The Republican Party Runs on Paul, Not Jesus
Every policy position the Republican Party calls "Christian" traces back to Paul of Tarsus — not the Gospels.
MAGA Jesus Is Paul’s Jesus — Not the Gospels’
Every Sunday in America, millions gather in church, bowing their heads to ask Jesus to bless their country — along with their guns, their borders, their political party, and their chosen candidate.
They stick fish symbols on pickup trucks, carry crosses to political rallies, wave Bibles — sometimes upside down — for photo ops, and place “Jesus Saves” beside “Trump Won” on the same yard sign without a hint of irony.
The thing is, they’re not completely wrong to invoke Paul. They’re just calling him by the wrong name.
Before We Begin
About a week ago I sent out a reader survey — and the response was humbling. Based on your feedback, I’ve put together a publishing schedule covering the topics you asked for most, which you’ll be seeing roll out over the coming weeks and months (or until the next survey shakes things up).
The overwhelming majority of responses were positive, but a handful of you left constructive critical feedback. I appreciate that more than you know — and if you left an email, I’ll be reaching out personally.
Thank you. Genuinely.
The God of the Republican Party Feels Off
When the Christian Right talks about authority, hierarchy, and submission to law — that’s Paul.
When they talk about the proper role of women — silent, subordinate, focused on home and family — that’s Paul.
When they defend wealth, dismiss economic justice, and tell poor people that their poverty’s a spiritual problem rather than a structural one — that’s Paul.
When they demand doctrinal conformity, cast out heretics, and build institutions designed to enforce ideological purity — that’s Paul.
Not Jesus. Paul.
And the distinction’s enormous. It’s the difference between a religion of liberation and a religion of control.
What Jesus Actually Said About Power
Jesus was executed by the state.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The founder of Christianity was deemed enough of a political threat that the Roman Empire — which had seen a thing or two — decided he needed to be publicly tortured and killed as a warning to others. And no, Rome didn’t crucify people for blasphemy against a god they didn’t believe in — whatever the Bible implies to whitewash Roman culpability. Rome crucified rebels, agitators, and threats to public order. That’s what Jesus was to them.
Jesus’s message was dangerous because it was a direct challenge to every power structure of his day. Roman imperial power. Jewish priestly power. Wealth. Status. The entire system of first-century hierarchy.
“He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” — Luke 1:52-53
That’s a declaration of political intent, not a metaphor, regardless of how you look at it.
Jesus didn’t bless the powerful but promised them consequences. He didn’t comfort the comfortable but disturbed them — repeatedly, deliberately, with great rhetorical precision.
Chances are the Republican Party’s Jesus would’ve been horrified by the actual Jesus.
What Paul Said About Power
Now let’s look at Paul.
“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted.” — Romans 13:1-2
There it is.
The foundational text of Christian political quietism: it’s God’s will to obey the government. Don’t rebel.
This is the verse that’s been used to justify — are you ready for this list — Roman imperial rule, the divine right of kings, American slavery, apartheid in South Africa, and Nazi collaboration by the German church.
Romans 13 is the Swiss Army knife of authoritarian theology. Every regime that’s ever wanted Christian cover for its exercise of power has reached for it.
And Paul handed it to them.
Now ask yourself: which version of Christianity do you think powerful people have preferred to fund, promote, and amplify for two thousand years? The one that says the powerful will be cast down? Or the one that says governing authorities are established by God?
The answer isn’t complicated.
The Prosperity Gospel Is Paul, Albeit in Corrupted Form
Let’s talk about money. Because the Christian Right loves to talk about money.
The prosperity gospel — the theological cancer spreading through American evangelicalism that tells people God rewards faith with wealth — has no basis in the teachings of Jesus. None. Zip. Zero.
Jesus said:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” — Mark 10:25
This is something he said repeatedly in different versions.
He told a wealthy man to sell everything. He praised a widow who gave her last two coins while condemning the wealthy donors who gave from their surplus. He said you can’t serve both God and money.
Jesus had a view on wealth and it wasn’t friendly to the wealthy.
But Paul’s letters, filtered through two thousand years of interpretation by wealthy institutions and comfortable theologians, got reframed into something that could accommodate — and eventually celebrate — accumulation.
