The Christians Who Live By The Sword
Why MAGA Evangelicals Hate Peacemaking Jesus
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. - Jesus
When’s the last time you heard a MAGA conservative Christian quote that scripture passage from Jesus on social media? Share it in a sermon? Even acknowledge its existence?
These words come only a few sentences within the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ seminal message on how his people are to live and move in the world; one where he later condemns cultivated hatred and retributive violence, and instead urges kindness and generosity as righteous responses.
But you will never find this peacemaking Jesus in the Gospel according to MAGA.
That’s because MAGA Christians despise him.
He is an inconvenience, an annoyance, a dissenting opinion they seek to silence.
The peacemaking Jesus doesn’t consent to their bloodlust; he doesn’t permit their incessant culture war demonizing of their neighbors, he doesn’t amen their incendiary sermons and reckless rhetoric, he refuses to bless their brutality.
This is why we are witnessing such calculated revisionist religious history happening right now in American Evangelicalism: a furious and intentional redaction of the words of their faith’s namesake, which seeks to erase him.
The peacemaking Jesus is being cancelled by professed Christians for daring to oppose the barbarism that their entire faith story runs on.
These fear-addled apostles of outrage exist inside a punitive, vengeful religion that cannot exist without violent threats to eliminate and encroaching enemies to be destroyed.
Their chosen narrative requires ever-present dangers, in the form of those around them who dare call for an empathy for the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable that they refuse to be burdened by, a love for their perceived enemies they truly have zero interest in, and a soft-hearted mercy that they make a mockery of.
For this reason, they are responding to an act of violence that they supposedly abhor by calling for greater violence in return.
There are very few of Jesus’ words that MAGA Evangelicals will even repeat in public, which, of course, is by design. And when they do, even those are subject to their censorship.
They will gladly tell about the moment where Jesus reveals that he is soon to be arrested by Roman soldiers and instructs his disciples to "bring a sword” when they return. Using this as their justification to use weapons of rapid carnage and wield aggression, Conservative Christians conveniently close the book and cut off Jesus mid-lesson.
They fail to stick with the same story for just a couple of paragraphs, when the Romans arrive and one of Jesus' students, named Peter, uses the sword to slice off a soldier's ear.
Jesus publicly admonishes his student, heals the soldier's ear, and tells those with him that this would not be their way, saying:
“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword…”
And this is the rub for these self-identified followers of a Jesus they have little interest in emulating:
They want to live by the sword.
They worship the sword.
They crave the power of the sword.
They love the pain the sword delivers, the suffering it generates, and the damage it does.
They are lost without the sword.
If they were to abandon the sword and the consuming chaos that it brings, they would realize that there is nothing left to their faith. They might then be forced to return to the words and life of a compassionate, caring, healing messiah whom they have long since discarded.
Conservative Christians are willing to kill for Jesus, to die for Jesus.
They’re just not willing to live for him.
If they were, they would put down the swords that he condemned and pick up the peacemaking he said would make them his children.
Imagine the nation and the world that might yield.
John, your words burn true. The Sermon on the Mount is the stone they stumble over, and they’ve chosen to bury it rather than be broken by it. They want Jesus with a sword, not Jesus with mercy. And you’ve named the cost of that better than I could.
But here’s where I find myself stuck: what do I do with that knowledge? My resources are limited. I don’t stand in a pulpit, I don’t have a crowd to move. What I have is my own mind and conscience, and they’re not immune to the same temptations. I can’t stop the revision of Jesus out there, but I can refuse to let it take root in me.
For me that means choosing, again and again, where I lean. Some mornings it’s a struggle just to turn away from the noise. Some days I feel the itch to strike back, to meet contempt with contempt. And maybe that’s the real test: to set down the sword in my own hand, even when rage feels justified.
It’s not grand. It won’t make the news. But if I can guard one small space of stillness, if I can offer decency where I’d rather sharpen the blade, then at least I’ve resisted becoming the thing I despise.
And maybe that’s where it has to start: not with their hypocrisy, but with our own choices, repeated until they harden into something that looks a little like integrity.
No kidding. If your version of Christianity thinks Jesus would be a gun nut and that the Sermon on the Mount is some kind of Marxist tract, you’re probably doing it wrong.