Double White House Blasphemy? Really?
Redeeming America 36
Substack PT 4037. Double White House Blasphemy? Really? Redeeming America 36
The wider public has registered outrage over the image of the 47th US president on his social platform mimicking the divine — the person of Jesus — in an AI cartoon. POTUS is pictured like a caring deity holding the power of healing light in his hand.
“Blatently blasphemous!” declared five Wyoming candidates running for US congressional seats. This included three Republicans.
On the television show, The View, Alyssa Farah Griffin announced: “In the Christian faith, this is considered blasphemy: blasting yourself as Christ, elevating yourself to the level of Christ.” Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly was similarly unequivocal: “It is blasphemous, by any definition of the word.”
“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” declared Megan Basham, a prominent conservative Protestant Christian, who was quoted in Time.
Is it blasphemy? Pride? Hubris?
Why might someone think of this image as blasphemous? Because of megalomania. When you or I treat ourselves as if we were God, those around us shrink in horror. To claim divinity for oneself is to claim superiority, authority, and dominance. We resent this when someone near us does this.
Before God, we are all equally poor beggars kneeling at the foot of the cross. God has appointed no one of us to behave omnipotently toward us.
What is actually going on in this moment is what Christian theologians call pride, biblically known as hubris. Hubris is actually more than pride. According to Paul Tillich, hubris describes the moment when we lift ourselves into the level of the divine, when we make all other things in existence orient themselves around us as the center.
“Hubris…is not pride — the compulsive overcompensation of actual smallness — but the self-elevation of the great beyond the limits of its finitude. The result is both the destruction of others and self-destruction”(Tillich, 3:93).
The current chief executive of the White House certainly exhibits pride and hubris in this theological sense. And pride and hubris both contribute to blasphemy, to be sure. But blasphemy entails more than pride or hubris alone.
Blasphemy on top of blasphemy
Because of an explosive public reaction, the president removed the initially posted image two days after putting it up. Then he followed it with another image on April 15, 2026. In this image, he is WITH Jesus rather than replacing Jesus.
The second image is just as blasphemous as the first, even though the president probably thinks he is smoothing ruffled feathers. He is clearly not mocking religion. Rather, POTUS is subordinating religious symbols to his own advantage when placing himself at the pinnacle of power over America’s money, military, media, culture, worldview, history, and everyday thinking. In this 2nd image, POTUS on Earth is being blessed by heaven. He is appointed by heaven to be our earthly authority.
What is blasphemy again?
If we ask — what is blasphemy — here’s an answer we find on The Conversion site.
Within the Christian tradition, blasphemy has historically been an unstable, shifting idea. But, simply put, it means speech, thought or action that shows contempt for – or mockery of – God and sacred matters.
No, it’s not “shifting.” It is not a “mockery” of God. Let’s try a little more precision here.
Yes, there’s an intuitive provocation of blasphemy when we just feel that something sacred is being trivialized or, worse, mocked. But there is more to blasphemy, and we instinctively know it.
Because of the proscription against idolatry in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), we routinely connect blasphemy with those among us who would demand so much power that we in the populace treat them as if they were divine. Our anti-blasphemy sensibilities are rightly triggered when this happens. This is hubris. But there is still more than hubris in blasphemy, something more subtle.
Blasphemy prevents biblical symbols from mediating God’s grace
Here is the essence of blasphemy: blasphemy prevents sacred symbols from mediating God’s grace. This is why Satan is so frequently depicted as the Antichrist. Satan prostitutes the sacred symbols so that they convey hatred, violence, and destruction. This blocks you and me from learning that the God of Israel is loving, gracious, and redemptive. Let me explain.
Traditionally, blasphemy has been associated with defiling God’s name, with using God’s name in a profane way. Yes, of course. But, as I have suggested, there is a reason behind this that explains why profanity is so damaging. Blasphemy is damaging because it misuses divine symbols in such a way that the symbols are unable to communicate God’s grace.
