Dear Brother in the “Trump is my President, Jesus is my Savior” T-shirt

Remember me? We shared that liminal space of terminal purgatory at LAX—you with your Driscoll book splayed open like scripture, me with my book, "On Being in The Middle: Doing Theology in the Face of Uncertainty" on my lap You leaned over and said, "The title seems soft." And all of a sudden, you became this introvert's worst nightmare. Our delayed flight stretched between us like the Jordan River: you on one bank, "Trump is my President, Jesus is my Savior" stretched boldly across your chest, Driscoll's "Real Marriage" splayed open on your lap, me on the other, both claiming the same Christ but seeing different kingdoms.

I've been thinking about your T-shirt.

Not just the cotton blend or the bold typography, but the theology it performs-the way it binds together two names, two authorities, two kingdoms in a marriage no prophet would bless. Trump and Jesus, paired like wine and wafer on your chest, a communion of power that makes me wonder which one truly transubstantiates into the other.

Let me tell you about my South Africa.

Before democracy bloomed in 1994, our pulpits thundered with certainties. White dominees (the Afrikaans title for pastors, which ironically means lord or master) proclaimed apartheid as God’s design-a ‘separate development’ blessed by scripture. They found verses to sanctify barbed wire, to baptise bulldozers flattening Black homes, to anoint the sjambok, a long, stiff whip, originally made of rhinoceros hide. They wore their theology like you wear that T-shirt: a declaration of divine right, a uniform of unquestioned authority.

Their Jesus had blue eyes, in army fatigues and carried a rifle.

When Desmond Tutu spoke of a Black Christ who suffered with township children choking on tear gas, they called him a Communist. When Beyers Naudé recognized his complicity and crossed the line to stand with the oppressed, they stripped him of his credentials. When Allan Boesak preached that God sides with the downtrodden, they dismissed him as "political," as if politics only exists when it threatens power, never when it enforces it.

I wonder if you see the parallels.

Your Driscoll preaches a God with genitalia-a divine phallus that somehow makes men more image-bearing than women. Your Trump performs a strength that never kneels, never apologises, never washes feet. Between them, they've constructed a theology of power that looks nothing like the Galilean who died naked, shamed, and abandoned on a trash heap outside Jerusalem.

What gospel is this? What good news for the poor does this muscular Christianity offer?

In the terminal, you spoke of "real men" with such certainty—as if masculinity were a doctrine to defend rather than a cultural performance that shifts like sand between our fingers. You cited chapter and verse about male headship with the confidence of someone who has never had to wonder if God's image includes his body.

But here's what haunts me: the way you spoke of Jesus.

Not as the one who touched lepers and ate with prostitutes, but as a conquering CEO with a corner office in heaven. Not as the one who said "the last shall be first," but as the one who ensures your first place stays secure. Not as the one who emptied himself of divine privilege, but as the one who guarantees yours.

Your Jesus and your Trump share this in common: neither seems capable of the vulnerability that might save us.

I keep returning to that moment when our conversation turned to power.

"Jesus wasn't soft," you insisted, fingers drumming on Driscoll's hardback cover. "He flipped tables. He called people vipers. He wasn't some woke pushover."

True enough. But notice which tables he flipped.

Not the tables of the marginalised. Not the tables of the outsider. He overturned the tables of religious insiders who had made access to God a transaction, who had turned faith into a marketplace that excluded the very people God came to embrace. Those who ruled over.

If Jesus were walking through LAX that day, which tables would he flip? Which T-shirts would he tear?

There's something in your eyes I recognised—something I've seen in the mirror. A hunger for certainty in an age of dissolution. A longing for solid ground when everything seems to be melting into air.

I get it. The world feels like it's coming apart at the seams.

Climate catastrophe looms like an approaching apocalypse. Economic precarity gnaws at the edges of the American Dream. The old hierarchies are being questioned, and with them, perhaps, your place in the world.

Trump offers you a wall against this tide. Driscoll offers you a theology to justify it. Both promise the restoration of an order that never truly existed except for those who benefited from its mythology.

But what if the gospel isn't about restoring old orders but creating new ones?

What if the kingdom doesn't come through strength but through surrender?

In Afrikaans, we have a word: "laager." It describes the circle of wagons Boer settlers would form against perceived threats. Inside: safety, certainty, homogeneity. Outside: danger, chaos, the other.

