When religion is fused with power, the line between “us” and “them” becomes a license for violence.
To understand the US today, we must start with an uncomfortable truth: The idea of God is no longer just a matter of faith — it is becoming a political weapon.
The erosion of liberal norms in the US is reshaping how power is exercised. What we are witnessing now is a more dangerous evolution: religion weaponized to justify that shift.
The Old Testament draws a stark moral boundary between “us” and “them.” Within the group, there is compassion, law and obligation. Outside the group, there can be conquest, expulsion and in some passages, genocide. Morality is bounded, and those boundaries define who counts.
The New Testament attempts to overturn this logic. Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Break the distinction between insider and outsider. Yet history offers a harsher lesson: Societies choose between these two systems. They do not reconcile them.
Nazi Germany made that choice with devastating clarity. It built an intense internal morality of loyalty and sacrifice for “Aryans” while systematically stripping Jews and others of their humanity. The structure was familiar: Morality within, none beyond. The language shifted — from “chosen people” to “chosen race” — but the logic remained intact.
Today, elements of US Christian nationalism are making a similar choice.
This is not the universalism of the New Testament; it is the selective morality of the Old Testament repurposed for modern politics.
The US is cast as a nation chosen by God. “Real Americans” are implicitly defined through cultural and religious identity, often white and Christian. Others — immigrants, Muslims and dissenters — are recast as threats.
US President Donald Trump is this trend’s clearest expression.
His rhetoric is undisciplined but also revealing. He threatens other nations with coarse language, frames conflicts in moral absolutes and invokes religious undertones to elevate politics into something resembling a sacred struggle.
At times, the performance collapses into incoherence — invoking phrases such as “Praise be to Allah” not as respect but as spectacle, exposing ignorance, emotionalism and a casual contempt for religion and diplomacy.
This is the breakdown of political language into identity-driven mobilization.
The deeper danger lies not in religion itself, but in how it is used. When leaders invoke God to decide who deserves empathy and who does not, empathy becomes tribal, violence becomes justifiable, because the other is cast as evil or less than human; institutions weaken, because those who claim to stand on God’s side no longer feel bound by restraint or self-reflection.
This is the logic that has underpinned some of the darkest chapters in modern history. For Taiwan, the implications are immediate.
The most dangerous miscalculation is to assume that the US remains a consistently rational, stable and values-based ally. If US politics continues drifting toward moral tribalism fused with religious nationalism, its foreign policy would become less predictable and it would be more willing to treat allies as instruments rather than partners.
The New Testament urges humanity not to divide the world into “us” and “them.” History suggests that this is precisely what humans do most easily.
When that division is sanctified in God’s name, embedded in state power and amplified by leaderssuch as Trump, it is no longer theology; it is geopolitics.
The concept of “God” is no longer something to be worshipped — it is something to be wielded.
Simon Tang is an adjunct professor at California State University, Fullerton, who lectures on international relations.
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