In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
From AI blasphemies to attacks on the papacy to prayers from the filmography of Quentin Tarantino, the Trump administration has managed to pack what feels like a year’s worth of breaking religion news into the past week. Since Sunday, when Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a healing Jesus Christ and then bizarrely attacked Pope Leo XIV as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” matters have escalated, or rather descended, into greater depths of what many Catholics and Christians would consider rank heresy. Reacting to the Pope’s criticisms of the Iran War, Vice President JD Vance, speaking at a sparsely attended Turning Point USA event in Georgia on Tuesday, lectured that “it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” and questioned the Augustinian pope’s understanding of, well, St. Augustine. On Wednesday, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth offered a prayer for “great vengeance and furious anger” that was derived from a fictitious elaboration on Ezekiel 25:17 by Jules Winnfield, the character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
It is easy to get distracted by the bonkers content creation, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the First Amendment proscribes government establishment of religion, even if the founders could not imagine AI or dark Hollywood crime comedies, much less their misappropriation to wage an illegal war. The Trump regime has a preferred religion — a bellicose, nationalist Christianity — but its expression, as we saw this week, can be very erratic and often theologically incomprehensible. But one thing is clear from all the chaos. The Trumpist establishment of religion is made up of various fiefdoms within the federal government, all aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.
