A teacher’s aide in Darke County, Ohio, watches her gas prices climb past four dollars a gallon and calls it a righteous exchange. A multi-generational farmer in Mercer County takes a several-thousand-dollar loss when the president rattles cattle markets and names that loss trust. What these voters call revival is the oldest captured operation in American Christianity: the substitution of the empire’s altar for the Lord’s table, dressed up in the language of faith.
The recent Wall Street Journal report from western Ohio gave flesh to the numbers. Nicci Keiser, a Catholic mother of four, says the president’s second term has restored Christianity to American politics because people are returning to the roots of making themselves better people. Bill Knapke, who manages hundreds of thousands of laying hens and raises steers across 350 acres, absorbs rising fertilizer and fuel costs because he believes the president holds the country’s best interests at heart. They are willing to pay the price. Let me name the transaction they are making, because I used to sit in the pews where it was made to feel holy. We who spent thirty years inside the apparatus recognize the exact vocabulary Keiser and Knapke are using. We were formed in churches that told us Ronald Reagan was God’s man for the job, that the Supreme Court was a mission field, that the flag in the sanctuary was a statement of rightful dominion. We believed it. We taught it. And the machine we helped build now churns out Christians who think gas prices are a small price to pay for a nation that can bomb Iran and deport their neighbors.
Jesus put the choice in a single sentence: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Matthew 16:26). Plainly read, the text identifies a spiritual bankruptcy the Evangelical apparatus has spent a generation learning to invert. Jesus does not mean the believer should calculate the exchange rate and, if the world is cheap enough, make the trade. He means the trade itself is the forfeiture. A soul is not a currency that can be spent to purchase a political arrangement, and no amount of cultural realignment compensates for what is lost on the other side of the ledger. The legalist interpretation-machinery reads the verse as an eschatological warning deferred to a future judgment, while the present age is a necessary battlefield for dominion. In this reading, economic pain is a righteous tithe, and the teacher’s aide calls her rising grocery bill a sign of progress and the farmer calls his commodity loss a mark of patriotism. They have internalized a gospel in which Christ has been swapped for the nation-state.
The same Scripture makes the point from the other direction: “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). The Greek is mamōnas — wealth and material security — which these voters have elevated to include national prestige itself. When a farmer loses thousands of dollars because the president picked a fight with the beef markets, and that farmer calls the loss acceptable because it advances America’s standing, the farmer is serving mammon. He is serving the god of national prestige. He is not, in that transaction, serving the God of the Bible, whose prophets never stopped screaming that the measure of a nation is how it treats the poor. Amos was run out of Bethel for less.
What Nicci Keiser described as a “big Christian movement coming back” has nothing to do with the movement Jesus inaugurated. Jesus inaugurated a movement in which the primary evidence of discipleship was care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46). The “Christian movement” that Trump’s base celebrates has made its central demand the opposite: the stranger is the enemy, and the hungry bear the cost of national greatness. We have watched more Republicans approve of Trump on immigration than on the economy, even as his overall economic approval slides under the weight of the Iran war — a revealing inversion that locates the movement’s moral center not in the Bible’s concern for the poor but in the machinery of enforcement.
When the prophet Isaiah stood in the temple and told the rulers of Sodom — and he meant the leaders of Jerusalem — that God hated their festivals because their hands were full of blood, he was not making a metaphor about culture-war loyalty. He was talking about specific economic practices: the failure to defend the oppressed, to take up the cause of the fatherless, to plead the case of the widow (Isaiah 1:10–17). The Christian nationalism that has captured Darke County has substituted the very worship Isaiah condemned — loud, frequent, patriotic worship that steps over the bodies of the vulnerable — and called it revival.
The local Democratic chair in Mercer County names the culture war as a distraction from fertilizer prices, but the distraction produces a real casualty. She reports that Latino families in the area now feel unsafe, afraid to step outside and risk being singled out by ICE, stripped of the quiet dignity of simply living a simple life. Amos 8:4–6 records the prophet’s indictment against those who “trample the needy” and ask, “When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain?” The legalist reading spiritualizes Amos into a warning about personal idolatry; the plain-language reading points directly to an economic system that grinds up the vulnerable to keep the borders enforced for the benefit of the secure. It is not just the immigrant worker who is caught in this machinery. The farmer himself is being asked to pay for it. He buys the manure, he fuels the semi-trucks, he absorbs the loss, all while the rhetoric tells him he is the architect of a national restoration. He is not the architect. He is the fuel.
The fear in Darke County is real. The county GOP chair acknowledges that enthusiasm may cool, but voters stay aligned because the alternative is terrifying — they fear gas would be seven dollars under the Democrats. The apparatus feeds that fear and calls it discipleship. Matthew 16:26 does not offer a discount on the soul if the buyer is wearing a cross. The forfeited soul costs the same regardless of which political party is arranging the sale.
This is not the Christianity of the New Testament. It is the Christianity Frederick Douglass distinguished from the “Christianity of Christ” — the slaveholding, cradle-plundering Christianity of his own day that quoted the same King James Bible and sang the same hymns. It is the Christianity that the 2022 Guidepost investigation exposed inside the Southern Baptist Convention: a machine that protected abusers while singing “Just As I Am.” It is the Christianity the biblical prophets would recognize instantly as the one they were sent to indict. The same shape, different century.
The Wall Street Journal’s numbers show that enthusiasm is cooling. But the refusal to break with Trump is theological before it is political. The voters who remain are not merely sticking with a politician. They are defending a god they have built. They have invested their identity in a narrative in which America’s enemies are God’s enemies and America’s strength is God’s strength. That is not the God of the Bible. It is a golden calf, hammered out of cultural resentment, oil, and military budgets, and the high priests are seminary presidents and cable-news personalities, not the pastors of the poor.
The believers in Ohio are not mistaken to want a better root-system or to long for a culture where making oneself a better person is not mocked. But a movement whose stated aim is making better people is visibly making them poorer. The arithmetic is unintelligible until you recognize that “better” here means more loyal to the apparatus, not more capable of feeding a family. The Sermon on the Mount and the household balance sheet agree on this one: a harvest of fear does not yield a crop of life. The kingdom is not restored by making the congregation poorer so that the empire can afford a larger army. It is already here, and it asks the farmer to keep his farm and the teacher to keep her peace, rather than trading both for a seat at a table that will not feed them.
“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). That invitation follows the indictment. It is still open, right now, for the Nicci Keisers of my own past — for the women in the pews who have been told that making America Christian again is the same thing as following Jesus. It is not. The first step of reasoning together is to stop calling the idol by God’s name. A soul is not a line item in a political budget, and no amount of flag-waving in the sanctuary changes what the ledger already shows.