Onward 'Christian' Soldiers
Behind Trump’s rush to gut the government and remake America is a powerful, educated religious cohort with White Jesus on its side
Three hundred ninety four years and one day before President Trump spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6, Roger Williams, the fulcrum of American religious liberty, landed on the shores of New England.
In 1644, Williams wrote: “God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state…true civility and Christianity may both flourish in a state or Kingdome, notwithstanding the permission of divers and contrary consciences, either of Jew or Gentile.”
Williams no doubt would have been pleased with himself — or as pleased as someone who started out as a radical Puritan can be — when about one hundred fifty years later his belief in the immutable division between church and state was established in the New World by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”
There is much about the 47th President of the United States that might have perplexed Williams. The notion that God had intervened to save Trump’s life would surely have given him pause, though few at the Prayer Breakfast blanched when Trump claimed in reference to the inept assassin who nicked his ear: “So, you never know, but God did that. I mean, it had to be.”
On its face, Williams might not have had trouble with Trump’s closing admonition at the Prayer Breakfast: “Let’s bring religion back. Let’s bring God back into our lives.” The founder of Rhode Island, who made several stops in his search for the right road to heaven, would have agreed that God should have a prominent place in the life of every mortal.
However, had Williams been able to recognize the political dog whistles that prick up the ears of right-wing Americans these days, he would have been aghast. Because what Trump, JD Vance, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and an emerging army of religious zealots want is not just God in their individual lives but central to the life of our nation. A Christian God, that is.

Opus Dei et al. Call them Christian nationalists or American postliberals or acolytes of the secretive Catholic sect Opus Dei or members of the New Right or whatever label these believers in a beatific America bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit use to describe themselves. They all don’t agree on everything, but their overarching goal, often cloaked in a strained and smug intellectualism, is to demolish the secular state. In its place, they want a country with White Jesus at its core.
Look around. You can see the tentacles of this invasive subset of the MAGA movement in the radical right wing’s Project 2025 and in Trump policies that derive from it. Not to demean those in red hats, but this slick, educated cadre has an agenda that transcends tailgate parties at campaign rallies. The “lock-her-up, send’em-home, make-meat-cheaper” yahoos are not exactly foot soldiers — and most probably don’t give a damn if they are tools. Still, they did help elect a transactional messiah who doesn’t care if he is being played by Jesus Jumpers or Elon Musk as long as he is perceived as the Brilliant Leader, financially enriched along his divinely inspired path to immortality.
Mass deportations is just one of the ways these Christian thinkers want to “restore” the United States to a peaceful and prosperous Ward and June Cleaver country — if the Cleavers got their kicks from theological retreats. The Constant Tribune will examine other elements of their agenda in coming columns, but this can be said about those advocating for the wholesale removal of aspiring Americans who labor in brutal slaughterhouses or help communities rebuild after devastating disasters like Hurricane Katrina (see below): They’re not very Christian.
Illegal migrants are, for the most part, poor people doing whatever they need to do to find a better life and raise up themselves and their children — like every wave of immigrants to these not-always-welcoming shores. Yes, they are line-jumpers. And if you have ever stood in a New York queue, you know that nobody likes a line-jumper.
So seal all borders tighter than a snare drum and eject the criminal element among the migrants. But no need to be heartless like Tom Homan, the President’s deportation czar and self-described “life-long Catholic,” or casually callous like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who likes to dress up like an ICE agent and then go on Fox News in her night-raid outfit.
No need to drag migrant children out of schools or wrest frightened families from churches. Dreamers, military veterans, and undocumented immigrants who have been here for years working and paying taxes should be given a pass. A reasonable cut-off point would be 2021, when the Biden Administration’s failure to stop the most recent stampede began.
Wrong Christians. For the most part, migrants from south of the border are Christians, so you might wonder why they don’t fit into the scheme for remaking America into a conservative theocracy. The answer is simple: Migrants are the wrong kind of Christians. They are largely brown-skinned and possess little more than the clothes on their backs.
This Christian wave washing over Washington is different than the previous political pander to mega-church evangelicals. Those domed Sunday revivals have been breeding grounds for MAGAs mesmerized by sanctimonious hustlers who promise eternal rewards in exchange for overflowing collection baskets and maybe a sense of (White) community in the face of woke-a-dope pronouncements from a physically and culturally remote federal government antithetical to faux-frontier, best-man-wins beliefs.
The new genuflecting class is more likely steeped in conservative Roman Catholic thought that hews toward the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI rather than that of the relatively progressive Pope Francis or the unsung egalitarian Pope Paul VI.
Besides Vance, among others, this influential cadre of Christian nationalists includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Office of Management & Budget Director Russell Vought (not a Catholic); Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and chief architect of Project 2025; and Leonard Leo, vice-president of the Federalist Society and one of the prime engineers of the Right’s takeover of the judiciary, which includes six Supreme Court justices who identify as conservative Catholics. Both Roberts and Leo are closely affiliated with the Catholic Information Center (CIC) in Washington, which is an Opus Dei operation.
In a video on the CIC website, Father Charles Trullols, an Opus Dei priest who is director of the CIC, urges all Catholics visiting Washington to come to the group’s chapel on K Street to pray “and together we will transform our country through God.”
