A defining trait of the clowns who govern us today is that you can never quite tell whether they are meant to make you laugh or to instil fear. Their controversies, by extension, tend to be both shocking and entertaining at once. Take the recent flare-up between Donald Trump’s gang and the Pope. “The world is being destroyed by a handful of tyrants,” declared Pope Leo XIV, who also condemned the abuse of power by religion — a charge that drove Trump and his followers up the wall. J.D. Vance struck back menacingly, warning that the Pope should “be careful when talking about theology”. Vance, who converted to Catholicism seven years ago, evidently considers himself a credible source on the subject.

Beyond the bizarre note of the episode lies a more serious matter: significant segments of the reactionary MAGA movement are transforming the Republican Party into a fundamentalist religious sect. A pious tone that may seem foreign to European ears has long been part of US political discourse, but what is happening now reaches well beyond it.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is affiliated with radical evangelical fundamentalist communities. He has tattoos of crusader symbols and the holy warrior slogan “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), the central rallying cry of the Crusades. The existence of a radical fundamentalist current within US Protestantism that openly seeks political power is hardly news; we have grown accustomed to such evangelical movements over the decades.

What is relatively new is a form of fundamentalism emerging within the Catholic sphere. There is already talk of “Catholiban”, and J.D. Vance is part of this movement. Peter Thiel, billionaire, MAGA sponsor and tech entrepreneur, is a key figure in a rigorously interpreted political theology. For decades, he has devoted himself to the work of René Girard, whose Violence and the Sacred is regarded as a foundational text of philosophical-theological literature. Thiel also engages with the writings of the German Nazi constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, whose influential texts on political theology and religiosity, including Political Theology, were published in the 1920s and 1930s. Recently, Thiel has been giving frequent lectures on the “Antichrist” and the “Katechon”, a power capable of holding back the diabolical. These unconventional ideas owe a heavy debt to Schmitt, and Thiel has shown a particular taste for apocalyptic thought. His suggestion in a New York Times interview that the Antichrist, who seeks to establish a world government, might be embodied in Greta Thunberg ultimately rendered this lofty Schmittian concept laughable.

All of this may sound confused, and at first glance perhaps even amusing. But the picture taking shape is far from funny: the MAGA movement is energetically attempting to harness religion to a radical politics.

In this effort, various radical themes are eclectically intertwined — religious motifs blending with the radical ideas of neo-reactionaries and the “Dark Enlightenment” articulated by figures such as Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, both influential within Peter Thiel’s circle. The mix dovetails with notions of a punishing, zealous God and a crusade mentality, in which adherents ultimately pray to Christ the Saviour for victory in war.

Christianity is thus transformed into a cult of harshness and ruthlessness, made subservient to extreme neoliberalism and individualism. Peter Thiel recently told a right-wing YouTube channel that “wokeness” should be understood as a deformation of Christianity — an “ultra-Christianity” or “hyper-Christianity” that retains Christianity’s solidarity with victims while stripping out forgiveness. The political work this framing performs is to recast concern for the weak, the losers and the victims of history as a quasi-religious pathology, and to treat the guilty conscience of the strong as the disease to be cured. The fashionable term in this context is “toxic empathy.”

Is it merely entertaining eccentricity? Thomas Assheuer recently warned in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit that “religion is being mercilessly forged into a weapon”. An angry, warlike Christianity is being cultivated and used to incite.

Two weeks ago, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drew ridicule when, leading a worship service at the Pentagon, he recited a “prayer” he said was used by the Combat Search and Rescue team that had just extracted a downed American pilot from Iran. The prayer, which he framed as inspired by Ezekiel 25:17, culminated in the line: “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger…”. It quickly emerged that the passage was an almost word-for-word lift from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction — a fictionalised verse spoken in the film by a hitman immediately before he executes his victims. Which is, in turn, not a bad metaphor for Trump and his allies.

The misuse of religion and Christian motifs borders on blasphemy. Over the centuries, humanistic and emancipatory ideals have been drawn out of the Christian message. The Old Testament Jewish tradition contains powerful passages of its own — for instance: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Or: “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” The biblical tradition embodies some of the most revolutionary and egalitarian ideals in human history.

At the same time, wrath, aggression and punishment are equally inherent in religion, particularly in the monotheistic faiths, which introduced a violent absolutism into the realm of the spiritual. Many scholars, the late Jan Assmann among them, have noted that monotheism’s exclusive concept of truth — distinguishing the one true God from many false ones — has fostered a rhetoric of severity and intransigence. The Lord is depicted as a “consuming fire” and a “jealous God,” of whom it is said: “The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.” One of the central, most famous phrases in the Gospels is: “Whoever is not with me is against me.” This zealous language of fundamentalism is the gateway to intolerance — a motto embraced by many of the world’s tyrants.

Hegseth views the US military, currently bombing Iran, not merely as engaged in a geopolitical conflict but in a war “for Jesus”. This perspective ties into a discourse in which the expectations of salvation and annihilation lie close together, invoking a “combination of piety and bloodlust” and binding “militant masculinity with religious certainty”. The founder of the denomination to which Hegseth’s church belongs openly advocates repealing women’s suffrage and establishing a Christian theocracy — views that Hegseth has amplified on his own social media. On the fringes of the MAGA movement, neo-integralist preachers are gaining influence, ultimately seeking to create a theocracy in which religious moral law and secular rule are no longer separate.

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