I was already several minutes in before they got to the clip of Vice President JD Vance at the Turning Point event. I had been listening, following the setup, knowing full well I was clicking into the kind of political spectacle that has become far too familiar. Then they prepared to show the clip. I listened just long enough to hear a student yelling something about genocide, and I paused it.

I did not stop the video because I was confused. I stopped it because I was tired. More than that, I stopped it because my body recognized the pattern before my mind even finished naming it. I did not need to hear the rest to know what kind of moment this was going to be: power posturing as composure, grievance dressed up as conviction, another public performance from people who talk endlessly about morality and leadership while embodying so little of either.

And in that moment, something became very clear to me.

These people do not speak for all Christians.

Part of what hit me so hard is that the noise is never just political anymore. It is moral noise. Religious noise. Nationalist noise. A student is yelling about genocide. A vice president is standing in the middle of a movement that constantly wraps power in the language of virtue. A president is posting images of himself as Jesus like a blasphemous internet troll with executive authority. Some of his own supporters recoil from it while others excuse it, laugh it off, or bend themselves into theological pretzels trying to explain why it is not as grotesque as it plainly is. None of this is spiritually serious, and yet so much of it is happening under the banner of public Christianity.

That realization matters to me because I was not raised outside Christianity, looking in from a distance with easy cynicism. I was raised close enough to it to know what it was supposed to ask of people. I grew up in church. I was there for morning services and evening services, prayer meetings and potlucks. I was even there for the groundbreaking ceremony for our little church. Some of my most formative years were shaped in those spaces. I was taught what faith was supposed to look like when it was lived honestly.

And whatever this political performance is now, it is not that.

I understand there are many kinds of Christians, many denominations, many interpretations, and many ways people explain their beliefs. I understand that faith has always been filtered through culture, region, family, personality, and power. But I also know the difference between a sincere spiritual tradition and a political identity dressed up in sacred language.

A real Christian ethic, at its core, is not hard to recognize. It is supposed to be rooted in humility, honesty, compassion, self-control, forgiveness, service, and love for neighbor. Not just love for the neighbor who looks like you, votes like you, worships like you, or flatters your worldview. Love for neighbor means something much harder than tribal loyalty. It means restraint. It means conscience. It means caring how you treat other human beings, even when it is inconvenient, even when it costs you something, even when you are angry.

That is part of why this moment in history feels so jarring to so many of us.

What is being pushed under the banner of Christianity right now often looks like the exact opposite of the values it claims to defend. It is loud where it should be thoughtful. Defensive where it should be grounded. Cruel where it should be compassionate. Performative where it should be convicted. It is obsessed with dominance, grievance, image, and control. It confuses power with righteousness and outrage with moral clarity. It rewards arrogance, excuses indecency, and then has the nerve to call all of that faith.

And some of us can see that because we remember what the teachings were supposed to be.

I do not say that as someone trying to reclaim Christianity for myself. I have moved outside the faith in many ways, and that has been its own struggle. It has also given me a vantage point I did not have when I was still trying to make every contradiction fit inside a framework I had inherited. That is the strange position I occupy now: close enough to remember the language from the inside, distant enough to see what has been done to it. I know what I was taught. I also know what I am seeing.

And what I am seeing, over and over again, is that much of what passes for public Christianity is not really about Christ at all. It is about turning religion into identity, using moral language as a shield for power, and confusing cultural dominance with spiritual authority.

That is where Christian nationalism comes in.

Christian nationalism does not simply distort faith. It weaponizes it. It takes the language of religion and fuses it to politics, grievance, hierarchy, and national identity until the two can barely be separated. It asks people to believe that their country, their political tribe, their cultural preferences, and their religion are all part of the same sacred order. It turns spiritual language into a loyalty test. It turns God into a mascot for the state. It turns disagreement into heresy.

That is not faith. It is ideology draped in religious language.

Maybe that is part of what makes the recent Trump-as-Jesus imagery feel so grotesque. It is not just offensive because it is absurd. It is offensive because it reveals the depth of the rot. When a political movement can circulate that kind of image, and when some of its loudest defenders can excuse it or rationalize it, you are no longer looking at faith in any serious sense. You are looking at ego, spectacle, and the steady collapse of moral seriousness. You are looking at a movement so drunk on its own self-importance that it can no longer tell the difference between reverence and idolatrous nonsense.

