in the same year, it prompted widespread protests in Northern cities from abolitionists who sought to prevent the enforcement of what they saw as a fundamentally evil law.
I thought about skipping President Trump’s State of the Union address, but out of a sense of civic duty—or perhaps misplaced hope—I watched it anyway. In what became the longest such address in U.S. history, Trump’s joint address to Congress devolved from political theater into vicious partisan baiting and derision.
I remember a distant past, almost too faint to recall with clarity. That season, so long ago, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, has since been eclipsed by the pressing concerns of our day. We now live with the backdrop of global shifts, political instability, war, and domestic turmoil. But when I think back on that time, one overwhelming emotion returns with acuity: a deep concern for the safety of my friends and loved ones. Unfortunately, that same fear has crept back with suffocating weight due to rising measles cases in the U.S. But this time, the demographics I am most concerned with are not the elderly or those with preexisting conditions. I am most concerned for the most vulnerable among us: our children.
Since the first documented case in South Carolina in October 2025, the state has reported 979 cases, and the numbers are rising. The surge in outbreaks threatens to reverse the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s declaration that measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000. At this rate, we are on the verge of losing elimination status. The moral crisis deepens with reports that two detainees in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center have tested positive for measles.