To be fair, Joel Osteen merely perfected the packaging of the pre-existing prosperity gospel. The theological raw material had been there for centuries, marinated in Pauline interpretation that slowly, quietly sanded off every inconvenient edge of Jesus’s radical economics.
Women, Again
You can’t discuss the Christian Right’s politics without discussing women. And you can’t discuss their theology on women without going straight back to Paul.
The opposition to women in church leadership? Paul.
The theological argument for male headship in marriage? Paul.
The framing of women’s bodies as sites of moral danger requiring male oversight? Paul.
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” — 1 Timothy 2:12
Meanwhile, in the Gospels, women are the first witnesses to the resurrection. They’re the ones who stayed at the cross when the male disciples fled. Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet as a disciple — in a culture where that was a radical act — and Jesus defended her right to be there.
The Republican Party’s position on women’s autonomy, women’s leadership, and women’s bodies isn’t derived from the Jesus of the Gospels.
It’s derived from the Paul of the Epistles.
Every time a Republican politician quotes scripture to justify restricting women’s rights, ask them to show you the chapter and verse from Jesus. They can’t. Because it isn’t there.
Christian Nationalism Is a Pauline Project
Christian nationalism — the belief that America is or should be a Christian nation, governed by Christian principles, with Christian identity baked into its legal and political structure — is having a moment.
Project 2025. The Seven Mountain Mandate. Dominionism. Whatever you want to call it, the basic idea’s the same: Christians should control the institutions of power and use them to enforce Christian values.
That project has nothing to do with Jesus.
Jesus didn’t establish a government. He didn’t write laws. He didn’t tell his followers to seize institutional power. When pressed on the question of political authority, he famously said give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s — and then pivoted back to talking about God.
His Kingdom was explicitly not of this world — at least not in the sense that worldly kingdoms operate.
Christian nationalism is Pauline in its instinct — the idea that the church should be aligned with governing authority, that Christian identity and civic identity should be fused, that institutions should enforce doctrinal conformity.
It’s just that Paul was telling people to submit to Roman authority, and the Christian nationalists want to BE the authority. They’ve taken Paul’s framework and flipped it: instead of the church serving the state, they want the state to serve the church.
Either way, don’t look for Jesus’s fingerprints. You won’t find them.
The Jesus They Couldn’t Tame
Here’s the part that should haunt every politically active American Christian.
The actual Jesus — the Jesus of the Gospels, that is — is a nightmare for the American right.
He commands care for immigrants and refugees. (Leviticus 19:34, and Jesus reaffirms it.)
He commands feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. And he says — explicitly, in Matthew 25 — that how you treat “the least of these” is how you treat him.
He commands non-violence. He rebukes Peter for drawing a sword. He tells his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.
He doesn’t say a word about abortion, homosexuality, or the capital gains tax. But he says a great deal about wealth, power, violence, and the treatment of the vulnerable.
None of that fits neatly on a Republican platform. So it gets quietly set aside, and Paul’s more manageable theology gets promoted in its place.
The MAGA Jesus is a fabrication. A political prop stitched together from selective Pauline proof texts, nationalist mythology, and the audacity to put a red hat on a first-century Jewish revolutionary.
The real one would’ve flipped their tables.
What’s Your Take?
Is the Christian Right following Jesus or Paul? Does the distinction matter politically? And what would American Christianity look like if it took the Sermon on the Mount as seriously as it takes Romans 13?
If this essay made you think, made you angry, or made you want to forward it to your pastor — do it. See what happens.
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Sources and Further Reading
Crossan, John Dominic & Reed, Jonathan L. In Search of Paul. HarperCollins, 2004.
Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium. Doubleday, 1998.
Whitehead, Andrew L. & Perry, Samuel L. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Tabor, James D. Paul and Jesus. Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Fortress Press, 2003.
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright, 2020.
Thanks for this. we have religious Christian relatives who are horrified by Seven Mountains. Another Pauline emphasis is Sola Fide (while it was really the Reformation that supercharged this, they base their views on Paul), you just have to have faith, righteous behavior is not nearly as important. The mass murderer that accepts Jesus on his death bed and goes to heaven, but the Buddhist who helped many people in need goes to Hell.
Descent argument.