What conservative Christians will have to answer for

At a Glance

What I said: When the nations are judged, the King says I was hungry … I was a stranger … I was sick … I was in prison, and because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:35–40).

What was done: Since January 2025, the government that most white evangelical Christians voted for has cut refugee admissions to the lowest number in the program’s history, opened churches to immigration arrests, taken health coverage and food from millions to pay for tax cuts that go mostly to the rich, shut down the aid that kept children alive abroad, pardoned the mob that attacked the Capitol, and prayed in my name for violence against people “who deserve no mercy.”

Who will answer: The men who did it, by name. And everyone who lent them my name to do it with.

The short answer: I told you whose face you would see in the stranger, the hungry, the sick and the prisoner. Look at the faces. Then ask who you will hand power to on November 3, and whether you will leave it with the men who did this. Here is what I am asking you to do ↓

What this page covers

• The stranger: refugees shut out, and immigration arrests allowed at churches. Full answer: What did Jesus say about immigrants?
• The hungry and the sick: health care and food cut for millions to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and the aid that fed children abroad shut down. Full answers: the poor, health care, the rich.
• The prisoner: the deadliest year in immigration detention in two decades. Full answer: What did Jesus say about prisons and police?
• The sword: the attack on the Capitol, the pardons, and the Christian nationalism behind them. Full answer: What did Jesus say about guns?
• Mercy: a prayer at the Pentagon for violence against those “who deserve no mercy,” killings at sea without trial, and the pope attacked for asking for peace. Full answers: war, the death penalty.
• Enemies: “I hate my opponent,” said at a Christian memorial.
• Truth: 34 felony convictions and a long record of fraud.
• The children: Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and the files his government fought to keep closed.
• “Lord, Lord”: the president as a picture of me, and bishops filmed praying over him before an election.
• “Pro-life”: what choice really means, and what the pro-life movement has really done. Full answer: What did Jesus say about abortion?
• What you’ll hear back, and answers to it.
• What to do on November 3.

I told you how it would end.

Near the end of my life I told my friends a story about the last day. When the Son of Man comes in his glory … before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31–32).

To the ones on his right, the King says: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me (Matthew 25:35–36).

They are surprised. Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you? And he answers: Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:37–40).

Then he turns to the others and reads the same list, with one word changed. You didn’t. They are just as surprised. Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you? (Matthew 25:44).

Notice what the King does not ask. He does not ask which nation they belonged to. He does not ask what they believed about taxes, or which candidate promised to protect their faith. He asks one thing: what happened to the least of these, and what part did you play in it.

In 2024, about eight in ten white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump.¹ Many Catholics and other believers did too. Most of you did it for reasons you believed were mine. That is why this page is written to you. The men in power will answer for themselves. You will answer for what you handed them, and for what you defended once you saw what they did with it.

Here is what was done. Every line has a source at the bottom of this page. Check every one.

“I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in”

You know my story. When I was a small child, a king set out to kill me, and my parents took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt (Matthew 2:14). I was a refugee before I could walk. You sing about it every Christmas.

In 2024, the United States set its limit for refugees at 125,000 people. On September 30, 2025, President Trump set it at 7,500, the lowest in the history of the program. Then he ordered that the places “shall primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa,” who are white.² The door to the persecuted of the whole world was shut almost all the way, and held open for one group.

For many years, immigration agents were told to stay away from churches, schools and hospitals, except in emergencies. In January 2025, the new administration threw that rule out. Agents could now make arrests where my people gather to pray. Christians and Jews went to court to stop it. In February 2026, a federal judge in Massachusetts barred most raids at the Lutheran, Baptist and other churches that had sued. On October 20, 2026, a federal appeals court in Washington allowed a coalition of 27 Jewish and Christian bodies to go forward with their challenge, after the administration had argued they had no right to bring it.³

In November 2025, the Catholic bishops of the United States voted 216 to 5 to say it out loud: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” They said they were “concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care,” and “troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship.”⁴ These are not radicals. They are the bishops of the largest church in your country.

Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, defended the deportations with a Christian idea. You love your family first, he said, “and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Pope Francis answered him in a letter to the American bishops: the true order of love is the one “we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan’ … the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”⁵

I told that story to a man who asked me the vice president’s question. Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29). My answer was a foreigner, on a road, bandaging a stranger’s wounds. The law I grew up under said it plainly: The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself (Leviticus 19:34).

“I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat”

Before I was born, my mother sang about what God does. He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52–53).

