I’m sick of Donald Trump, so let’s talk religion, specifically, Christianity.
Last week Ash Wednesday began the 2026 Lenten season, a period of 40 days before Easter during which Christians are supposed to fast and engage in self-examination.
This year Ash Wednesday was also marked by what I believe was a significant event. Some 400 American religious leaders published a statement (they call it a “letter”) in response to Donald Trump’s “cruel and oppressive government,” calling all Christians “to resist the injustices and anti-democratic danger sweeping across the nation.”
In the face of such danger, the authors said, silence is not a sign of neutrality, but “an active choice to permit harm.” The crisis America is in, they insisted, “is not only political—it is one driven by a moral and spiritual collapse showing up in alarming levels of polarization. Our faith is being tested,” they said, and ‘Christians cannot pretend otherwise and must make a decision to act.”
The authors also assailed the corrosive ideology of Christian Nationalism, declaring, that “we must never preach nationalism as discipleship, confuse American and Christian identity with whiteness, or mistake allegiance to modern-day Caesars for faithfulness to Christ.”
History, the reminded us, will judge our actions: “If we as Christians fail to speak and act now – clearly, courageously, and prophetically – we will be remembered not only for the injustices committed in our time, but for the righteous possibilities we allowed to die in our hands.”
Not only will future generations remember the choices we are making now, the statement said, but “the God of heaven and earth will judge our faithfulness.” Thus, every Christian must be willing “to take risks for the sake of the Gospel and our democratic rights and freedoms.”
Strong words. Provocative words. As I read them what immediately came to my mind was the Barmen Declaration of 1933 that challenged the theological apostasy of “the German Christian movement” within the German Evangelical Church that supported the nationalistic and racist ideology of Hitler and his Nazi political party.
The parallels between then and now are striking. Leaders such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized early on that German Christians who were supporting Hitler were making a tragic mistake born of an aberrant Christian nationalism that was blinding them of the fatal compromise they were making.
The Ash Wednesday statement of last week represents a similar type of warning to American Christians who are supporting Donald Trump. Evangelical leaders fawning over Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast a few weeks ago come to mind as examples of Christians today compromising themselves as the German Christians did.
Some people object to such comparison, arguing that it is too extreme to compare what is happening here in America today with what happened in Germany.
My response is that they apparently think comparisons must be exact to be true, but they are wrong, as writer Mary Geddry explained when she recently wrote, “…a comparison is not a claim of identical outcomes, nor a claim that history repeats with perfect symmetry; it is a way of tracing patterns across time, a way of identifying how democracies can be hollowed out while their citizens insist the walls are still standing.”
In truth, it is both instructive and essential that we see the parallels between the German Christian movement and American Christians supporting Trump precisely because Trump is a threat to Christianity and the nation in his own way much as Hitler was to Christianity and Germany in his.
The Barmen Declaration gave the German Christian movement a chance to understand the mistake it was making. It chose, instead, to ignore it, leading to the emergence of the Confessing Church of Germany led by such figures as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller whose poetic confession, “First They Came,” is widely quoted today.
The story of what happened in Germany historians have told underscores the fact that it was the Confessing Church that did not compromise its faith, unlike the German Evangelical Church that bent to the will of the German Christian movement and in the process lost its soul.
I have no doubt history will tell the same story about what is happening here in the U. S. today. The comparison between the German Christian movement and Christians supporting Trump will be unavoidable.
This is why the 2026 Ash Wednesday declaration by mainstream Christian leaders is so important. Just as the Barmen Declaration said the church had only one Lord and it was not the German state, so the Ash Wednesday declaration is unequivocal in saying that there is nothing Christian about supporting Donald Trump and his administration. Nothing.
Perhaps that declaration won’t make any difference to Trump Christians, but it represents a moment of truth for those of us who reject Trump and everything he stands for, not least because it assures us that ours is a righteous cause.
History will, of course, be the final arbiter of the significance of the Ash Wednesday declaration, but I believe when all is said and done it will be seen as a pivotal moment when American Christianity took a major step in saving itself from losing its soul.
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