This Viral Video Has People Talking About Christianity Versus ‘MAGA Christianity’

Two weeks ago, Jen Hamilton, a nurse with a sizable following on TikTok and Instagram, picked up her Bible and made a video that would quickly go viral.

A few days earlier, Hamilton, who lives in a small town in North Carolina, had posted a video asking her followers about resources she could give to people in her life who were beginning to deconstruct their loyalty to the MAGA movement.

There were some helpful tips, but Hamilton noticed one reply in particular: “Whoa,” it said. “Be careful now. I am happily MAGA and I love Jesus. We are exhausted from liberal nonsense.”

Hamilton didn’t want to argue. Instead, she grabbed her Bible and attempted to “hold up the character of Jesus, his actual words, as a mirror” to some of the more ardent supporters of President Donald Trump.

“Basically, I sat down at my kitchen table and began to read from Matthew 25 while overlaying MAGA policies that directly oppose the character and nature of Jesus’ teachings,” she told HuffPost.

“I was hungry and you fed me,” she reads in the clip, as a headline about a Trump administration spending bill that proposes slashing federal funding to the SNAP food program by nearly $300 billion pops up.

“I was in prison and you visited me,” she says, as a headline about migrants who entered the country legally and were still deported to El Salvador prisons appears on the screen.

“I was sick and you cared for me,” she says, as another story, this one about potential cuts to Medicaid, flashes by.

As Hamilton highlights, Matthew 25 stresses that those who serve people in need ― the hungry, the prisoner, the stranger ― will enter his Kingdom, while those who overlook the downtrodden will receive judgment: “When you refused to help the least of these, you were refusing to help me,” Jesus tells the latter.

As she notes in the video, Hamilton thinks that all sounds “pretty liberal.”

In the comments of the video ― which currently has more than 8.6 million views on TikTok ― many (Christians and atheists alike) applauded Hamilton for using straight Scripture as a way of offering commentary. Others picked a bone with Christians who uncritically support Trump.

“As a Christian, I don’t think you can be both MAGA and Christian,” a top comment on the Instagram video reads.

But not everyone was a fan. Hamilton said she’s been on the receiving end of some MAGA ire since posting the clip.

“Some even reported me to the Board of Nursing to have my license taken away,” Hamilton told HuffPost. “As a nurse, I don’t know how you don’t fight for the rights of the vulnerable communities you care for.”

“I’m a Christ-follower but the video I made wasn’t a religious or political statement ― it was a moral one,” she told us, before noting that she believes that there is a big difference between identifying as a Republican and being MAGA.

“The video was about the hypocrisy of people claiming to follow Jesus while supporting a movement that actively harms the specific communities He called us to love,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton’s critics say that she is misrepresenting Scripture, but she wonders how that can be when she was literally just reading Jesus’ words.

The fierce debate over Hamilton’s video is a microcosm for what’s been happening in American Christianity for at least the last 50 years, said the Rev. Brandan Robertson, a pastor of Sunnyside Reformed Church in New York City, and the author of “Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and our Place at the Table.”

“The religious right was formed to use conservative Christianity as a tool to help right wing politicians gain power and enact policies that preserve white, conservative Christian privilege at the expense of everyone else,” Robertson said in an email interview with HuffPost.

The MAGA movement, Robertson said, is just the “full revelation” of what the religious right has dreamt of doing for decades.

“They have been remarkably effective in their strategy to conflate their values with Christian orthodoxy and have convinced a considerable number of American Christians that to be a Christian is to support right-wing policies,” he said.

Interestingly, most Americans don’t consider President Trump to be particularly religious, with fewer than half in a 2020 Pew survey saying they think he’s Christian. Raised Presbyterian, Trump now calls himself a “non-denominational Christian.”

Still, he has dedicated support among white evangelical Christians. In a Pew survey conducted after his first 100 days in office in April, 72% of white evangelical Protestants approve of his job as president.

The president has surrounded himself with a coterie of evangelical pastors and faith leaders, including Paula White, a tongue-speaking televangelist whose called the Black Lives Matter movement the “Antichrist,” and William Wolfe ― a self-described “Christian nationalist” and executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership who told conservative news site The Daily Signal he considers mass deportations a Christian issue.

Robertson doesn’t think such Christian faith leaders represent the full breadth of American Christianity today.

“There are also many moderate and progressive Christians in our country,” he said. “Nearly every mainline Protestant denomination in the U.S. stands against most if not all of the xenophobic policies coming from the religious right.”

Notable among the critics is Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington who delivered the homily at the interfaith prayer service following Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January.

In her sermon, Budde made a direct plea to Trump, asking him to have “mercy” on those “scared” about his return to the White House and the effect his policies may have on them, such as LGBTQ+ children and undocumented immigrants.

While Protestants may be the most vocal critics of the Trump administration, a number of evangelicals and Catholics have split off from the MAGA movement and spoken about the “the spiritual danger of Donald Trump.”

The latter have been particularly vocal about the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant actions. Earlier this month, the first U.S. bishop appointed by Pope Leo XIV called for priests, deacons and parish leaders to stand in solidarity with migrants by showing up to immigration court proceedings.

“All of these people are working to shake their fellow believers out of their obsession with Trump and calling them back to Christ,” Robertson said.

“Prophetic, progressive Christians that are devoted to the way of Jesus are standing up and speaking up, and I am hopeful that we can form coalitions that can change the direction of this country for the common good of all people,” he said.

As Carrie McKean, a writer and the communications director at First Presbyterian Church Midland in West Texas, has written about, there are even pastors who generally like Trump’s border policy while still worrying about, and even sheltering, migrants.

“Despite the way MAGA, populism and Christian Nationalism might be dominating this current political moment — and despite the way many within those movements distort and twist Jesus’ words to achieve their own ends — it’s so important to remember, Jesus was never trying to build a kingdom of this world,” McKean told HuffPost.

″[Jesus] cannot be sorted into one of our contemporary political boxes — he is not merely liberal or conservative,” she said.

As a follower of Jesus, McKean said she’s praying that more Christians demonstrate a willingness to place even the strongest political convictions beneath the authority of Jesus.

“To do this, we each must cultivate a critical eye toward our own parties,” she said. “We must stay alert, recognizing that earthly rulers are prone to manipulation, power plays (Matthew 20:25), and ungodly acts of injustice (Ecclesiastes 5:8–9).”

Hamilton, the creator of the viral video, agrees. She said she’s been most heartened by comments from people who’ve reached out and said that video caused them to give more thought to the political movements they’ve stood behind.

“I heard from people who are finding their faith by divorcing it from Christian nationalism and that brings me hope,” she said. “I’m not trying to turn everyone liberal, I’m just trying to create a moment of pause for people who feel deeply entrenched in MAGA ― to maybe help them reconnect with their own values outside of the noise.”