Atonement
How Trump supporters are being divinely inspired … to sorrow.
Lent is in full swing and as someone who loved his Catholic mother, his Catholic grandmother and grandfather, their Catholic parents, I am obliged to do the bare minimum of engagement with the church of our oppressor in order to keep both sides of my relationship with my ancestors level. I love this season in the church because it reminds me that it’s OK to feel like a piece of shit and remind others that they’re pieces of shit, too.
“No one is perfect but god,” is what Lorraine Iron Shell-Walking Bull would remind me as a child. Especially after I’d coo at her for making perfect food. Her modesty forbade accepting compliments and her devotion required her to acknowledge the greatness of the god of Abraham before her own.
In these political times, so many Evangelical Protestants find impressive ways of doing mental gymnastics to align their faith to serve the will of Donald Trump. It’s little wonder that so many of them, tired and defeated, come to the Catholic Church in these times where complexity abounds but is rarely understood and make for what they think is a church of absolutes.
A real estate conman ran businesses into the ground and rather than admit his failures, he pulled more people into his cult until he manifested two presidential administrations.
Say what you will about the god of Abraham, but I think some old school Satanic cult shit was in full play to make that happen. Not the Satanists of today who fight for the Bill of Rights, I mean “Rosemary’s Baby” Satanists and the friends of Jeffrey Epstein.
But even in such stark relief, the trick that Evangelical Protestants pull is an insidious one. They call out grace and say that everyone is a sinner and quote John 8:7, the one about being without sin and throwing a stone. It’s how they manage to both downplay the actual harm that predators like Trump and his people commit, while extolling the greatness of the god of Abraham without even having to do the hard work of reading four more verses down wherein Jesus commands the woman he saved saying, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more.”
“GO AND FROM NOW ON DO NOT SIN ANY MORE.”
But the sins continue to pile up in Donald Trump and his supporters’ corners. They go again to the defense of grace—the Protestant Christian standby that because we are such pieces of shit, the god of Abraham cut us a sweet deal and sacrificed his own son (Jesus) to redeem us without the work of having to be worthy. It’s the crux of Christian theology.
For me, though, grace—as a concept—is still one I’m wrestling with as a decolonizing Indigenous Two Spirit.
The closest we come in my culture is the entire practice of Wolakota, though the order of who and how we forgive is based on relationship. The often-misunderstood concept of All My Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin) has been mistranslated for white, culturally Christian audiences as “we are all related.” Forgiveness in our culture is possible, but it requires sacrifice and does have to be earned. And there are consequences that include corporal punishment and maiming to remind the transgressors of their short-sightedness. Rapists and murderers were executed. No system is perfect, but for an insular culture, it helped us to be clear about the standards of justice that we hold ourselves to without creating too many loopholes for accountability.
But as I said, grace as the idea that one can simply be absolved of guilt by confessing a belief in a 2,000 year-old prophet-turned-savior is a great convenience when we weigh it against the entire history of violent colonization.
I struggle.
Is this grace thing a real thing or just something someone in power made up to avoid being killed?
That is why I appreciate my mother’s Catholicism in these times; note, my mother’s Catholicism, not current Catholicism. The Holy Mother Church that existed before the Second Vatican Council, the version that the right wing is so in love with and attend Mass celebrated in a dead language for.
In that Catholicism, forgiveness is still earned. Through atonement.
Now, granted, the church’s position on atonement has reliably fallen on the direct relationship one has with the god of Abraham through the risen Christ. If one sins, even against another person, the rules say we’re encouraged to make repair with the person we’ve sinned against, but first, we worry about being forgiven by the god of Abraham through its intercessors. To wit: examination, contrition, confession, penitence, and then absolution by a priest.
Right now, Trump supporters who failed the empathy test two years ago (and longer) are being put through their atonement by the lord, their god.
Ordinarily, human decency says that we shouldn’t call attention to other’s misfortunes and woes, but in my middle age, I have less days ahead of me than behind me and if we don’t remind the youth that some values are worth condemnation, our society fails to build empathy for itself.
I’ve been keenly observing this narrative arc of Trump supporters who have gone past buyer’s remorse and are now publicly recanting their zeal.
The Guardian: Ice is cracking down on Trump’s own supporters. Will they change their minds? (6/19/25)
CalNews: ‘We may be deporting the wrong people’: New poll shows doubts about immigration crackdown (12/9/25)
Intelligencer: Are MAGA Latinos Having Buyer’s Remorse? (2/16/26)
The Daily Beast: Trump Voter Regrets Ballot After Fiancée’s ICE Detention (2/21/26)
In my mother’s Catholicism, atonement and repentance aren’t academic abstractions. Sacrifice and suffering must be endured to ensure that one can fully examine one’s own conscience privately. It’s the same examination I make in these holy seasons whether in confession or before I take communion.
Have I separated myself from god of Abraham—and by its presence in the human dignity of others?
Which sin have I committed? Have I been greedy? Have I been lustful? Have I been envious? Have I been gluttonous? Have I been angry? Have I been lazy? And of course, have I been proud?
Am I truly sorry?
The answer is always: “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes.”
I’m fortunate that my humiliation is a mostly private one each week but in the case of Trump supporters who are being impacted by his policies, I can only pray they now truly understand that other peoples’ lives are just as valuable as their own. I’m heartbroken that they have to learn this lesson as adults with far-reaching consequences, but even Pharoah had to sacrifice his own child to be moved.
It’s not a perfect belief system, which is why I don’t let it too far into my innermost rooms of faith. Decolonizing meant I had to commit to not just tearing down old things, but I had to be willing for the Takuskanskan to create something new and different. What it did is remind me that when I confess that All My Relations are nearby, I have an obligation, a duty, a responsibility, to act in every way I can to see to their needs. Sometimes, I even have to put their needs before my own. That is what my people have always believed and it is how we survived and thrived since time immemorial.
But this system is what supposedly works for these people who confess Christ as their redeemer and savior. “One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God,” is the Gospel reading for today. And what I conceptualize as the word of god is compassion, empathy, that is being forged with every Trump supporter’s revelation that they have been complicit in suffering.
Finally, however, what Christianity routinely fails at is supporting the contrite.
The path forward isn’t by finding common ground with the oppressors and predators, their supporters and enablers, who are executing these atrocities in our cities. The path forward is by helping those victims who previously supported this terror to realize they have more in common with us than those in power.
Too much of our political discourse has been centered on working across aisles as if the two political parties only difference is still disagreeing about taxes and not basic functions of democracy and human decency. We don’t really pay attention to the followers of that GOP cult who find their way out of the fear and hate.
The deep work of repair is where we need Christians most to step up in the days to come. Because the cognitive dissonance that it takes to notice that one’s beliefs are actively harmful is a destabilizing one that creates more fear and can lead them to more error. And this is not to excuse anyone currently in the administration, employed by ICE, Homeland Security, or Customs and Border Protection. Accountability cannot—and should not—be dodged by people who recant at the last possible minute.
But being there to catch those who are impacted by these policies when they fall, guide them through their penitence, and reinforce the virtues of faith, hope, and love in community is support that the Christian church is uniquely qualified to provide in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
As Saint Paul wrote to the Romans:
“For just as through the disobedience of the one man
the many were made sinners,
so, through the obedience of the one,
the many will be made righteous.”
This is so so good