The Theology of Deportations. Then there is Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame political science professor and theorist; mentor to both Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; author of the best-seller Why Liberalism Failed; and a principal of the Substack publication Postliberal Order. Deneen has also led seminars at the Leonine Forum, which partners with the CIC, where young professionals are trained to incorporate Catholic teachings into their political and corporate work lives.
Postliberal Order’s “about” says: “The liberal ordering of the world is exhausting us. We are addicted to endless innovations which don’t improve our lives, and the more we seek to transgress every moral limit, we find ourselves ever more solitary, ever more detached from ourselves, from our families, from our countries, and our God.”
Vance, a convert who is particularly close to Deneen, last week attempted to justify the corralling of migrants, which for some includes detention at Guantanamo Bay and forced return to the repressive regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, by citing the concept of ordo amoris, or order of love. In practice, Vance argued, Christian love must first be given to family and then expanded to neighbors, community, and country. Translation: a Christian America First.
In an extraordinary scolding of the Trump Administration and Vance, Pope Francis wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops on February 11: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
A recent article on the Substack “magazine” The American Postliberal — which seems to be an homage to the Deneen site, only overtly Trumpian and written by younger and lesser thinkers — attempted to expand on Vance’s ordo amoris pronouncements with an extensive argument quoting St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
I prefer one of the simple rules of St. Benedict: “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ.”
Or to put it closer to home: You want America to be a Christian Nation? Treat every undocumented, law-abiding immigrant as if she or he was born in Bethlehem.
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For secular sense about illegal immigration, listen to Haley Barbour, the former Republican governor and onetime chairman of the Republican National Committee. He got it right years ago.
The Wonderous & The Wonderful
Patriots at the Barricades
Why is New York Attorney General Leticia James (born-in-Brooklyn, no-nonsense Democrat) calling Danielle Sassoon (Republican, clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, member of the conservative Federalist Society) “a profile in courage”?
Because she is.
Until Thursday, Sassoon was the acting U.S Attorney for the Southern District of New York. She resigned rather than terminate the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams on orders from the Trumped-up Justice Department. In doing so, she set off a stream of resignations by career prosecutors both in New York and Washington who are reacting with their feet to the corruption already sloshing through the corridors of the Justice like the wave of blood washing through hallways in The Shining.
A BBC profile of Sassoon quoted a tribute she wrote to Scalia that said in part: "Sometimes, when you peek behind the curtain of power, you suffer a rude awakening. What you find is corruption, ego, or a lack of ideals and intellectual heft."
To be clear, Adams has not been convicted of any of the crimes for which he was indicted, which include wire fraud and soliciting and accepting bribes from a foreign national. However, the mayor certainly hasn’t been behaving like a font of innocence, visiting the President at Mar-a-Lago to lobby for a pardon and Trump-talking about the “weaponization” of the justice system against him.
If proven, the case against Adamas would land him in the rogues gallery of City Hall sleaze, alongside such scallywags as Mayors Marion Barry of Washington and Buddy Cianci of Providence (God rest their charming, always-for-sale souls). But it is likely that the case will never be prosecuted, and Adams will be free to run again or maybe join the Trump Administration as a bribery adviser now that greasing palms overseas is no longer forbidden.
It is probably folly to hope that Sassoon and her fellow patriots will spark a broader American Resistance by principled professionals across the federal government who refuse to abandon integrity in the face of intense pressure from Red Swamp creatures like the disgraces coming up. But maybe I’m wrong (again). Maybe it’s mutual, not-going-to-take-it-anymore revulsion that will bring Republican and Democratic officials and citizens of good conscience together.
The Awful & The Odious
A-Words of the Week
Emil Bove III, the acting Deputy Attorney General and former Trump lawyer , slapped back after Danielle Sassoon laid out her rationale for refusing to squash the prosecution of Adams. “You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General,” he wrote.
She lost sight of her oath? Even the conservative National Review lauded Sassoon’s “act of courage and integrity.”
In the end, Bove and a couple of complicit associates signed the paperwork necessary to withdraw the prosecution of Mayor Adams, though the courts may seek justification for such an unusual termination when, as Sassoon pointed out, there is ample evidence of criminal behavior.
Bove suggested that moving ahead with the prosecution of Adams would distract the mayor from a Trump Administration priority — rounding up illegal migrants. AG Pam Bondi’s errand boy, who might remind a cruel observer of Roy Cohn without the year-round tan (a look adopted by his protégé), denied that lifting the legal weight off Adams’ bespoke shoulders in exchange for his cooperation in the war on illegals amounted to a quid pro quo.
But apparently no one briefed deportation czar Tom Homan, who could easily be mistaken for one of the drooling shot-and-a-beer barflies you used to see in the Blarney Stone near the old Penn Station in New York. On Friday, Homan appeared on Fox and Friends with Adams. When asked what he would do if the mayor didn’t hold up his side of the bargain and cooperate with ICE, Homan said: “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch, I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is this agreement we came to?’”
Classy.
But then as Homan’s boss has demonstrated for decades, you can’t buy class.