Faith is one of the most personal, profound things a human being can hold. For billions of people, religious belief provides comfort in grief, community in isolation, and a moral framework that helps them navigate an often difficult world. Christianity, in its many forms, has inspired extraordinary acts of compassion, courage, and social justice across centuries.
Which makes it all the more infuriating to watch it get wielded like a political bludgeon.
There is a long and dishonourable tradition on the political right of selectively citing scripture to dress up what is, at its core, cruelty, exclusion, or the protection of power. It is not new. But in the era of Trump, Morrison, and the global Christian nationalist movement, it has become more brazen, more cynical, and more damaging — both to democracy and to Christianity itself.
The Selective Bible
Anyone who has read the Bible — actually read it, rather than cherry-picked highlights — knows that it is a vast, complex, and often contradictory document. It contains passages of extraordinary moral beauty sitting alongside instructions that any reasonable modern person would find barbaric. It has been used throughout history to justify slavery, the subjugation of women, the persecution of LGBTQ+ people, the colonisation of Indigenous peoples, and the burning of heretics.
It has also been used to argue for the abolition of slavery, the rights of the poor, the dignity of all human beings, and the moral obligation to welcome strangers. The very same book. The difference is not in the text — it’s in who is reading it, and what they want to justify.
This is the fundamental problem with political Christianity: it almost always operates through selective quotation. The passages that support kindness to the poor, the outcast, and the stranger — the passages that Jesus himself is recorded as emphasising most strongly — get quietly set aside. The passages that can be used to justify punishing people who make lifestyle choices the reader disapproves of get amplified, quoted at press conferences, and stitched onto banners.
What Jesus Actually Said
It’s worth pausing on this, because the gap between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of the American religious right — and increasingly, the Australian religious right — is truly extraordinary.
The Jesus of the Gospels spent his time with prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, and the destitute. He reserved his harshest words not for sinners, but for the religious establishment — the Pharisees who used their piety to justify their power and look down on ordinary people. He overturned the tables of money changers in the temple. He told a wealthy young man that to follow God he should give away everything he owned. He said it was harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
This is not a description of a figure who would feel at home at a Trump rally, blessing AR-15s, cutting food stamps, or telling refugees to go back where they came from. And yet, here we are.
The right-wing political Christianity of our era has performed a remarkable sleight of hand: it has taken a faith whose central figure was a poor, homeless, Middle-Eastern refugee who preached radical compassion and was executed by the state — and turned it into an ideology of nationalism, wealth, and social conservatism. It deserves to be called out for exactly what it is: not Christianity, but the cynical use of Christianity’s cultural authority to give moral cover to a political agenda.
Scott Morrison’s Australia
Australia has not been immune. The Morrison government’s relationship with religion was instructive. Morrison was open about his Pentecostal faith and frequently framed his politics in religious terms. There is nothing wrong with a politician holding personal religious beliefs. But there is something deeply wrong when those beliefs become the justification for policy that causes measurable harm to vulnerable people — while simultaneously shielding the powerful from scrutiny.
The religious discrimination legislation pursued by the Morrison government was sold as protecting the rights of faith communities. What it largely amounted to was the right of religious institutions to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and staff, wrapped in the language of religious freedom. The message — however it was dressed — was that some Australians were less deserving of dignity because of who they were.
Meanwhile, the same government that spoke frequently of Christian values maintained a policy of indefinite offshore detention that was condemned by church leaders, human rights organisations, and doctors as deliberately cruel. The refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru were, by any reasonable reading of the Gospels, precisely the people a Christian government should have shown mercy to. The theology was convenient when it served the culture wars. Less so when it came with a price tag or required political courage.
The American Template: Christian Nationalism
The United States provides the most advanced — and most alarming — example of where this leads. Christian nationalism, the belief that America is a fundamentally Christian nation and should be governed by Christian principles, has become a significant force within the Republican Party. At its fringes, it openly advocates for a theocratic state.
What is striking is how little the Christianity of Christian nationalism resembles anything in the Gospels. It is overwhelmingly focused on a small cluster of social conservative issues — abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and a vaguely defined concept of “traditional values” — while showing almost no concern for the issues Jesus himself emphasised: poverty, wealth inequality, care for the sick, welcome of the stranger.
The result is a movement that has given theological blessing to a political programme that cuts healthcare for the poor, reduces food assistance, separates families at the border, and concentrates wealth in the hands of the already wealthy — all while wrapping itself in the language of faith and morality. If you can pull that off with a straight face, you have mastered the art of using religion as a political prop.
This Is Not About Faith
Let’s be clear about what this article is not arguing. It is not arguing that religious people should stay out of politics. It is not arguing that faith has no place in public life. It is not arguing that Christians — or members of any other faith — cannot draw on their beliefs when forming their political views. Of course they can, and many do so with integrity and genuine compassion.
What this article is arguing is that the selective, cynical weaponisation of religious text to justify cruelty, exclusion, and the consolidation of political power is a form of dishonesty that should be called out — firmly, and regardless of which faith is being exploited.
When a politician quotes scripture to justify cutting support for single mothers, ask which verse they’re citing. When a religious lobby group claims divine authority for discriminating against LGBTQ+ young people, ask them to square that with the two greatest commandments Jesus identified: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself. When a political movement claims the mantle of Christian values while ignoring the poor, the sick, and the persecuted, ask them to read the Sermon on the Mount again — slowly, this time.
The Damage to Faith Itself
There is an irony that the people most damaged by the politicisation of Christianity may be Christians themselves. Church attendance across the Western world has been in long-term decline, and surveys consistently find that young people in particular are put off organised religion by its association with judgement, exclusion, and right-wing politics.
When Christianity becomes synonymous in the public mind with homophobia, political tribalism, and the blessing of the powerful, it loses the people who might otherwise have found genuine meaning and community in it. The loudest voices claiming to defend Christianity are, in the long run, doing it the most damage.
The most effective advertisement for genuine Christian values is not a politician quoting Leviticus at a press conference. It’s the church that runs the food bank. It’s the faith community that opens its doors to refugees. It’s the chaplain who sits with someone in crisis without condition or judgement. These expressions of faith rarely make the news. They also don’t need to be held up as political leverage.
A Simple Test
Here’s a simple test for evaluating any politician or political movement that invokes Christian values: ask whether their policies make life better or worse for the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. Ask whether they welcome or exclude those who are different. Ask whether they exercise power with humility or with arrogance.
By that test — which is, more or less, the test the Gospels themselves propose — a great deal of what passes for “Christian values” in contemporary right-wing politics fails comprehensively.
You don’t have to be religious to recognise the hypocrisy. You just have to be paying attention.