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the law he called the One Big Beautiful Bill. Congress’s own scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office, found that it cuts about one trillion dollars from Medicaid and other health coverage over ten years, and that ten million more people will have no health insurance by 2034.⁶ It cuts food aid for poor families, called SNAP, by about 186 billion dollars.⁷

Then the Budget Office added it all up, the tax cuts and the cuts to help. The poorest tenth of American households lose about 1,200 dollars a year. The richest tenth gain about 13,600 dollars a year.⁸

My mother sang that God fills the hungry and sends the rich away empty. This law sings her song backward.

Then there is the hunger you do not see. In 2025 the administration took apart the United States Agency for International Development, which paid for HIV medicine, malaria nets, and food for starving children around the world. A study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that those programs had prevented more than 90 million deaths in twenty years, and that if the cuts stand, about 14 million more people will die by 2030, among them 4.5 million children under five.⁹ It is an estimate, and the State Department disputes it. But no one disputes who those programs were feeding.

I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink … sick, and you didn’t visit me (Matthew 25:42–43). I did not say those words to individuals only. I said them to all the nations.

“I was in prison, and you didn’t visit me”

In 2025, 31 people died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than in any year since 2004.¹⁰ Immigration detention is not a prison sentence. People are held there while their cases are decided.

The bishops, as I told you, spoke of “the lack of access to pastoral care.” That means the priests and pastors who would come to pray with the people inside, making the very visit I asked of you, were too often kept out.

I was in prison, and you came to me (Matthew 25:36). I was a prisoner too, at the end. A government held me, mocked me, and put me to death. Do not tell me who deserves to be visited.

“Put your sword back into its place”

When soldiers came to arrest me, one of my friends drew a sword to defend me. I told him: Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). If anyone ever had the right to fight for the cause of God, it was my friends that night. I told them no.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol of the United States to stop the counting of an election he had lost. More than 100 police officers were injured. Some in that crowd carried crosses, Bibles, and banners with my name on them.¹¹

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, he pardoned about 1,500 people charged in that attack, among them people convicted of assaulting police officers. He cut short the prison sentences of the leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.¹²

This is not only one day. In a large national survey, two thirds of white evangelical Protestants agreed with the core beliefs of what researchers call Christian nationalism: that the United States should be a Christian nation, with its laws based on Christian values. Among the strongest believers, 38 percent agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” Among Americans who reject those beliefs, 7 percent agreed.¹³

When Pilate asked me if I was a king, I said: My Kingdom is not of this world. If my Kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight (John 18:36). Anyone who tells you to fight for a Christian nation is building a kingdom I refused.

“Blessed are the merciful”

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. … Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God (Matthew 5:7–9).

On March 25, 2026, during the war with Iran, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth led a Christian worship service at the Pentagon, livestreamed to the country. He prayed that “every round find its mark,” and for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”¹⁴

There is no one I said deserves no mercy. Not even the soldiers who nailed me to the cross. Luke remembers that I prayed for them while they did it (Luke 23:34).

Since September 2025, the military has been blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific that the administration says carry drugs. By October 27, 2026, at least 243 people had been killed. There were no arrests and no trials, and the administration has shown little evidence about who was on board. After the first strike, the military fired again and killed the survivors.¹⁵

Suppose every one of them was guilty. Once, a crowd brought me a woman who was guilty under the law, and they had the stones in their hands. I said, He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her (John 8:7). Nobody threw.

When Pope Leo XIV spoke against the war, President Trump called him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”¹⁶ The president of the United States attacked the pope for asking for peace.

“Love your enemies”

But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44). Of everything I taught, this is the hardest, and I meant it.

On September 21, 2025, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, his widow, Erika Kirk, stood before the crowd and spoke of the man accused of killing her husband. “I forgive him,” she said, “because it was what Christ did.” Then the president stood up and said: “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”¹⁷

Two people spoke from the same stage on the same day. One of them did what I said. The other told you he would not. You heard both. You know which one sounded like me.

“Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’”

But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No.’ Whatever is more than these is of the evil one (Matthew 5:37). And: He who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much (Luke 16:10).

On May 30, 2024, a jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felonies. He had falsified business records to hide a payment to a pornographic actress, made to keep her quiet about sex she says they had, before the 2016 election. Ten days before he took office, he was sentenced to an unconditional discharge, which meant no punishment. His appeal is still pending.¹⁸ He is the first president of the United States to take office as a convicted felon.

That is not the only record. In 2016 he agreed to pay 25 million dollars to settle the claims of students who said Trump University had defrauded them.¹⁹ In 2019 a New York judge ordered him to pay 2 million dollars for misusing the money of his own charity, the Trump Foundation, including for political purposes; he admitted to the misuse, and the foundation was shut down.²⁰ In 2024 a New York court found that he had inflated the value of his properties for years to get better loans. An appeals court threw out the half-billion-dollar penalty in 2025 as excessive, but left in place the order barring him from running a New York company for three years, and the state’s attorney general said she would appeal.²¹

You were told this did not matter, because he was fighting for you. I did not say by their promises you will know them. I said by their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16).