And yet even there, the backlash matters.

Because the outrage does not only come from the left. It comes from Christians too. It comes from Catholics. It comes from believers who still understand that there is something deeply warped about treating Christ as an accessory for political theater. That matters because it exposes the lie at the center of Christian nationalism: the lie that it speaks for Christianity itself. It does not. It speaks for a faction. A loud one, a shameless one, and a dangerous one, but still only a faction.

What struck me last night, sitting there with my finger on pause, was not just how exhausted I am by the spectacle. It was the realization that the whole project is weaker than it wants us to believe.

How do you turn a country into a Christian nation when Christians themselves do not agree on what Christianity even requires?

How do you claim divine authority in a nation full of Protestants, Catholics, Pentecostals, Apostolics, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Orthodox believers, non-denominational believers, ex-Christians, people of other faiths, and people of no faith at all?

How do you build a moral consensus on top of so many contradictions?

You do not.

You can pass laws. You can elevate the loudest and most shameless voices. You can pressure institutions. You can reward public performance over private conscience. You can make fear feel holy and cruelty feel principled. You can turn ignorance into a badge of honor and call criticism persecution.

But you still cannot force authenticity.
You cannot manufacture spiritual legitimacy.
And you cannot honestly claim to speak for all Christians when so many people, including people raised in the church, can see the distortion for exactly what it is.

That may be the only light I found in that moment.

Not that the danger is fake. It is not fake.
Not that the damage is small. It is not small.
Not that the people driving this movement are powerless. They are not powerless.

But they are not universal.

They do not speak for every Christian grandmother who quietly lived a life of decency and prayer.
They do not speak for every believer who still understands that humility matters.
They do not speak for every person who has ever read the Bible and noticed how often power is warned against.
They do not speak for every former believer who left the institution but still remembers the difference between mercy and manipulation.
And they certainly do not speak for the whole country.

That matters.

It matters because one of the great tricks of this era is repetition. Not argument. Not depth. Repetition. If people hear the same distorted version of Christianity often enough, they begin to mistake familiarity for truth. If they see enough politicians, pundits, influencers, and preachers weaponize faith in public, they begin to assume the weaponization must be part of the religion itself. If cruelty is wrapped in religious language often enough, the wrapping starts to look like doctrine.

That is how distortion spreads. Not always through careful persuasion, but through saturation. Through slogans repeated until they feel ancient. Through talking points repeated until they sound like principles. Through public theater repeated until performance begins to pass for conviction. Over time, people stop asking whether something is faithful, ethical, or even true. They start asking only whether it sounds recognizable.

And some of us know it is recognizable precisely because we have watched the message change.

That may be one of the strangest griefs of all: to remember a language before it was hollowed out. To remember when words like faith, prayer, grace, humility, and service still pointed, however imperfectly, toward something deeper than branding, tribalism, or political dominance. To remember enough of the original moral expectation that the imitation cannot fully fool you.

Some people have reached for the language of antichrist, and I understand why. I do not mean that in the sensational, prophecy-chart way that so often takes over American religion. I mean something simpler than that. If Christ is supposed to represent humility, mercy, truth, restraint, and care for the vulnerable, then what do we call a politics that exalts domination, deceit, spectacle, cruelty, and self-worship while draping itself in Christian language? Whatever else it is, it is not reflecting Christ. It is a vulgar inversion of the values it claims to defend.

That is why I did not need to finish the video.

I already knew what I was looking at.

I was looking at another performance of power pretending to be principle. Another public display of ego masquerading as conviction. Another reminder that too many people in leadership now are missing the very qualities that would have been expected in almost any ordinary workplace: composure, accountability, discernment, empathy, and self-control.

And maybe that is the strange gift of being on the outside now.

I can see more clearly.

I can see that what is being sold as Christian leadership is often neither particularly Christian nor meaningfully moral. I can see that many of the loudest men demanding cultural submission do not reflect the teachings they claim to defend. I can see that this movement is trying to force a narrow ideology onto a country that is far too diverse, too fractured, too aware, and too full of contradiction to hold that lie together forever.

So no, I did not finish the video.

I paused it.
I sat with the discomfort.
And I realized that maybe the light at the end of the tunnel is this:

The louder they become, the more obvious it is that they do not speak for all Christians.

They never did.