Vital Christian Teaching in the Age of Trump
On Being Theologically, If Not Politically, Correct
Falsely Teaching the Faith
On Sunday, June 22, in the worship services at First Baptist Church of Dallas, Pastor Robert Jeffress misled and misinformed his congregation by engaging in false teaching about the Bible. He offered an interpretation of scripture that twisted texts to justify his professional and political messaging. His words also violated the Ninth Commandment by bearing false witness against other persons living and dead.
In a statement1 that celebrated President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb several Iranian sites and that yielded multiple rounds of applause—including a standing ovation from his church—Jeffress spoke inaccurately about God’s promises in scripture. By omitting important contextual elements about the history of Israel in the Bible, he ignored the prophetic critiques of Israel’s unfaithful behavior embedded in our sacred texts. While praising the president, he committed exegetical errors that warrant critique and correction.
Jeffress said, “Thank God for the courageous and godly leadership of our President Donald Trump.” He called attention to that part of the president’s address to the nation the previous night, after the completed military action against Iran, when Trump said, “I want to thank everybody, but in particular I want to thank God and I just want to say, we love you God.” Jeffress commented: “Have you ever heard another president say that—Republican or Democrat? No other president has said that before.”
Jeffress’s assertion was dangerously, if not deliberately, deceitful. For he either ignored, overlooked, or intentionally withheld from his congregation the truth about other presidents’ personal expression of the love of God. Jimmy Carter had proclaimed and shown it not only before his presidency but during and after it. Barack Obama had demonstrated it, including through the words he spoke at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina, and as he sang the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
Well known for his pulpit proclamations and frequent FOX commentaries, Jeffress’s misguided and misguiding teachings have not been limited to one Sunday morning. He is a repeat offender. His program “Pathway to Victory,” which promotes and sells his teachings, features false and misleading interpretations of biblical passages, such as when he asserted that Christians “are called to honor each God-ordained institution,” including the current government of the United States.2
Faithful Christians have an obligation to confront false teaching. It is a biblical mandate to do so. Since the day Jesus was raised from the dead, across two millennia of church history, Christianity has had a mission to teach truth and confront falsehood. That mission remains true beyond the reach of earthly executive orders, whether they come from an ancient Pilate or a present-day president. But correcting false teaching requires courage and creates controversy.
Teaching Is Our Foundational Task
It is vital for the church to reclaim its teaching mission in the second quarter of the 21st century. Two key biblical texts point the way. One is from the closing verses of Matthew 28, in which, with “all authority in heaven and on earth” (v. 18, NRSV), the risen Jesus directs his disciples to educate everyone everywhere, “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (v. 20). Another is from John 20, in which the risen Jesus endows his followers with the power of the Holy Spirit to confront sin: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (v. 23).
By the word of the risen Lord, teaching that instructs and corrects is fundamental to Christian life. For some Christians it is an individual vocation, and for all Christians a communal necessity, so that the world may know what is true and what is not true about the gospel, and consequently, about human life.
Early Christians had no military or political capacity to impose their beliefs on others. They had no access to the levers of governmental authority or the powers of legal systems to control what others learned or believed. All they could do was teach by the power and understanding of the Holy Spirit given them, for the sake of discerning the difference between truth and falsehood. The same is true today.
Teaching for Evangelization, Discipline, and the Transformation of the World
The New Testament teems with evidence about the significance of teaching. Paul taught the theology and practice of the Eucharist when he wrote that he “received a tradition from the Lord, which I also handed on to you” (1 Cor 11:23, CEB). A council of first-generation Christian leaders, who convened in Jerusalem (Acts 15), defined what the church would teach about the relationship between the law of Moses and the gospel of Jesus.
Timothy underscored the importance of “those who labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim 5:17, NRSV). Titus was ordered to teach in Crete, not because Crete’s people were eager learners but because difficult circumstances there required good teaching (Titus 1:5). Thus a bishop “must have a firm grasp of the word that is trustworthy in accordance with the teaching, so that he may be able both to preach with sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict it” (1:9, NRSV).
Christians were also to discipline one another through correct teaching. Paul wrote that he confronted Peter face to face in a dispute about the content of the gospel (Gal 2:11). James (2:2–4) corrected the Christian practice of granting privileges to persons of prominence or power, emphasizing equity for the poor and the wealthy. The Second Letter of John states that false teaching is not merely mistaken but is participation in evil (vv. 9–11).
We Christians teach in both sacred and secular realms. A council that was held at Nicaea 1,700 years ago gave us a creed with clear parameters for Christian teaching. Subsequently, the Church’s commitment to education has given us schools, colleges, and universities for teaching and practicing the arts and sciences, along with methods for evaluating their fidelity and truthfulness.
