Will Christian Nationalism finally die by its own sword?
The dereliction of empire eats its own
I was not planning to add anything to the torrent of writing about Jeffrey Epstein. Since his death while in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York awaiting trial on federal charges of sex trafficking, the story has been picked clean by tabloids, true-crime documentarians, and political intrigue waiting for the fallout of those who had been touched by his rot. For victim rights advocates, the release of the emails was necessary to get justice, and those pursuing convictions for his crimes and abuse against women have been waiting for it as well.
Long before Trump rode down his golden escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his candidacy, there was already a long public record that weighed upon his shoulders like a litany of crimes that would await him in hell. But there was no judgement day for his criminality, just the privilege of impunity. Right wing Christian Nationalists used these contradictions of righteous rectitude to uphold him as the poster child of absolution. Criminality no longer weighed on his shoulders, as it was now the hands of Jesus that uplifted him, and Trump’s success was proof that one could do no wrong under the American aegis of absolution.
Trump is Pornography
For Christian Nationalists, the morally and financially bankrupt, the more transgressive Trump appears—the more he brazenly violates the rules of decency—the more powerful his absolution. If he can be saved despite grabbing women by the pussy, defrauding charities, and attempting to steal an election, then his followers, who have committed lesser sins, are certainly saved.
Transgression is not a problem to be explained away, rather it is fuel proving that salvation is not about moral improvement but about tribal loyalty. The leader’s willingness to be accused of the worst possible crimes is the ultimate proof that he has taken the violence of the accusers onto himself. As a performance vehicle, this is replayed over and over and across the disciplines from Claude Levi-Strauss to Rene Girard, from Sigmund Freud to Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade, the analysis is simple:
You are shit,
You are a heap of garbage,
You have come to kill us,
You have come to save us.
(Girard p.107)
In Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, the central theme explores how transgression is recast as sacred. The greater the transgression, the greater the potential for transformation. By no means is this a prescriptive how-to govern book, rather it is cautionary work about how violence, blame, and ritual can be converted into legitimacy. (Girard p.107)
Trump works because accusation and redemption get folded into the same story. The leader is called corrupt, dangerous, or immoral, then that same stigma is recast as proof he was chosen to fight “evil” enemies. Fear gets turned into group identity, and group identity gets turned into political loyalty. In older religious terms, this looks like a sacrifice story, but in the hands of the media, it’s just modern politics. The accused claims persecution, refuses accountability, and comes back stronger as a kind of savior for his base.
And now, watching the public’s response of the FBI’s latest trove of released emails, there has been a predictable circus of moral condemnation against all those named in the Epstein file. Some like, Noam Chomsky, have been a surprise, but there has also been an added layer of uncertainty because of AI fakery. Authenticity requires more than Google, for example, to credibly verify the who’s who on Epstein’s list.
For example, while there is no evidence of Putin ever having met Epstein, the media has been trying to spin an Epstein-Putin story with headlines that read “Putin named over 1000 times in Epstein email,” implying that Putin was an associate of Epstein, not just a target. The sheer volume of these manufactured headlines is shaping the Googlesphere with pages and pages of misaligned evidence that Putin was involved with Epstein. And while apparently, Epstein had a preference for Russian or Ukrainian girls, it is more likely that Epstein sought to entrap Putin into his influencer spy ring while simultaneously establishing a trafficking connection, the way that drug traffickers did with opium in Afghanistan.
And as I too, have taken the bait, getting ensnared in the Russia Russia Russia fiction, this article is about absolution, and whether Christian Nationalism can finally die by its own sword, withering away in shame, or will it come back with the vengeance of the apocalyptic horsemen smiting anyone who dares accuse Trump of having a predilection for young girls. Either way, this undermines any accountability that the United States has a moral authority for global leadership.
This strange and dutiful reluctance to call genocide, slavery, and rape by its name defines the United States as if there were a contradiction within the wild western constructs of deliverance, reckoning, and absolution. This fiction is often repeated in the American Gothic, in myths of horror and aberration, from Clint Eastwood films to the novels of Cormac McCarthy. As evidence of systemic abuse rises alongside hearsay of child sacrifice, cannibalism, and occultism, we should ask whether the manufacturing of violence reinforces the sacred that has come to define American power. The history of the United States is most accurately defined by genocide, slavery, rape, theft, fraud, and dispossession, routed through the excesses of capitalism. And yet we have continually sold ourselves to the world as a society of values, laws, and moral order. “Do as I say, not as I do” is how Washington manages its international affairs.
