Why MAGA Is So Triggered By The Words of Jesus

When Donald Trump lashed out this week at an Episcopal Bishop who, using the words of Jesus himself, called for mercy on those whose lives will be shattered by his neofascist policies, I wasn’t particularly surprised.

I was, however, taken aback by was the shear number of MAGA followers who came out to bash this woman of the cloth, the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde. Our Facebook for NOTICE News, the progressive news outlet I co-run, was flooded with vitriol for this woman.

“Mental illness is rampant on the left,” one commenter wrote. “She needs to be removed from her position! She preaches hate!” wrote another.

But the most revealing comment came from a self-proclaimed longtime believer: “I’m a Christian of 40 years. Trump is the best thing that’s ever happened to America and you catholics should be ashamed for the way you are treating him.’”

Putting aside that this commenter couldn’t distinguish between an Episcopal Bishop and a Roman Catholic one (where women can’t even be ordained), this sad person’s comment reveals something far more insidious about the “Christianity” that many today adhere to.

What this person has been led to believe is not Christianity. What this person has been led to believe is a religion of social control propagated by the ruling class for centuries — and it has almost nothing to do with Jesus.

A Religion of Social Control

You probably know this false “Christianity” quite well. People are bad, selfish, and inherently evil, and our lives are full of endless suffering and toil. But if you believe the right things (the things we tell you) and do the right things (the things we say are right or proper) then you can spend the next life in paradise.

This corrupt religion is not the religion of Jesus. It’s a religion engineered by the ruling class to keep the working class enslaved, working to make the rich richer.

To be fair, this religion was developed partly out of necessity. One of the many “challenges” of capitalism — including the proto-capitalism from which this Christianity was born — is that it requires workers to accept a shitty deal. If workers figure out just how much they’re being ripped off because the “owners” are stealing from them the fruits of their labor, they’re likely to reject this system. (1)

The submission necessary for capitalism to function can be achieved multiple ways. Force is one option.(2) But as the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote in the 1930s, endless violence is incredibly expensive. It is much cheaper — and easier — to subdue workers through indoctrination.(3) Gramsci noted three institutions that can help manufacture obedience: schools, the media, and religion.

Through these tools of social control, the working class internalizes their oppression. They are taught from an early age that the way things are (the capitalist hellscape we’re born into) is the natural result of human behavior. There’s no use challenging it, because people are selfish, sinful, and can’t live together cooperatively. Resistance is futile.

But this dark reality can go too far — it can push people to rebel. That’s because humans need hope. We will accept enslavement and suffering for a little while, but the natural human desire towards freedom will eventually rear its head.

What better way to give people hope without actually having to change anything than to direct that instinct towards a completely different life? And on top of it, the ruling class gets to explicitly direct the thoughts and conduct that will ensure entry into this made up paradise, as well as the thoughts and actions that will get you eternally damned. It’s actually quite brilliant.

In short: we’ve all been brainwashed. We’ve been brainwashed to believe humans are naturally greedy and selfish, to believe that it’s every person for themselves, to believe that if we “accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior,” everything will be great when we’re dead.

That’s the religion about Jesus at work. It’s designed to keep workers from seeing the inherent unfairness of capitalism, and thus blind, kept from challenging it. This is the religion of MAGA and capitalism.

But there’s a big problem… Jesus.

The man they claim to put at the center of their false religion poses a significant challenge for this religion of social control.(4) The life, ministry, and death of Jesus of Nazareth demonstrates a man who — from start to finish — challenged imperial, commercial, and religious social control.

In his very first sermon, Jesus made clear where he stood: with the poor, the oppressed, and those crushed by economic of exploitation. Quoting the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, Jesus announced that he came to “proclaim good news to the poor… to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). This wasn’t metaphorical — he was talking about real liberation from very real systems of oppression.

And that’s exactly what terrifies — and triggers — the MAGA faithful about the actual words of Jesus. Because if you actually read what Jesus said and did you find someone who consistently stood against everything they’ve been brainwashed to all their lives to believe.

They are triggered because the words of Jesus clash with everything they’ve ever been taught about him, the world, and themselves.(5)

Becoming un-brainwashed

That’s not to say this can’t change. But the hardest part about breaking free from brainwashing is that you don’t know you’ve been brainwashed.

Most us were subject to this unceasing capitalist indoctrination from the moment we could understand language, so seriously questioning capitalism can feel like questioning reality itself. And that is truly, deeply scary for most people.(6)

On some level — and admittedly I struggle with this — we need to have compassion for brainwashed MAGA and conservative “Christians.” They did not choose what they believe. They are victims of a system that has deliberately misled them, using their faith as a tool of control and submission. The ruling class has spent centuries — and billions of dollars — perfecting these techniques of social control. Breaking free isn’t easy.(7)

But thankfully, Jesus shows us the way forward. He didn’t just condemn the religious authorities of his time — he offered people a radically different vision of what’s possible. He showed them that God’s love wasn’t controlled by the Temple hierarchy, that true community isn’t based on exclusion and judgment, that real freedom isn’t found in accepting the status quo but in challenging it.