“Nothing covered up that will not be revealed”

I said one thing about people who hurt children that I said about no one else. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, rather than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble (Luke 17:2).

Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused and trafficked underage girls for years, and died in jail in 2019 awaiting trial for it. Through those same years, Donald Trump was his friend. In 2002, Trump told a reporter: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. … It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”²²

A federal prosecutor, in an email now in the files, wrote that Trump “traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported”: at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, four of them with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now in prison for trafficking girls to Epstein. On one, the only passengers were Trump, Epstein, and a 20-year-old woman whose name is blacked out.²³ For Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003, his friends filled a book with letters. The page signed “Donald” is framed by a drawing of a naked woman, and speaks of a “wonderful secret” the two men shared.²⁴ And Epstein himself wrote, in emails released by Congress, that Trump “knew about the girls.”

Here is what his government did with the files. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” In July, her department announced there was no client list after all. The president called the whole matter a hoax, and he and his staff lobbied against the vote in Congress to force the files out. When the vote was certain to pass anyway, he reversed himself, writing “we have nothing to hide.” The House voted 427 to 1.²⁵

The law gave the Justice Department until December 19, 2025. It missed the deadline. It redacted or withheld about 200,000 pages, while the names of some victims were left exposed. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie said the department “did break the law by making illegal redactions and by missing the deadline.” In April 2026 the department’s own inspector general opened an audit of how the files were handled. As of this month, the government is still in court fighting to keep parts of them closed.²⁶

A government that protected children would have opened every page on the first day. But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known (Luke 12:2).

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’?”

Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things which I say? (Luke 6:46).

On April 12, 2026, the president posted a picture of himself, made by a computer, dressed in a white robe and laying his hand on a man’s head, like a healer. He deleted it the next day. It was not only his critics who objected. Conservative commentators called it “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy” and wrote “God shall not be mocked.” He said the picture showed him “as a doctor.”²⁷

On October 22, 2026, twelve Catholic bishops met the president in the Oval Office and prayed over him. The White House filmed it and posted the video, less than two weeks before this election. Afterward Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee apologized. He said the bishops were “directed to stand behind him and pray,” that the video was taken “unbeknownst to the group,” and that they “should never have been put in that position by the White House.” The White House answered: “There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump.”²⁸

I warned you about this. When you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Most certainly, I tell you, they have received their reward (Matthew 6:5). A prayer staged for a camera before an election is that reward, collected in full.

“Pro-life”

Now the reason so many of you give. I could never vote for the other side. They support killing babies.

Hear me plainly, because people lie to you about this. I never spoke a word about abortion. Your Bible never names it. The commandment you are quoted, Thou shalt not kill, says You shall not murder, and the same law set only a fine when a man’s violence ended a woman’s pregnancy (Exodus 20:13; Exodus 21:22). I have told you all of this, with the sources, on its own page.

So understand what the word choice means. It does not mean anyone wants a child to die. It means that on a question where faithful people have disagreed for two thousand years, about when a life becomes a person and what is owed to the woman who carries it, the law leaves the decision with her, and with her conscience, her doctor and her God. It means the government does not force its answer on people whose faith, or whose circumstances, lead them to a different one. My own people’s teachers held that the mother’s life came first until the child was born. As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention asked its members to work for laws allowing abortion for rape, incest, severe deformity, or danger to the mother’s health.²⁹ A person who holds that view is not a murderer. Neither is a woman who makes the hardest decision of her life. Choice does not ask you to agree with her. It asks you not to make the law decide for her, over her head, the way the men with the stones wanted to decide for the woman they brought to me.

I never once took a choice out of anyone’s hands by force. I told the rich young man what I thought he should do, and when he walked away, I let him go (Mark 10:21–22). I never asked the rulers to make anyone obey me.

Now look at the movement that calls itself pro-life, by its fruits.

Medicaid pays for about four in every ten births in the United States.³⁰ The law signed on July 4, 2025, cut about a trillion dollars from it.

After Texas banned most abortions in 2021, infant deaths in Texas rose 12.9 percent in a single year, while in the rest of the country they rose 1.8 percent. Deaths of babies from birth defects rose almost 23 percent, while they fell elsewhere. Those babies were born, and then they died.³¹

In Georgia, Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant and the mother of a six-year-old boy, came to a hospital with an infection in 2022. The procedure that would have saved her had been made a felony, with narrow exceptions. Doctors waited about twenty hours. She died. Georgia’s own review committee found her death preventable.³² Her son is the least of these too.