We see this repeated again and again, so much so that this becomes a meme, losing its efficacy, trivializing its victims. More than a generation has passed since the Boston Globe exposed Fr. John Geoghan and showed that Cardinal Bernard Law and the Archdiocese of Boston had moved abusive priests from parish to parish for decades. The Catholic Church has never fully escaped that moral condemnation. In parallel, strands of rabbinic interpretation have treated the Torah as a political template for the ongoing Zionist state violence and genocide. This has damaged the post-Holocaust moral authority Judaism once held in global public life, and we will hopefully see Palestinians take the role of moral authority in the world.
Isn’t it time for the world to embrace a shift in virtue away from absolution and impunity, away from paradigms of vice and moral ineptitude, and toward governance grounded in mutual respect, trust, and legitimate authority? The only way to sustain a global economy without trust is through predation. If Epstein is a metaphor for the pathological transgressions of wealth accumulation and abuse of power, where do we look for an alternative?
Until Christian nationalists fall upon their sword, eviscerating themselves from its capitalist and imperialist entrails, if there is any moral or ethical order in the world, we need an example of good governance to lead us.
Now who will lead us?
In the postwar era, the United States constructed something unprecedented: a global order anchored not only in military and economic power, but in a carefully maintained posture of moral supremacy. That posture was built with a clear objective: preserving Western influence across former colonies and newly decolonizing states. The Marshall Plan, the Universal Declaration, and the Nuremberg trials helped build an architecture of human rights, liberal democracy, and rule of law with strong U.S. influence. Yet even as the Cold War required alliances with dictators, even as the CIA helped topple governments in Tehran and Guatemala City, and even as bombs fell on Hanoi and Phnom Penh, the United States sustained an ethic of superiority. It advanced legal principles while engineering large-scale violence. It spoke of freedom while funding death squads. It helped codify the Geneva framework, then repeatedly narrowed or bypassed its constraints.
As the world moved into the post-perestroika neoliberal order, moral legitimacy gave way to unipolar economic management. The language of rights remained, but enforcement followed finance, trade discipline, debt conditionality, and sanctions architecture. In that transition, credibility shifted from justice to compliance. The question was no longer who acted lawfully in a universal sense, but who could set the metrics, control liquidity, and define acceptable governance for everyone else.
From an interfaith perspective, China represents that virtue shift. Wrapped within the framework of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” the long histories of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, all older than the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which are also foundational in Christian scripture, have evolved alongside China’s history, and shaped the moral and ethical drive for revolution. Even China’s embrace of Marx’s historical materialism is wrapped within the virtues of these traditions.
China’s historical materialism developed within a civilizational context shaped by religious ethics, so governance is often framed through duties, harmony, restraint, and social responsibility rather than class analysis alone. In practice, this means material development and state planning are presented as legitimate when they align with social cohesion, moral cultivation, and long-term collective stability.
In this historical context, the Republic of China should be understood as a political and economic shift in the wrong direction. It moved away from virtues that tied authority to balance, restraint, and reciprocal duty, and toward a reactionary Confucian order centered on hierarchy and coercion, shaped in part by the 1919 Washington framework and the Nine-Power Treaty signed by Wellington Koo, and later intensified by war, invasion, and state fragmentation under Chiang Kai-Shek. The ROC’s moral vocabulary, together with its Open Door alignment, did not match the material conditions of its people.
The ROC’s claim to legitimacy leaned more on a Judeo-Christian anti-communist alignment and Western protection, and thus remained closer to the crisis conditions that had already destabilized China, from the Taiping era to the Boxer aftermath, than to the broad post-colonial repair central to Confucian and Taoist ethics. In that sense, it’s inaccurate to describe China as having no religion. China’s religious and spiritual traditions are older than the Abrahamic traditions, while Christianity remained comparatively limited and often concentrated in treaty-port and colonial settings. Islam was also historically significant, tied to dominant Muslim communities across western China and to long-distance trade networks connected to Silk Road commerce under successive imperial formations, including the Yuan and Qing dynasties.
From the multipolar perspective of BRICS-plus and the development priorities of the Global South, the United States appears as a debt-laden economy whose political order is increasingly shaped by a billionaire class of asset managers, tech ideologues promoting a quasi-religious digital order, the ongoing support of a genocide in Palestine justified by ultra-conservative Zionist currents, political kidnappings, terror networks by government thugs, and the Epstein-Trump axis of predation, absolution, and impunity.
Reference
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory, Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. (p.107)
King, Wunsz. China at the Washington Conference, 1921-1922. St. John’s University Press, 1963