Evangelical Christians are having a very good and normal one in 2024. For example, here’s one who wrote a worship song about Donald Trump:

The song, titled “The Chosen One”, was written by Christian musician Natasha Owens. She released it in June, after a New York jury convicted Trump of 34 felonies. The video features his mug shot and video clips of him walking into court, interspersed with shots of the Statue of Liberty, cheering crowds and soldiers saluting. The lyrics say that he’s “imperfect” and “gets in trouble bigly”, but he’s been appointed by God as a “warrior” to lead and save America.

Lest you think it seems a little, well, blasphemous, to worship Donald Trump in song – don’t worry! The lyrics reassure listeners that Trump isn’t divine. He’s just God’s chosen one on Earth. Totally different!

I have to emphasize, this isn’t satire or parody. It’s in dead earnest. Natasha Owens isn’t a comedian or a leftist, she’s a successful evangelical Christian musician who’s recorded several albums of praise and worship songs. She says that she got into music to heal her grief after her father accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun (yes, this is 100% true).

After listening to this song, if you can stomach it, you may have questions. For example, if Trump is God’s chosen one and there “ain’t no stopping what the Lord’s begun”… why did he lose in 2020?

Well, no worries, Owens has you covered. She has another song with the self-explanatory title “Trump Won”, explaining that Trump did win, including California and New York, but the election was stolen by Democrats. (So why did God permit that to happen? Sorry, you only get to ask one follow-up question.)

You might think, from a believer’s standpoint, that it’s risky to declare on God’s behalf who the chosen one is. After all, the Bible is famous for insisting that God’s ways are not our ways and that humans can’t grasp the divine plan. To appoint yourself God’s spokesperson, informing everyone else what he wants and what he’s planning, seems more than a little arrogant. After all, if you’re wrong (as many “prophets” were in 2020), you not only look foolish, you risk incurring the punishment that the Bible decrees for false prophets. You would think a Christian wouldn’t want to chance that.

However, if there was a time when American Christians considered humility a virtue, it’s long past. They’ve decided that God isn’t speaking loudly enough, so they’re going to do it on his behalf. As with the Jericho March, where one speaker after another announced that God personally revealed his will to them, they’ve crowned themselves infallible messengers proclaiming God’s wishes to the rest of us.

I’m an atheist, but if I were religious, I’d say that all this worshipful iconography Christians have constructed around Trump looks just like idolatry, which the Bible emphatically warns against.

After all, Owens’ song contains a perfect example of the-lady-doth-protest-too-much denial. She includes the lyric “I’m not saying / He’s something divine”. Why would she write that unless she knew other people were saying that, or might reasonably interpret her as saying that? Do Christians normally feel the need to add a disclaimer that their leaders aren’t God incarnate?

It’s not even the first time the religious right has done something like this. In 2021, CPAC unveiled a literal golden idol of Trump to cheers and applause. At least one person was photographed bowing down to it.

Evangelical Christians have constructed a cult of personality around Trump in the most literal sense. This greedy, lying, racist, pussy-grabbing felon has become the focal point of the religious right’s zealous worship and devotion. They’ve literally deified him, in the same way ancient people believed that their kings were either appointed by the gods to rule, or else were gods themselves.

But whether they realize it or not, they’re facing a problem: the subject of their worship isn’t a conveniently ethereal messiah, but an elderly, out-of-shape man. When he dies, and he will die some day, they’re going to go into a tailspin. How do you cope when God’s chosen one dies a failure, without accomplishing all the things you believed he’d do?

When that time comes, it’s going to be a full-blown theological crisis. Just as with other failed messiahs through history, I won’t be surprised if Christians cope by inventing a new mythology that Trump sacrificed himself for the sins of the world.

Ironically, we could be witnessing the birth of a new religion in real time. In a thousand years, if Christianity is still around, it may have mutated into a messianic religion of Trumpism. We might well see a certain orange tycoon shoehorned into the Trinity; or written into the Bible with his own set of gospels that bear only a tenuous resemblance, if any, to the actual events of history; or made the subject of prophecies that he’ll return to earth one day.

(Imagine the apologists: “We know for a fact that Donald Trump miraculously healed COVID using blessed bleach, and multiplied Trump steaks and paper towels at his rallies, because we have five hundred testimonies from people who saw it happen! If they had been lying, there would have been critics who would have pointed it out!”)

It’s probably a tribute the man would enjoy. But it will be proof of the moral decay and terminal collapse of Christianity.