Paul D. Miller is a Georgetown University professor, a former Bush-era national security official, and one of those self-appointed guardians of “respectable” religion who enjoys lecturing not just his students but half of America. Miller’s latest essay published in the Dispatch is an extraordinary act of pious snobbery — a lab-grown blend of theology, therapy, and think-tank sanctimony.
He calls it an exploration of “MAGA Christianity.” In truth, it’s a sermon against Christians who dare to think, vote, or worship outside the polite confines of Beltway belief.
The irony is exquisite: a man preaching humility while presuming to judge the eternal destiny of half the Christian electorate.
Miller’s starting point is as cynical as it is tasteless: He uses Charlie Kirk’s memorial — a moment of collective grief — as the courtroom to indict millions of fellow believers. He admits that the event was both a Christian service and, in his words, a “state funeral,” yet he somehow interprets that duality as corruption.
To turn a mourning congregation into evidence for a political thesis is not discernment but desecration.
From there, his argument collapses under the weight of its own conceit. Miller insists that “MAGA Christianity” is a deviant strain of faith — emotional, populist, and unmoored from doctrine. His proof? None. He offers no creeds, no sermons, no teachings that contradict scripture.
He merely declares, with professorial confidence, that it looks “a lot like historic Christianity” but “departs from it in important ways.” Which ways? He never bothers to say.
It’s a masterpiece of insinuation — assert first, define never.
He even attempts an ecclesiastical census, claiming Southern Baptists rarely attend Trump rallies and that Reformed Christians fall outside the MAGA mold. The statement is so bizarre it reads like satire. Millions of evangelicals who pray, tithe, and read their Bibles daily have supported Trump not out of idolatry but conviction — because they see in his policies a defense of life, liberty, and the family.
Yet to Miller, they are theological tourists, emotional rubes cheering a false gospel.
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What Miller calls “anti-elitist” is, in fact, fidelity to the biblical principle that truth is not confined to temples of power. Christ did not recruit His disciples from the upper crust of Roman bureaucracy. He chose fishermen, tax collectors, and outcasts — the same kind of people Miller treats with sociological suspicion. And his horror at the “bottom-up” nature of MAGA Christianity betrays the real heresy at work: the worship of hierarchy.
For Miller, holiness lives in the ivory tower. For MAGA Christians, it still lives in the heart.
There’s also the matter of credentials. By his own admission, Miller is a political scientist, not a theologian. Yet here he is, parsing scripture like a prophet and warning millions that their souls are in peril. One almost expects footnotes to include “peer-reviewed visions.” He quotes Matthew 7:21-23 — “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’…” — as if it were aimed at Republican voters.
In doing so, he twists a warning against hypocrisy into a cudgel against patriotism. The irony is exquisite: a man preaching humility while presuming to judge the eternal destiny of half the Christian electorate.
Miller’s great mistake is his failure to grasp that Christianity and citizenship are not enemies.
American Christians understand that their faith shapes their politics because their politics shape the moral order in which faith survives. To pray for righteous leadership is not “lawlessness” but obedience. To fight for the unborn, defend the family, and resist the creeping godlessness of government is not vengeance but virtue. Miller cannot see this because he’s too drunk on his own self-importance.
The truth is simple: MAGA Christianity, as he sneeringly calls it, is nothing more than Christianity that refuses to be bullied.
His disdain for “emotion” is equally misplaced. Scripture is not a spreadsheet. Christ wept, rejoiced, and raged. The Psalms are nothing but emotion sanctified into song. Yet Miller treats passion as proof of poison, as though the only acceptable Christian is one anesthetized by nuance. His theology is cold oatmeal — gray, tasteless, and best left untouched.
What’s most galling is his casual dismissal of millions of believers who have thought deeply about the intersection of faith and politics. These Christians are not mindless zealots. They are men and women who have grappled with conscience, scripture, and civic duty. They’ve endured scorn from the press, mockery from academia, and condescension from precisely the sort of clerical technocrats Miller represents.
To suggest they are not truly Christian is to bear false witness on a national scale.
The truth is simple: MAGA Christianity, as he sneeringly calls it, is nothing more than Christianity that refuses to be bullied.
It’s the faith of people who believe morality is not negotiable, borders are not blasphemy, and the flag can be honored without idolatry. It’s the faith that built churches, schools, and communities, while the mainline denominations he venerates bend over backward in search of social approval.
Miller’s essay, then, is not a defense of the gospel but of the establishment. He frets that the “Radical Reformation” spirit has become too powerful when, in reality, it’s the only thing keeping Christianity alive in a culture hell-bent on its erasure. His real quarrel isn’t with President Trump, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec — whom he dismisses as a fabricator and charlatan — but with any Christian who refuses to ask his permission to live faithfully.
In the end, Miller proves his own point unintentionally.
He accuses MAGA Christians of arrogance, yet his entire essay drips with it. He warns against false teachers while setting himself up as one. And he preaches humility from a pulpit of self-regard, confusing his contempt for clarity. The faithful he mocks will go on praying. They’ll keep voting and building families while his essays gather dust in the archives of complete irrelevance.
Because in the end, the difference is simple: He writes about Christianity — but they live it out.
Christianity, Christian, Maga christianity, Maga, The dispatch, Donald trump, Faith