“Our President is not a Christian,” Marjorie Taylor Greene posted to X on Easter Sunday. The former House Republican was responding to Donald Trump’s profanity-laden threats to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure and send its people to hell. A week later, when Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself as a Christ figure, Greene accused him of having “an Antichrist spirit.” It’s tempting to say that if we’re going to label people based on their behavior, Greene—who has a long history of spreading antidemocratic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and racist conspiracy theories—hardly qualifies as a Christian either. But we should resist this temptation, for both theological and practical reasons.
For millennia, the question of who qualifies as a Christian has fueled theological reflection, shaped councils and creeds, and determined the boundaries of participation in worship. In our own era, Greene is far from the first to anathematize Trump. In 2016, Pope Francis responded to a reporter’s question about Trump’s proposed border wall, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”
The pope may have been recalling Luke 6:44: A tree is known by its fruit. Yet, however terrible a person’s actions, there are theological dangers in denying other people’s identity as Christians. When we make this contingent on observable human acts, we underestimate the power of baptism to confer belonging in God’s family and of communion to reconcile sinners with God. We also blur the line between justification and sanctification—a line the Reformers worked hard to preserve. And when we pattern our congregations on merit rather than grace, we deny God’s prerogative to constitute a beloved community of saints and sinners, one with invisible boundaries.
