How the Trump administration is using the BibleExBulletin

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner prays during a Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on February 26, 2025, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also bow their heads. Pool photo/AP .

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As massive immigration enforcement efforts were underway in Minnesota in January, the Department of Homeland Security released a video that, at first glance, looked like a movie trailer.

Set to singer Lorde’s haunting cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” the images unfold in a sequence of eerie juxtapositions: a helicopter hovering in a green haze of night vision, armed agents pounding on doors, and bodies moving with choreographed urgency. On the screen, a quote from the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are the peacemakers”.

Moments later, after more images of military-style immigration control actions, the rest of the biblical passage materializes: “for they will be called sons of God.”

“My first thought was that there is a weapon called the Peacemaker,” said Dyron Daughrity, pastor of the Evangelical Church of Christ and dean of religion and philosophy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. “It’s sort of this idea of ​​peace through strength.”

Scripture has long been a rhetorical resource for presidents—among them Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush—who invoke the Bible to frame moments of crisis or national purpose. But the Trump administration is referencing the Bible in a very different way — using specific passages to connect its policies and actions to God’s will — from immigration control to military action.

The place of the Bible in political life seems to be increasing. A study released by Pew Research this month found something new among those surveyed. For the first time since Pew asked the question, a majority of respondents say the Bible should have a lot or at least some influence over U.S. laws, with 28 percent saying that when the Bible and the will of the people come into conflict, the Bible should have more influence over laws.

For Daughrity, the images in the DHS video are striking but not unprecedented. “It’s very common for armies, throughout history, to invoke the name of God, to invoke the name of Jesus Christ,” he said. The association of biblical language and force, in this sense, belongs to a long and familiar tradition.

Others see something more intentional and more disturbing. Yii-Jan Lin, professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School and author of the book Immigration and Apocalypse, views the video as a calculated provocation.

“DHS is creating surprise for a certain reason: to make a statement: All Homeland Security does is create peace, even if it seems violent,” she said.

For some scholars of Christianity, this view comes at a significant cost in undermining some of the fundamental ethical teachings of Jesus. The Rev. John Dickson, who teaches at Wheaton College near Chicago, highlights the broader context of the verse itself: the Sermon on the Mount.

“The first phrase of the entire Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, is, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’” he said. “It contrasts that with this discussion of how one takes the kingdom: through gentleness, through peacemaking, through humility, through love.” These comments, he said, are in categorical opposition to the actions of DHS.

For Obery Hendricks, an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who teaches religion at Columbia University, the dissonance is both aesthetic and religious.

“To use that song ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ what they’re saying is ‘Yes, we’re building an empire,'” he said.

This fusion of Scripture and statecraft extends to other parts of the Trump administration.

Among its most religious figures is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, an evangelical who wrote a book called American Crusade. He frequently framed political and military action in explicitly biblical terms, both during the war against Iran and in the days and weeks preceding military actions there.

After the invasion of Venezuela, Hegseth cited Psalm 144 during a prayer service at the Pentagon, held on January 21: “Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. »

At the national prayer breakfast in early February, he began with a reading from the Gospel of Mark: “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever loses his life for my sake, the Gospels will save him. »

Hegseth then offered an interpretation that rephrased the passage in martial terms. “The warrior willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country and his creator,” Hegseth said. “This warrior finds eternal life.”

For Lin, it is a significant change: from the cross to the sword.

“What Hegseth does intelligently is call to arms, to become warriors, to take up the sword in a kind of glorious martyrdom,” she said. But, she added, “the power dynamic here is missing, which is that Jesus is not doing this for the cause of empire but actually against [it]”.

Dickson reads the same biblical passage as pointing in the completely opposite direction: opposing bigotry. “It was the ultimate critique of a warrior theology,” he said. “This means that Christianity advances through service and suffering, not through force.”

And yet, for some observers, the increasing openness with which politicians talk about faith is a positive development. Daughrity sees a shift from the relative restraint of previous decades toward a more explicit embrace of religious identity.

“While a politician probably wouldn’t have spoken like this, say 30 years ago, today he openly embraces his religiosity,” he said. For him, this visibility carries its own imperative: “To compete in this world, we must defend our faith and we must be evangelists. »

This perspective, however, depends on a particular understanding of Scripture – one that treats it as a resource to be deployed rather than as a text that poses a challenge to its reader.

Lin, who grew up in an evangelical immigrant congregation, worries about the implications of reading the Bible in this way in a pluralistic society. “I think it can be an interlocutor with many different ways of thinking about immigration policy, but there are many different sacred texts that could be used,” she said, “and also just an ethic that doesn’t have to subscribe to any religion at all.”

Hendricks makes a clearer distinction. “We are talking about an ideological Christianity versus a Christianity of faith,” he said. “Ideological Christianity refracts everything in the Bible through the prism of the interests of the interpreter.”

The alternative, he suggests, is more demanding. In what he describes as a Christianity of faith, Scripture does not sanctify power: it interrogates it, questioning every political position rather than blessing a particular program.

The tension between these approaches is not new. But in an age when Scripture appears not only in speeches by administration officials but also in highly produced videos—recorded, edited, and released for maximum impact—the question becomes urgent: not whether the Bible has a place in public life, but what happens when it is used to sanctify power rather than challenge it.

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