Blasphemy takes two forms, covert and overt (Peters, 16). In its covert form, blasphemy hides sin under the name of something good. Blasphemy is a tool for self-justification involving the use of religious symbols, such as an image of Jesus, to enhance one’s own position of power. In history, we have seen such blasphemy in the divine right of kings to justify power over and the exploitation of peasants. At times, biblical passages have been marshalled to justify slavery. Imagine if you were a peasant or a slave. Just what would biblical symbols convey to you? They would mediate your diminishment, imprisonment, and worthlessness. This is just the opposite message Scripture wants to communicate.
In its overt form, blasphemy is the deliberate use of divine symbols in the worship of radical evil. Here, overt blasphemy promotes evil in the name of evil. That’s why I call it radical evil, in contrast to garden variety every day sin wherein we hide our wolf-like evil beneath a coat of sheep’s wool. In Satanic religious practice, a symbolic world is constructed wherein the Devil takes the central place belonging to God. Radical evil and overt blasphemy are relatively rare. This does not apply to the present situation.
What we experience today in the White House is covert blasphemy, even if it looks so obvious to fool almost nobody other than House Speaker Mike Johnson.
POTUS’s blasphemy blocks the mediation of divine grace
Imagine that your family is Iranian. You look up at a noisy sky to watch American-made bombs falling, detonating, and destroying. These bombs terrorize, maim, and kill countless children in your neighborhood. Then, you see an image of the US president with Jesus’ hand on his shoulder. How could such an image of Jesus mediate God’s grace to you in this situation?
Imagine that you are a Spanish-speaking American or visitor to America. You find yourself locked up by ICE and detained in an incarceration camp. You have no access to legal representation. You are packed into a jail cell with so many other prisoners that there is no room to sit, let alone lie down and sleep. Medical and dental care are denied. You find vermin in your food. Then you see an image of Jesus with eyes closed in prayer, blessing the chief executive who is exacting this cruelty upon you. How could such an image of Jesus mediate God’s grace to you in this situation?
Imagine….well, I think you get the picture. This is how Satan presses our human blasphemy into his mission to block our access to divine grace in our lives. I sometimes call it symbol-stealing—that is, the US president steals sacred symbols and hides under them to justify corruption and cruelty. Instead of mediating to us God’s love and compassion, Jesus becomes the cipher for justifying government-sponsored barbarity. That, in my judgment, constitutes blasphemy.
Conclusion
Is there a good reason to shout, “blasphemy,” at these two images and likely future images to come? Yes, there is.
Yet, there is also a good reason to pause and ask: just what makes this blasphemy so damaging? Is it POTUS’ megalomania? Well, yes, this is part of it. Megalomania indicates pride and hubris and the destruction that comes with them.
But let’s avoid the misleading claim that POTUS is mocking religion. That’s not what's happening here.
Rather, POTUS is stealing sacred symbols to make look good what is otherwise evil, namely, callously killing people on foreign battlefields and similarly killing the spirit of freedom in domestic incarceration camps. When POTUS makes it appear that God in Jesus Christ is baptizing these evils, Satan smiles.
Substack PT 4037. Double White House Blasphemy? Really? Redeeming America 36
SIN 1 Sin? Really?
SIN 2 Self-Justification
Sin 24. Morally Bad Americans? Power, Self-Justification, and Scapegoating
Prayer, Jesus, and Pope Leo XIV. Praying in the Department of War
Public Theology, Political Symbolization, and Discourse Clarification. Eric Voegelin on Redeeming America’s Future 10
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Meet Ted Peters. For Substack, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and an emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society, as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. In 2023 he published, The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. More recently, he has published an edited volume, Promise and Peril of AI and IA: New Technology Meets Religion, Theology, and Ethics (ATF 2025), and, along with Arvin Gouw, an edited collection, The CRISPR Revolution in Science, Religion, and Ethics (Bloomsbury 2025). Soon to be released is a volume of essays, A Handbook on Astrobiology, Astrotheology, and Astroanthropology, co-edited with Carolina Azucena Sanz de la Fuente and Arvin Gouw, with ATF.
See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Patheos blog site.
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References
Peters, Ted, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993.
Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology. 3 Volumes: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-1963.