Orders of Roman Catholic clergy and laity have devoted themselves through the ages to scholarship and teaching. Sixteenth-century Reformers like Martin Luther (a priest and biblical theologian) and John Calvin (a theologian and Bible teacher) were devoted to learning and teaching the Christian faith. Nineteenth-century Christians, such as Phoebe Palmer and Frances Willard, were devoted to teaching scripture and church doctrine in an era when denominations did not ordain women to the priestly and teaching offices. Invariably, all such teachers confronted false teachings in their time, and set about to correct them. Controversy was often the result.
Methodism got its name due to the condemnation of those who criticized adherence to disciplined methods of faith and practice. Its founder, John Wesley, turned the epithet into a trademark for the “methodist” movement. He convened his first conference in 1744 and set its agenda in the form of questions, the first of which was “What to teach?”
Teaching Truthfully to Counter False Teaching
Congregations, conferences, dioceses, presbyteries, and other ecclesiastical judicatories within respective religious traditions, denominations, and sects possess their own structures for discerning the truth and soundness of the teachings they espouse. The Roman Catholic Church through its hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, with the pope presiding at the pinnacle, determines the veracity of doctrine for worldwide Catholicism.
However, some Catholic orders discipline their members apart from the rubrics of the hierarchy. When the president of the University of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, invited then-President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate,3 the diocesan bishop railed against inviting a person who did not oppose abortion, demanding that the invitation be rescinded.4 Father Jenkins responded by saying that he did not take instructions from the bishop but rather from the head of the order of Holy Cross Fathers who control the university and what is taught there.5
Unlike the hierarchical polity of the Roman Catholic Church or the connectional polities of the Methodist and Reformed traditions, Baptists operate within a congregational polity in which each local church makes its own decisions as to whether its pastors and teachers are teaching what the congregation sees fit to be taught. Hence, Robert Jeffress can teach whatever he wishes, so long as his congregation is comfortable with it. Consequently, any confrontation, critique, or correction of his teaching must derive from an external source when the congregation itself indulges in false teaching.
Given his broad public presence, Jeffress has effectively invited a public debate regarding his interpretations of scripture and his attributions of godliness to the current president. Confronting Jeffress (and others who teach false Christian doctrine in order to adorn their political views with religious validation) is sure to provoke controversy.
Yet, in as much as we live in terrifying times when sacred teaching is easily surrendered to popular opinion, and when secular educational institutions succumb to the extortions of those in power, silence in the face of false teaching betrays faithful Christian witness.
False Teachings Seize Control of Public Institutions
At this very moment, federal authorities, and some state governments, seem determined to demolish existing educational institutions, from the elementary to the graduate level, in order to seize control and impose their own brand of ideological sanction on what they conceive should be taught, whether or not it meets rigorous accreditation standards of truth-telling, such as in the teaching of history.
Until most recently in the United States, qualified peer professionals and academics possessing contractual authority from the Department of Education or accrediting bodies such as the regional Associations of Colleges and Schools, dedicated as these are to the highest standards of teaching and learning, have been making informed judgments about the quality of educational institutions. Allied professional organizations, like the American Bar Association and the Association of Theological Schools, have done the same.
Their responsibility has been to examine all aspects of institutional vitality and viability—financial stability, faculty quality, library capacity, academic integrity, governance accountability, and more. They review public institutions, from the massive state universities to small state colleges. They review private institutions, from prominent and financially wealthy ones to tiny and struggling ones, from independent colleges to faith-related ones. They assign reviewers with expertise as scholars, executives, librarians, accountants, artists, and technologists who prepare their assessments by comparing what exists at an institution with best practices for each field. But that system is now being undermined and replaced.
When Secretary of Education Linda McMahon was appointed to her post in early 2025, she was expected to diminish, if not entirely eliminate, the department. It is now approximately 50% smaller than it was on Inauguration Day. On July 14, the Supreme Court ruled6 that the U.S. president can fire personnel across the broad spectrum of government agencies. Although the Department of Education can be legally disestablished only by an act of Congress, it continues to exist with far fewer employees, in contrast to the former administration. Funds that previously supported educational programs across the spectrum of underserved populations have now been withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the political powers that control gigantic public universities in six southern states have decided to create their own accrediting bodies.7 Once their plan is in place, decisions about what constitutes authentic, qualitatively evaluated teaching about slavery or the slaughter of native peoples in colonial and post-colonial America will be subject to “politically correct” formulations of reality rather than scholarly-driven inquiry into objective factual truth.
