How MAGA learned to love Christian persecution
Their "faith" has become a weapon of white nationalism.
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It’s a familiar cri de coeur howled by conservative talking heads and Republican politicians: Christians in America are under siege.
Although every American president, nearly every Supreme Court justice, and the vast majority of members of Congress, governors, and state legislators are Christian, conservative Christians bemoan their supposed dwindling political power. They falsely claim Christians are persecuted for merely expressing their faith. In the absence of real persecution, some Christians and their media allies simply invent transgressions, like the absurd myth that Americans can no longer wish people “Merry Christmas.”
Today’s white Christian nationalists, who along with Trump scream about persecution, are part of a long tradition.
“For more than a century, white evangelicals in the United States have cultivated a myth that Christians are under siege by a hostile secular culture,” explains Ruth Braunstein of the Religion News Service. “This ‘persecution complex’ has been stoked for decades by white evangelical leaders, conspiracy theorists, right-wing media stars and, most recently, Donald Trump, who tells his white evangelical flock that without his protection the secular left will destroy them.”
And yet there is an ongoing, vivid, and sometimes lethal case of Christian persecution, one for which roughly one-sixth of those Christians under siege are evangelical protestants. Anyone who wants a closer glimpse of this horrific and systemic persecution can do so easily: Just turn on your TV and watch whatever agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) are up to.
That’s right: Although ICE and CBP also round up people from Somalia or other African countries, and many Asian immigrants, their primary target group is Latinos.
ICE’s Latino victims
Despite the media’s overwhelming focus on ICE’s January murders of two white Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, most people killed by ICE or who died in detention centers since Donald Trump took office in January 2025 have Latino surnames or came here from Latin American countries.
Since the start of Trump’s second term ICE or CBP so far have shot nine people, seven men and two women. A man and woman shot in Portland were not identified. Of the remaining seven whose identities are known, three have what appear to be Latino surnames: Marimar Martinez, a female who survived, and two men who died, Silvio Villegas Gonzalez and Isais Sanchez Barboza. (A federal judge ruled earlier this month that Martinez can release text messages she received from the border patrol agent who shot her.)
The share of those who have died in ICE detention centers who are Latino is much higher. Based on a cursory review of their surnames and countries of origin, a solid majority of the 32 persons who died in ICE detention centers last year are also Latinos. (The remaining victims immigrated from a variety of countries including China, Haiti, and Vietnam.)
The vast majority of Latinos are, of course, Christians.
It is difficult to ascertain whether the religious attitudes of undocumented and legally- residing Latinos exactly mirror those of native-born and naturalized Latino citizens. But assuming the two groups are similar, Latino non-citizens are overwhelmingly Christian. ICE has also detained Latino Christian pastors in both Easton, Maryland, and Brooklyn, New York.
But Latinos are far from a religious monolith, and, like their citizen cohorts, they’re becoming more secular. According to Pew Research Center, 42 percent of American Latinos in 2024 identified as Catholic. What’s notable is that this Catholic share plummeted from 67 percent since 2010. This decline has been offset by growth, from 10 percent to 27 percent during the same period, of Latinos who self-identify as “religiously unaffiliated,” “agnostic,” or “nothing in particular.”
Perhaps most interesting is the relatively stable share — about 17 percent in both 2010 and 2024 — of Latinos who self-identify as evangelical protestants. One wonders if most white evangelical Christians who do not attend services in mixed-race or predominantly Latino evangelical churches realize that roughly one-sixth of US Latinos are their religious brethren.
In 2023, 60 percent of evangelicals Christians said they “experience a lot of discrimination” but believe that only 39 percent gays and lesbians do. (Perhaps they’re discounting the effects of their own discrimination directed toward gays and lesbians, notwithstanding evangelicals’ professed “love the sinner, hate the sin” mantra.)
Christian nationalists and law enforcement
Trump administration-aligned Christian nationalists are unapologetic about their support for ICE. In fact, some openly reject calls from religious leaders to reconsider the administration’s violent immigration policies.
Asked recently to respond to Pope Leo’s criticisms of Trump’s mass deportation, House Speaker Mike Johnson was unrepentant: “Sovereign borders are biblical and right and just. It’s not because we hate the people on the outside. It’s because we love the people on the inside.”
Meanwhile, the DHS has even cited biblical passages in social media posts designed to justify the administration’s brutal policies.
Those who study white evangelical Christian movements are not surprised by how disconnected their attitudes are from political reality and the policies currently on display. In fact, many conservative American Christians happily ignore entreaties from the Beatitudes to bless the neediest in favor of exacting punishment on them.
“What some on the hard right think is religion amounts, in many cases, to a punitive impulse: the desire to punish perceived evildoers and transgressors,” Katherine Stewart, an expert on white Christian nationalism and author of the 2025 New York Times bestseller, “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy,” wrote to me by email. “Some of them are explicitly against ‘unmanly,’ ‘woke,’ ‘love-thy-neighbor’ forms of the Christian faith — which is, ironically, how many if not most American Christians understand their faith.”