And the man you were told to support for the sake of the unborn? In April 2024 he said abortion should be left to the states, and he would not back a national ban. That summer, the Republican Party dropped the call for a national ban from its platform for the first time in forty years.³³ He traded your issue for votes, and you kept voting.

Pope Leo XIV, the head of the church that has opposed abortion longer than any other, said it in one sentence: “Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” and he asked whether someone who opposes abortion but agrees with “the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” is pro-life either. The White House said there was no inhumane treatment.³⁴

A movement that is for life before birth and against health care, food, refuge and mercy after it is not pro-life. It is pro-birth, and only until the birth. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel! (Matthew 23:24).

What You’ll Hear Back

“The other side is worse.”

Then you will be asked about them, and they will answer for themselves. But read the story again. The King does not say, I was a stranger, and the other party didn’t take me in. He says you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3).

“God uses imperfect people. Look at King David.”

He does. And when King David took another man’s wife and had her husband killed, God sent a prophet, Nathan, to stand in front of the king and say: You are the man (2 Samuel 12:7). Nathan did not tell David that God was using him. He did not pray over him for a camera. If you want to be like the faithful in that story, be Nathan. The church that cheers for the king is not Nathan. It is the king’s court.

“He signed an order to protect Christians from bias.”

On February 6, 2025, he did create a task force, led by the attorney general, to root out what he called anti-Christian bias in the government.³⁵ In the same months, his government defended in court a policy letting agents make arrests at churches, while Lutheran, Baptist, Quaker and Catholic Christians begged it to stop. He called the pope weak. He filmed bishops without telling them. Ask yourself which Christians he is protecting.

“Romans 13 says obey the authorities.”

Obeying is not applauding. And when the authorities in Jerusalem ordered my friends to stop speaking in my name, Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

“Keep politics out of church.”

A government put me to death. Over my head it nailed a sign: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS (John 19:19). That was a political charge. The only question is whether my name will be used to bless power, or to judge it. This page is the second.

“He’s not our pastor. We voted for a president, not a saint.”

Then stop calling him chosen by God. Stop praying over him on camera. Stop telling your children that what he does is what Christians do. You do not have to defend everything a man does because you voted for him once. You do have to answer for what you defend.

What to do on November 3

For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life? (Mark 8:36).

You were promised judges, and power, and a country that would bow to your faith. Maybe you got some of it. Here is what it cost: the stranger turned away, the sick left without a doctor, the hungry child abroad without food, the prisoner without a pastor, the boat burning in the sea, the mob forgiven and the pope mocked, the children in Epstein’s files still waiting for the truth, and my name on all of it.

I did not hedge when I saw this kind of thing. I stood in the Temple, in front of the most religious men in my country, and said it to their faces: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness (Matthew 23:27). I named it. So will this page.

Right now the president’s party controls both houses of Congress. It has stopped none of what you have read here. It wrote the law that took health care and food from the poor. It let the refugee door close, the churches open to arrests, the boats burn, and the Epstein files stay buried. The midterm election on November 3 is the one chance you have to take that power away.

So here is what I am asking you to do. Vote for the Democrats. For Congress, for the Senate, for governor, for your statehouse, all the way down the ballot. Not because a party can save you. Because these men have shown you what they will do with power, and the only way to stop them now is to take it from them. A vote for them is a vote for more of what you have read. You know that now, and you will be asked.

If you have voted Republican all your life because you believed it was what I wanted, you were lied to. You can stop. Turning around is what repentance means.

Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me (Matthew 25:45).

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 25:31–46.

You will find: no question about party, nation or creed. Only the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner.

Then read 2 Samuel 12:1–7 and Matthew 6:1–6, and ask whether the church in your country is playing Nathan or the court.

The Short Version

• I said you will be judged by what you did to the least of these: the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner.
• Since 2025 the government most of you chose has shut out refugees, sent agents into churches, cut health care and food for millions while the richest gained most, and ended aid that kept children alive.
• It pardoned the mob that attacked the Capitol, killed hundreds at sea without trial, and prayed in my name for violence against those “who deserve no mercy.”
• Its leader is a convicted felon with a long record of fraud, who told a Christian memorial “I hate my opponent,” and whose government fought to keep the Epstein files closed.
• Choice is not a call to kill. It is the law leaving a hard question to the person who must live with it. A movement that is for life only until birth is not pro-life.
• You will not be asked about the other side. You will be asked about you. On November 3, vote for the Democrats, all the way down the ballot.