The Religious and the Nonreligious Among Us Agree, Do Not Invoke God in Vain

Trump as a doctor? My aching ass!

The problem is not that President Trump’s latest AI image was merely tasteless. The problem is that it crossed a line that both believers and nonbelievers should recognize. A political leader who seeks to drape himself in the aura of a savior while embodying none of the savior’s virtues is not engaging in harmless spectacle. He is attempting a moral theft. He is borrowing sacred authority to legitimize conduct that, by the standards of the very tradition he is exploiting, stands condemned.

For context, Trump posted an AI-generated image on Truth Social showing himself in a white robe, holding a glowing orb, and appearing to heal a stricken man. The post came in the middle of his feud with Pope Leo, after Trump attacked the pope as “weak on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” He later tried to explain the image away by saying he thought it made him look like a doctor, but the visual grammar was plain enough, and the backlash was immediate, including from religious conservatives and Catholics who called the post blasphemous.

No serious person should pretend this appeared out of nowhere. Evangelical allies of the administration have been amplifying overtly religious language around the Iran war, with some supporters comparing Trump not merely to biblical figures in general but, controversially, even to Jesus. This follows a longer pattern that was documented in 2024, when merchandise at a Trump rally openly paired Christian symbolism with Trump devotion, including hats reading, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” The movement has been inching toward this line for some time. The new AI image did not invent the impulse. It revealed it.

Now set doctrine aside for a moment and read the matter humanistically. The commandment against taking God’s name in vain has often been flattened into a rule against profanity, as though the central concern were impolite speech. That is childish. The deeper prohibition is against fraudulent invocation: using the name, authority, or prestige of the sacred to bless what is base. It is a warning against laundering vanity, cruelty, greed, domination, and deceit through divine language.

Likewise, the commandment against false gods is not merely about ancient statues. It is about the perennial temptation to elevate some worldly thing, some ruler, some tribe, some idol of power, into an object of moral submission. Even stripped of supernatural belief, the logic is coherent and profound. Do not sanctify the profane. Do not bow before the counterfeit.

On this point, then, the religious and the nonreligious among us should agree. A secular humanist does not need to confess the divinity of Christ in order to understand what Christ signifies in moral culture. He signifies humility over vanity, sacrifice over self-dealing, mercy over cruelty, truth over propaganda, service over domination, and solidarity with the weak over worship of the strong. If a politician claims the halo while repudiating the ethic, the offense is visible even to the unbeliever. Indeed, it may be especially visible to the unbeliever, because he has no tribal incentive to excuse the desecration.

And that is where the religious ought to feel a sting of shame. Do they really wish to cede the moral high ground on this question to secular people? Do they want the atheist, the agnostic, and the civic humanist to be the ones more faithful to the substance of the commandment than the churchgoer who cheers as a politician wraps himself in borrowed sanctity? Because that is the comparison now on offer.

One side says sacred names and symbols should not be conscripted for ego, war, deception, or cultic politics. The other side shrugs, rationalizes, or applauds, provided the man doing it wears their colors. If that is where some believers now stand, then the nonbeliever will be fully justified in saying: on this matter, I am closer to your own commandments than you are.

The Christian objection should be even sharper. If one truly believes in the God of the commandments, then this is not a branding problem. It is blasphemy and idolatry. It is blasphemy because it drapes divine significance over conduct that openly defies the virtues associated with the divine. It is idolatry because it encourages people to transfer to a political man the indulgence, submission, and moral exemption that belong to God alone.

The danger here is not abstract. Once a leader is treated as providential, criticism becomes sacrilege, accountability becomes persecution, and loyalty becomes a substitute for conscience. That is how a republic is morally disarmed.

There is a reason this pattern feels so filthy even to people outside the faith. The act itself is parasitic. It does not create holiness. It feeds on the residue of holiness left in the culture. It takes the symbols that still carry moral force and uses them to shield a man whose public and private character gives no evidence of reverence, restraint, compassion, truthfulness, or repentance. And when that appropriation is defended, the corruption spreads outward.

Citizens are asked not merely to tolerate vulgarity, but to reinterpret it as virtue. They are asked not merely to ignore moral inversion, but to kneel before it.

The believers who still possess a functioning conscience should understand the stakes. If they do not call this out, then they are telling the country that Christianity is not a discipline of humility and service at all. They are telling us it is merely a costume that can be thrown over any strongman who promises to hurt the right enemies. They are telling us that the commandment means nothing when power is on the line.

And if that is the witness they offer, then they should not be surprised when nonbelievers conclude that many of the secular among us now take the moral meaning of the Ten Commandments more seriously than the people who claim to defend them.

So let the line be drawn clearly. One need not be a believer to reject the use of God for ungodly ends. One need not kneel in church to understand that the sacred should not be mobilized in the service of vanity, cruelty, war-lust, propaganda, and self-coronation. One need only possess a minimally intact moral sense.

The commandment is plain enough in human terms: do not invoke God in vain. Do not use the holy to bless the unholy. Do not put a false god before the real one. And do not ask the rest of us to pretend that such desecration is piety when it is, in fact, sacrilegious fraud.

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