Your T-shirt is a kind of laager, a fortress of identity that keeps complexity at bay.

But Jesus was always breaking through such barriers. Always touching the untouchable. Always speaking to the silenced. Always redrawing the boundaries of belonging until the circle included those the religious authorities had cast out.

The gospel isn't a wall. It's a table. And at this table, the seating arrangement keeps changing to include the stranger.

Again, when you quoted Paul —‘I do not permit a woman to teach’—I watched your face harden with righteous certainty. But I wonder: have you ever sat with Mary of Nazareth, who carried God in her womb and prophesied revolution (Luke 1:46–55), only to be reduced by history to a silent nativity prop? Or with Mary Magdalene, first witness to the resurrection, apostle to the apostles, her voice erased after Pope Gregory the Great conflated her with an unnamed penitent prostitute in 591 CE—a smear that stuck for 1,400 years? Have you lingered with Junia, whom Paul hailed as ‘outstanding among the apostles’ until scribes masculinised her into Junias? Or with Phoebe, the deacon who likely delivered and interpreted Romans to its first hearers, her authority flattened to ‘helper’? Or with Priscilla, who taught the eloquent Apollos a better way, her name buried under her husband’s in sermons and seminaries?

I don’t blame you for not knowing their stories. They’ve been discredited, erased, or reduced to footnotes by those who shaped the tradition you inherited. But what if reclaiming these women isn’t about rewriting Scripture—it’s about recovering it from the dust of our own selective memory?

Scripture isn't a blunt instrument but a living conversation, one that includes voices that challenge our certainties.

The Bible you thump contains multitudes. It holds both the household codes that reflect ancient patriarchy and the radical declaration that in Christ there is "neither male nor female." It contains both the conquest narratives that sanctify violence and the prophetic visions of swords hammered into plowshares.

Let me be direct: When you said, "God has a penis," quoting Driscoll with such conviction, I laughed. Not mockingly—please understand—but from the sheer vertiginous absurdity of reducing the infinite to anatomy. The Creator who spun galaxies into being, who breathes life into dust, whose vastness exceeds our comprehension, now confined to biological particulars? It's like claiming the Atlantic Ocean has knuckles or that gravity wears socks.

This is theology as genital fixation—a strange obsession that says more about our insecurities than about God's nature. The biblical writers themselves understood this. They used both masculine and feminine imagery for God: a mother hen gathering chicks, a nursing mother, a woman searching for coins. Not because God is literally female in these moments, but because all human language for the divine necessarily falls short. We reach for metaphors because the reality exceeds our grasp.

You seemed so certain that maleness is somehow more divine—that the penis carries ontological weight, theological significance. Yet the Genesis account you cite undermines your very certainty: humans are created in God's image-male and female created He them. The imago dei spans the gender binary; it's not located exclusively in the male body.

What haunts me is that such certainty—such rigid gendering of God-doesn't amplify divine glory. It shrinks it. It renders the infinite finite, the transcendent mundane. It fashions God in our image rather than acknowledging we are but fractured reflections of something far greater.

You asked me, face flushing with conviction, "Don't you think the church needs more testosterone? More warriors? More men who aren't afraid to lead?"

Brother, what the church needs isn't more testosterone but more transformed hearts. Not more warriors but more witnesses. Not more leaders who dominate but more servants who wash feet.

Consider how Jesus himself dismantled the warrior-king mythology of his day. The disciples wanted a Messiah who would crush Rome through superior force-fulfilling those violent Psalms where enemies are dashed against rocks. Instead, they got a teacher who touched lepers, who conversed with women publicly, who rebuked the sword-wielding Peter ("Those who live by the sword will die by it"), who submitted to torture on a Roman cross rather than summoning legions of angels.

This isn't softness—it's a strength so absolute it doesn't need to prove itself through domination.

Remember how you quoted Mark 10 as evidence that "servant leadership doesn't mean weakness-it means strength under control"? But read further in that same passage. Jesus doesn't say, "Control your strength while maintaining authority." He says, "Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all."

That's not strength under control-that's strength transfigured, transformed, turned inside out. It's not about restraining power but redefining it entirely.

Your T-shirt performs a theological sleight-of-hand—it suggests that following Christ and pledging allegiance to a particular political figure are compatible commitments.

