Judas Was a Pseudo-Christian Nationalist

Exposing the Heresy at the Heart of Pseudo-Christian Nationalism

Betrayal is the darkest of human acts. It’s not simply harm done—it is harm done by someone who claims to be on your side. A stranger’s attack wounds you in the flesh; a friend’s betrayal pierces the soul. We recoil at traitors because they exploit intimacy for violence. Betrayal is the corruption of trust, the turning of something sacred into something deadly.

The archetype of betrayal in Western moral imagination is Judas Iscariot. He was not an external enemy but one of the twelve, trusted with the common purse, close enough to greet Jesus with a kiss. And it was precisely this nearness that made his act so devastating. Judas’s betrayal handed the Son of God to the violent machinery of empire. He didn’t simply fail to understand Jesus’s mission—he tried to repurpose it for his own ends, imagining an outcome on his terms, disillusioned when the Messiah wouldn’t bend to his agenda.

That same spirit of betrayal stalks parts of American Christianity today in the form of pseudo-Christian nationalism. This movement, loudly invoking Jesus’s name, seeks to transform Christianity from a global, reconciling faith into a tribal badge of cultural dominance—specifically, White cultural dominance. It wants not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of White privilege, cloaked in biblical language.

This is pseudo-Christian because it is a counterfeit. It is heterodox at its core. Jesus taught, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), yet pseudo-Christian nationalists demand a worldly kingdom of exclusion and hierarchy. The gospel proclaims that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free (Galatians 3:28), but they demand sharp lines between Us and Them. The early church demolished ethnic and social barriers, but this movement erects new ones in the name of God.

Its campaign of hate, prejudice, and xenophobia is not merely a rejection of the gospel—it is apostasy. It denies the essential Christian confession that Jesus is Lord of all, reducing him instead to a tribal totem. Jesus warns in Matthew 7:21–23 that many will say, “Lord, Lord,” only to hear him reply, “I never knew you.” The Apostle John writes starkly: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar” (1 John 4:20). The violent rhetoric and political idolatry that passes for Christianity in these circles is a Judas-kiss of betrayal: intimate, pious, deadly.

Let’s be clear: when a movement that calls itself Christian blesses racism, seeks to exclude immigrants, mocks the poor, or calls for violence against its enemies, it does not just err. It denies Christ. It sells him for thirty pieces of cultural power. It does not just harm the witness of the church—it becomes the antithesis of the church.

History will remember both those who raised their voices to sanctify violence and those who sat in silence while it spread. Silence in the face of betrayal is complicity with it. We cannot claim to follow the Crucified One while aligning ourselves with the betrayers who hand him over again and again to the powers of this world.

And so, we must choose. There is no middle ground between the gospel of Jesus and the gospel of exclusion. There is no compromise between Christ crucified for all and Christ claimed for the few. The way of the cross always calls us to die to our tribalism and our lust for domination.

Because if we do not heed this warning, there will be consequences. As James Baldwin so prophetically reminded us, there will be “the fire next time.”