I know Eric Metaxas, the MC of yesterday’s pro-Trump Jericho March on the Washington Mall. While Trump isn’t Hitler, nor the GOP the Nazi Party, the error made there by Christians is the same one made by Christians in post Weimar Germany. Religion, the Bible, Christ are never . .

to be placed at the service of the political power, but Eric and his retinue strained to do it yesterday. Not only is such a grotesque cooptation of faith an affront to believers in the gospel, but it should be to all people of faith. When religion becomes a tool of the state . .

it is, de facto, corrupted. Corrupted, politicized religion is dangerous because the absolutist zeal it generates is no longer grounded ethically or morally—it is motivated only by power. History is replete with episodes of oppression, terror, even genocide resulting . . .

from the fusion of the church and political/state forces. Most alarming yesterday was the ferocious cheering of a military general who had earlier called for the suspension of the Constitution and the imposition of marshal law—just what my colleagues warned of during the . . .

Obama years but was never even suggested, let alone urged by a presidential security advisor and military leader. Yesterday’s event eerily echoed the infamous 1934 Sports Palace rally when the German Christian movement pledged itself in solidarity with the Nazi Party and its . .

Leader, whom it declared “a gift and miracle from God.” There’s been only one Adolf Hitler, one Nazi Party and one Third Reich, but the error made by the German Evangelical Church was the same error made by yesterday’s event organizers: pledging absolute fealty to a political . .

party, personality, and power. It ultimately proved the kiss of death for so much of the German church and it will prove so for a large swath of American Christianity, but, in the mean time, America’s religio-political heresy will prove as destructive to the integrity of . . .

American Christianity as the German heresy was to Christian witness there. Yesterday’s spectacle may have been bizarre, irritating, disconcerting, and maybe even amusing at times, but it was much too serious to be funny . . .

Trumpian religion is spiritually, socially, and politically very dangerous and must be treated as such. It is up to church leaders, elected and appointed officials and all people of conscience to call this for what it is, expose its menacing nature, neutralize its influence . . .

and lead people back to a faith emulating the model, message and ministry of Christ and separates itself from political masters bent on using it for their own ends. Christianity must always challenge the state, not enable it. The detoxification of Christian faith is now our work.