Stopping MAGA and ending capitalism

So how do we help people break free? First, we have to recognize that you can’t argue someone out of their brainwashing. Facts and logic alone won’t do it — trust me, I’ve tried. Instead, we need to do what Jesus did: demonstrate an alternative.(8)

We need to live lives and create communities that embody the radical love and inclusion Jesus preached. We need to show people that another way is possible — that we can build a world based on cooperation instead of competition, on love instead of fear, on justice instead of exploitation.

This isn’t easy work. It requires patience, compassion, and a willingness to stay engaged even when it’s difficult. But remember: Jesus didn’t give up on people, even those who were deeply embedded in systems of oppression. He kept showing up, kept demonstrating God’s love, kept offering a different way — even though it ultimately cost him his life.

The good news is that more and more people are waking up. Because along side the hate directed at the Right Rev. Budde, there was also a lot of love and support.

People are discovering the real Jesus. They’re rejecting the fictional Christ of capitalist social control, and embracing the radical teacher who challenged greed and called us to create the beloved community here and now. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

That’s our task today: to keep embodying that alternative, to keep demonstrating that love is stronger than fear, that community is more powerful than division, that God’s dream for the world is bigger than any system of control or exploitation.

Because ultimately, that’s what will help MAGA Christians the most: seeing that the liberation Jesus promised is real, and it’s happening right now.

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Footnotes:

1. Capitalism is based on theft. This is essentially Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value. It explains how capitalism inherently exploits workers. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you work at a coffee shop. In one hour, you make and sell $100 worth of coffee. The shop pays you $15 for that hour. The cost of coffee beans, cups, etc. is around $25. That means the owner — who did no work — takes the remaining $60 as “profit.” That $60 is what Marx called “surplus value” — the difference between what your work produced and what you were paid. Marx argued this is fundamentally theft: the owner is stealing the value you created through your labor. This is why he famously wrote that “profit is unpaid wages.” While conservatives claim owners deserve this profit because they took “risk” or provided “capital,” Marx pointed out that this capital itself came from previously stolen surplus value, creating an endless cycle of exploitation. For a deeper dive, see David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010).
2. This is why we have police today, and it’s why true followers of Jesus should be abolitionists who push for abolishing police and prisons. The modern police force emerged in the 1830s specifically to control workers and protect ruling class interests — evolving from slave patrols in the South and strike-breakers in the North. While conservatives claim police “protect and serve” everyone, history shows they primarily serve to protect property over people and maintain “social order” — which really means maintaining current systems of power and wealth. This is why police regularly use force against workers and protesters demanding change, but rarely investigate crimes by the wealthy against workers (wage theft costs workers more annually than all other forms of theft combined). See Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing (London: Verso, 2017).
3. Gramsci developed this idea, which he called “cultural hegemony,” while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime from 1926–1937. He observed that ruling classes maintain power not just through violence and force, but primarily through controlling culture and ideas — making their dominance seem natural and inevitable. The ruling class gains consent for their rule by controlling institutions like schools, churches, and media that shape how people think. This explains why so many working-class people defend a system that exploits them: they’ve internalized the worldview of their oppressors. See Joseph V. Femia’s Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
4. This has been a challenge for Christian leaders throughout time. It was such a challenge that the western church in Rome kept the vast majority of people from ever reading the words of Jesus. In fact, the medieval Catholic Church was so concerned about ordinary people reading and interpreting Jesus’s radical teachings that they actively prevented it. Until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, the Bible was kept in Latin, a language most people couldn’t read. Those who tried to translate it into common languages, like John Wycliffe in the 14th century and William Tyndale in the 16th century, were condemned as heretics. Tyndale was actually executed for the “crime” of translating the Bible into English. The church claimed this was to prevent misinterpretation, but scholars now widely recognize it was about maintaining control over biblical interpretation and thus preserving the church’s power and authority. For more on this history, see Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010).
5. The historical Jesus — a poor Palestinian Jewish peasant who challenged systems of power — differs dramatically from the divine figure portrayed in later Christian writings, especially John’s gospel (written 60–70 years after Jesus’s death). While Jesus preached about creating God’s kingdom of justice on earth, later writers transformed his message to focus on personal salvation and heaven. See my article, “How Jesus Became God,” and Marcus Borg’s Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (HarperOne, 2006).
6. As the British thinker Marc Fisher said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. He called this notion “capitalist realism,” which he explored in a book by the same name (London: Zero Books, 2009).
7. This is not to say we excuse or don’t call out evil, dumb, or just plain stupid arguments.
8. Research in behavioral psychology reveals that roughly 90% of our decisions are driven by emotion rather than logic. In one study outlined in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, researchers found that patients with damage to their brain’s emotional centers became paralyzed by even simple decisions like scheduling appointments — despite maintaining full logical capabilities. This explains why presenting facts alone rarely changes deeply-held beliefs. People need to see and feel an alternative to be moved to change. See Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown Business, 2010).