Two lords on one throne. Two masters being served. The shirt doesn't say "Trump is my preferred political leader" or "Trump represents my policy preferences." It places Trump in direct grammatical parallel with Jesus-suggesting equivalent devotion, loyalty, perhaps even authority.

This isn't mere politics. It's a theological claim, a statement about ultimate allegiance. And it's one that Jesus himself explicitly rejected: "No one can serve two masters," he warned. The Kingdom he proclaimed stands perpendicular to all earthly kingdoms-not aligned with them, not validated by them, but challenging them at their very foundations.

When Jesus said "my kingdom is not of this world," he wasn't describing its location but its nature. Its values, its methods, its vision of power run contrary to the dominance systems that govern human societies. Power through vulnerability. Strength through surrender. Victory through sacrifice. Leadership through service. Glory through humiliation.

Here's what troubles me about your shirt: not that it endorses a politician I disagree with, but that it grafts Jesus onto precisely the kind of power system he came to subvert.

But Jesus wasn't crucified for suggesting mild reforms to the Roman tax code.

He was executed because his kingdom posed a fundamental challenge to all earthly powers-not by seizing their weapons but by exposing their bankruptcy. Not by promising walls but by tearing down dividing walls of hostility. Not by putting America first but by proclaiming that God's preferential option is always for the last, the least, the lost.

When you bind Jesus to Trump, you don't elevate Trump. You diminish Christ.

In the terminal, you spoke of being "under attack"—as if critique were persecution, as if accountability were oppression.

But here's what I've learned in South Africa: real persecution leaves bodies, not hurt feelings.

Real persecution is Steve Biko murdered in detention, not Ben Shapiro disinvited from a campus talk. Real persecution is the Sharpeville massacre, not X criticism of your pastor's latest book. Real persecution is the forced removals that scattered families across the wasteland of the Cape Flats, not the mild social consequences of your political views.

When you claim persecution because the culture no longer automatically centers your experience, you trivialise the suffering of those who have faced genuine violence for their faith or identity.

The cross is not a symbol of cultural grievance. It's the ultimate sign that God sides with victims, not victimisers.

I wonder what you make of Jesus's tears.

Not his anger—you've claimed that as permission for your own righteous rage. Not his authority—you've claimed that as justification for male headship. But his tears: his weeping over Jerusalem, his grief at Lazarus's tomb, his anguished prayers in Gethsemane. What does your muscular Christianity do with this Jesus who breaks open with sorrow? This Jesus whose power is perfected in weakness? This Jesus who, when given the chance to call down legions of angels, chooses instead the vulnerability of love?

There's a reason Driscoll doesn't dwell on these passages. There's a reason Trump mocks men who cry. Tears complicate the narrative of strength they're selling you.But a faith without tears is no faith at all, just a hollow certainty that has never been broken open by the world's pain or God's love.

I keep thinking about your hands.

The flight to Philadelphia eventually departed, hours late. We sat in different sections, you near the front, me toward the back. I watched you walk down the jetway, Driscoll tucked under your arm, T-shirt proclaiming your divided loyalties to anyone with eyes to see.

I wondered what you'd make of my students in Philadelphia—brilliant women and men preparing for ministry, weird Christians reclaiming their place at the table, people of colour interpreting scripture through lenses you've never had to look through.

I wondered what you'd make of my guests-Bishop Royster organising for justice in the streets of Philly, Nikki Toyama-Szeto leading with gentle South Asian female strength, Joe Modica teaching that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not.

Most of all, I wondered what you'd make of Jesus if you met him fresh—not the Jesus of American evangelicalism with its strange marriage to empire, but the Jesus who touches lepers, who eats with sinners, who dies rather than kill, who rises not to conquer but to reconcile.

I'm not writing to change your mind. Minds rarely change through arguments alone. But I am writing to invite you to a different table-one where certainty gives way to wonder, where strength is redefined as vulnerability, where faith is not a fortress but a journey.

This table has room for you. Not despite your T-shirt but because beneath it beats a heart made for more than the small gospel of American greatness. A heart made for the wild, upside-down kingdom where the first are last and the last are first. A heart made for the Jesus who is always more complex, more challenging, and more loving than the one we try to contain in our tribal certainties.

The invitation stands. The table is set. There's bread enough to share.

Safe travels, brother.

A Fellow Traveller