In the days after Trump began our country’s latest war of choice in the deserts of Southwest Asia, a military leader reportedly told the officers under his command that the war was part of God’s plan. He also preached that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.”

Days later, Trump summoned at least 20 Christian pastors to the Oval Office, where they all performatively laid hands on the chief executive, asking God to bless this war. Another prayed, “Lord Jesus, protect President Trump.”

To anyone who takes the historical Jesus seriously—with his uncompromising demand for nonviolence and peacemaking in his movement—such an understanding of Jesus is completely bonkers.

In no way or form would Jesus—the actual person, not the Christ of faith that was invented by Christianity in the centuries after his murder—condone Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal and immoral war.

Scholars and theologians have written extensively about how MAGA Christianity gets Jesus so wrong; far less examined is why this invented Jesus has such broad appeal among working-class Americans.

But the answer is simple. As one member of the capitalist political class once opined: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The Misery is Real

Here’s a fact that most establishment liberals and coastal elites refuse to acknowledge: life in working-class America is absolutely miserable right now.

Over 42% of the U.S. right now are living in poverty or are one emergency away from financial ruin—in the richest country in the history of the world. At the same time, the unemployment rate is near historic lows. That means most people are working. They work and work and work, and they never get ahead. That’s not a failure of the system—that’s the system working as designed.1

COVID made this undeniable. Americans watched billionaire wealth explode by trillions while they were told to go back to work in unsafe conditions, to be grateful for a one-time check that didn’t cover rent.

Then came inflation—real, punishing, felt-in-the-grocery-store inflation—that neither party had an honest answer for. The liberal establishment kept pointing to GDP growth and job numbers while people couldn’t afford eggs. Republicans, for their part, redirected the rage where they always redirect it: toward immigrants, toward Black and brown communities, toward anyone who wasn’t the actual cause of the problem.2

The resentment is earned; what’s been done with it—both politically and spiritually—is the con.

Economics and the Apocalypse

What most Christians don’t realize about Revelation is that it’s actually from a whole genre of writing—called apocalypses. The images and prophecies that make it seem so unique and scary are really more like tropes and common motifs found across the genre.

And here’s the thing: these writings don’t emerge in a vacuum. They emerge from oppression—real or imagined—almost every single time.3

Ancient religious authorities usually preached (and this is reflected well in the Hebrew Bible) that obeying their rules and dictates—or the rules and dictates from “God” will lead to prosperity. Disobeying will lead to suffering.

But what happens when that’s not true? This is the theological problem of theodicy—why do bad things happen to good people. There are many ways to answer this question. The Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible offers one solution, essentially, how dare you ask? A few chapters of Daniel and the entire book of Revelation offers another: God is about to step in and fix everything. This is apocalypticism.

The essential plot of all apocalypses goes something like: evil forces are now in control of this world. And if evil forces are in control, then God must be planning a cosmic intervention to overthrow them. The end is coming, the powerful will be destroyed, and our suffering will be vindicated—soon. The word apocalypse even means “unveiling”—the unveiling of this next world.

And the dissatisfaction that produces this kind of thinking is, at its root, almost always economic. People don’t imagine the end of the world when things are going well. That’s the engine that produces this phenomenon.

It was this dissatisfaction that produced the historical Jesus’s apocalyptic message, as well as Paul’s. Both clearly thought God was about to intervene in this world to bring about the next—what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God.” To both the historical Jesus and Paul, that Kingdom was on this planet—not some otherworldly heaven—as most contemporary American Christians believe.

The writer of Revelation, the self-identified John of Patmos4 took this and ran with it. He took that idea and transformed it into a stunning message for seven specific communities in modern day Turkey.

But that impulse—that when the economic and political systems become so crushing that no earthly power seems capable of fixing it, people turn to cosmic intervention—is the through-line from first-century Asia Minor to twenty-first-century America. The form changes, but the function doesn’t.

The Bait and Switch

So here’s the con, and it is a con of breathtaking precision.