Concurrently, popularizing forces that employ streaming, podcasting, and other digitized technologies have become dominant regarding the sacred task of Christian teaching. Whoever controls a congregation, owns a web domain, or mounts a podcast can claim to own title to terms like “evangelical” and “Christian.” There is no such thing as orthodox copyright to protect against theologically misappropriated Christian jargon.
The Courage to Teach with Wisdom
It is vital that the voices of true and wise prophets rise in every age to teach the faith faithfully, which includes taking to task those who teach the faith falsely. This mission is particularly crucial due to the eruption of errant Christian nationalism within the United States of America.
A loud and strident minority, which has seized control of many media, promotes the notion that the current president of the United States has been chosen by God to lead the nation toward a period of prosperity and piety.
During his first presidential term, those clamorous sycophant voices claimed that Donald Trump was a 21st-century version of the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, who though “scarcely a devotee of YHWH the God of Israel,” nevertheless facilitated the return of Jewish exiles from their Babylonian captivity, just as Trump, they believe, will “advance the causes of the evangelical community—and by extension the country.8
Moreover, during Trump’s campaign for a second term, the failed attempt on July 13, 2024, to assassinate him led Trump and those heretical voices behind him to say that God had spared him for a divine purpose that included his reelection to the presidency.9
We Christians, however, being faithful to the scripture, must courageously correct that false narrative.
First, we must do so because it is never the task of the church to infer a divine purpose to any specific human event. As too often in war, opposing combatants have claimed that each is fighting on God’s side or—worse—that God is on their side.
During the civil rights movement in the United States, Christians climbed onto buses as freedom riders and prayerfully marched in segregated places, such as across the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma, Alabama, while other Christians burned crosses and lit fires to freedom rider buses in order to assert that segregationists were the army of Christ. But, in fact, those who committed those acts of violence did so in direct opposition to the teachings of Christ.
Christian discipleship must always be conducted with an air of humility. Until God’s will be completely done “on earth as it is in heaven,” according to the words of Jesus’s prayer, we can only penultimately—not ultimately—know which human actions belong to heaven and which ones to mere earthly mortals.
Second, as Jesus bore witness in his own words, saying, “Go and tell that fox,” Herod Antipas (Luke 13:32), neither the status nor the potency of persons in positions of power can be taken as proof of their divine purpose.
One must wait until the fruits of their labor are apparent. With regard to Trump, to date, his bitter fruits appear as a far cry from what one would expect from a truthful and faithful president.
When the president’s agents arbitrarily arrest people in public places, including churches, on the basis of their ethnic or racial identity, without credible evidence of their having committed a crime,
When such persons are subsequently deported without benefit of due legal process,
When the president’s heavily armed and militarized forces threaten entire neighborhoods by invasion of public spaces, so that the targets of his intimidation are afraid to leave their homes to go to schools and hospitals,
When statutory health care programs are deliberately decimated, leaving millions of Americans at risk of losing access to vaccinations and medical treatments,
Then, the fruits of the president’s labor are social poison produced to destroy human life. For such fruits in no way represent “godly behavior” as falsely attributed to President Donald Trump by Pastor Robert Jeffress.
Courageous teaching is a Christian responsibility. Faithful teaching is truthful and wise when it confronts those who speak and act unfaithfully by bearing false witness to God and by doing grievous harm to human beings. Faithful teaching generates “good trouble,” as it rightly should.
Christians in America are now living in a time when bishops, pastors, professors, and Sunday School teachers must lift up their prophetic voices and engage in prophetic actions, lest the truth of the gospel become captive to the false prophets who, failing to discern the true word of the Lord, lead people astray into the dungeons of false hope and the caverns of deep despair.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits,” declared the Lord Jesus.
It is of this God that we teach, and to this Lord that we Christians give praise.
1 First Baptist Church issued a news release quoting his remarks, with a link to a video of his statement.
2 July 7, 2025, email circulated from “Patriot US Mail” with Jeffress’s signature.
3 https://news.nd.edu/news/president-obama-to-deliver-notre-dames-commencement-address/
4 https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/2009/04/12/rockford-bishop-knocks-notre-dame/44218419007/
5 https://canonlawmadeeasy.com/2009/07/09/notre-dame-obama-and-the-bishops-authority/
6 McMahon v. New York https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a1203_pol1.pdf
7 The consortium of major institutions, all of which are controlled by their state governments, includes state university systems in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, in addition to Texas A&M University. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/06/27/public-universities-in-six-southern-states-form-new-accrediting-agency/
8 https://www.christianitytoday.com/2018/10/donald-trump-cyrus-prophecy-old-testament/
9 See the video of Trump’s remarks about his being spared by God for his work. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/13/trump-butler-shooting-religion/