That disposition gibes with white Christian nationalists’ politicized views of law enforcement.
University of Oklahoma professor Samuel Perry is a renowned scholar on white Christian nationalism and author or co-author of five books on religion and politics, including “The Flag and The Cross.” As it happens, Perry and his colleagues are currently studying how Christian nationalist sentiments affect how white Americans regard different law enforcement agencies. Their work relies upon data from two Public Religion and Research Institute (PRRI) polls.
Results from the first 2022 PRRI survey confirmed that the degree to which white Americans subscribe to Christian nationalist ideas “hardly changes” their favorability toward “local police.” But “their favorability toward ‘Capitol police’ actually plummets. Why? Because in the wake of January 6, 2021, the US Capitol police are those who were trying to control insurrectionists with whom white Christian nationalists identify. Law enforcement in this case are the bad guys, the “oppressive arm of the state.”
The 2025 survey produced an eerily similar but inverse result. When asked how they felt about police generally or ICE officers specifically, the more that whites subscribe to Christian nationalism again changes their support for the police “only slightly.” But asked about ICE officers, their “support skyrockets” because, as Perry explained to me by email, they view ICE as “serving white conservative Americans and busting on their ethno-cultural enemies.” (Both italics are Perry’s.)
The clergy respond
Meanwhile, the response from Latino clergy to the harms ICE is causing Christian Latino parishioners depends upon the respondent.
“I’m 40 years old, born in California and for me as a pastor, I am traumatized,” said Pastor Victor Martinez, who worries that his New Generation Church in Minneapolis may have to close because congregants are too afraid to attend services. “Every now and then, I get worried and emotional. I’ve had white Republican suburban pastors call me and just apologize to me so profusely.”
Many Catholic bishops are also speaking out against ICE.
“We were told that the government’s mass deportation effort would focus on deporting violent criminals. So why is Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting churches and school pickups?” asks Catholic Diocese of Yakima, Washington, bishop the Rev. Joseph J. Tyson, in a recent commentary. Thomas cited data from the Cato Institute and New York Times that showed a mere five to seven percent of ICE detainees are estimated to have violent criminal records. He reminded readers that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced “indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
But major Trump supporter and National Hispanic Evangelical Leadership Council COO Tony Suarez continues to defend his three presidential votes for Trump. Asked at an October public forum to respond to the attacks by ICE agents on churchgoers and even pastors like himself, Suarez offered an embarrassing explanation for why he was unaware that federal agents assaulted two white Christian preachers, one of whom ICE non-fatally shot with rubber bullets.
“I’ve not been shot and I don’t want to downplay that, but to say, I guess I’m not as involved in the protests the way I used to be to know about that,” Suarez confessed. “So I apologize. I’ll have to do some more, a little work on this.”
So does Attorney General Pam Bondi. Apparently, Bondi’s Department of Justice — which recently arrested two African American journalists merely for covering a protest at a church — will not bother to investigate when church operations are interrupted by violent ICE or CBP agents, even when they harass or injure Christian congregants and pastors. ICE arrests made at or near churches or church events are rare, but have occurred in both New Jersey and California.
Even if those rounded up by ICE were not fellow Christians, true adherents of Christ’s teachings should take biblical offense to the persecution of their co-religionists. So argues Aaron Griffith, Duke Divinity School assistant professor and author of “God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America,” in a recent essay.
Citing the inclusive ethic in Paul’s letter to the Galatians — namely, that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” — Griffith reminds devotees that their Christians bonds transcend cultures and boundaries, that their values ought to supersede governments, policies, and especially borders.
“Christians across the country (and around the world) should ask hard questions about the work of ICE and its harmful impact on Christian communities who worship the same Lord,” Griffith writes. “Christians should reject double standards when we identify threats to Christian worship and community in this country.”
In testaments both Old (Leviticus 19:34: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”) and New (Matthew 25:35: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”), the Christian ethic regarding foreigners is clear. Yet, the sad irony is that many of the same white Christian nationalists who believe biblical tenets ought to supersede if not replace the US Constitution are among those quickest to subsume their faith to the siege mentality of an oppressive government.
Or at least the persecutive sieges of this oppressive government.
That’s it for today
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Thank you for this article Tom Schaller. As a Catholic I am appalled by the hate and hypocrisy and blatant disregard of Jesus’ teachings. Thankfully Pope Leo and the American College of Bishops are speaking out.
I wish Pam Bondi, Karoline Leavitt, Kristi Noem would remove those crosses from their necks. And shame on Speaker Johnson- always.
I find it rich to read of the many ways individuals who proclaim to be Christian but also support the abuses of ICE and CBP explain their reasoning- I haven’t read that, I have been too busy to watch the news, if “they” say these people are violent then it must be so, the streets are not safe as long as these “terrorists “ are free, and the worst mentioned in this article- I haven’t been shot so….so what will it take for these “Christians “ to wake up and smell the rot of which they have been supporting?