MAGA Christianity takes the form of apocalyptic resistance. It uses the language of cosmic battle: dark forces control the world, but divine intervention, imminent deliverance, a great reckoning is coming. It tells suffering people that their pain is real and that a champion is on the way.

That champion is two-fold: God and the Christ of Faith are controlling the strings, and Trump is their puppet. It’s the holy MAGA trinity, action-packed, fighting and kicking ass for you.

But here’s the thing. This con turns both the actual message of Revelation—and the message of the historical Jesus—on its head. To both, the enemy was always the empire. Wealth extraction. The domination system that channeled the production of the many into the pockets of the few.

John explicitly called out this evil system of elite-dominated commerce—a sort of proto-capitalism before it was ever called that in chapter 18 of Revelation—calling Rome and its commerce “the great whore of Babylon.” The historical Jesus targeted the temple authorities who collaborated with imperial power.

The enemy, to both, was the system that made people poor and kept them poor. MAGA Christianity, however, identifies the enemy as immigrants, queer people, “wokeness,” DEI, and drag queens reading books to children.

That’s the bait and switch. Take the legitimate economic rage that produces apocalyptic longing—rage that is earned, that reflects real suffering caused by a real system—and redirect it toward the people least responsible for that suffering. Blame the refugee, not the CEO. Blame the trans kid, not the shareholder. Blame the professor, not the private equity firm that bought the hospital and closed the ER.

Like so many of the right’s tactics, this one works because there’s a kernel of truth to it. The historical Jesus’s message—and the message of Revelation—was burning with rage towards an unjust system. But the system is obfuscated by two thousand years of Christian lies.

By using the rhetoric of Revelation and the message of Jesus but concealing the actual enemy—the rich, ruling elites—they’ve redirected a class war into a culture war. It’s how they get people to vote for the interests of billionaires while believing they’re fighting for God.

The Real Reason Jesus Was Killed

The bitter irony of all of this is that the historical Jesus was killed for doing precisely what MAGA Christianity prevents.

Jesus wasn’t executed because he threatened the culture or for claiming to be the “son of God.” He was executed because he threatened the powerful, rich elite—and the system that made them rich and powerful.

His action in the temple—overturning the tables, disrupting the machinery of extraction—was not, as many scholars have written, a “cleansing.” It was an indictment. The temple had become the center of a collaboration between native elites and imperial power, a system that extracted wealth from the peasant class and funneled it upward.5

Jesus called it a “den of robbers”—not because the money changers were dishonest, but because the entire institution had become a mechanism of economic violence.

Rome crucified him for it. That’s what empires do to people who challenge their systems of extraction. They kill them publicly, as a warning.

MAGA Jesus is an inversion of this. Where the historical Jesus challenged the domination system, MAGA Jesus serves it. Where the real Jesus organized among the dispossessed and named the powers that crushed them, MAGA Jesus tells the dispossessed to blame each other. He is not a weapon against the extraction system. He is a weapon of the extraction system, deployed to keep the extracted in line.

What Would the Real Jesus Do?

The question isn’t what would the cosmic Christ of Revelation do—that figure was always a projection of longing by people in pain, not a historical person. The question is what did the actual Jesus of Nazareth do?

He organized among the dispossessed. He built community among people the system had abandoned. He named the powers that made them poor—and he named them specifically: the wealthy, the powerful, the religious authorities who collaborated with empire. “Blessed are the poor,” he said. Not blessed are the hardworking. Not blessed are the entrepreneurial. The poor. And “woe to you who are rich”—not because wealth is spiritually complicated, but because your wealth came from somewhere, and that somewhere was other people’s labor.

If the Christians who stormed the Capitol and who now cheer for war in Iran wanted to follow the real Jesus instead of the one they invented, they wouldn’t be building walls or bombing hospitals. They’d be building the kind of movement he actually started—one that aimed its fury not at the vulnerable, but at the powerful. Not at the immigrant, but at the system that profits from keeping all of us desperate enough to turn on each other.

That movement still needs building. And the first step is telling the truth about the Jesus they’ve made up—and why.