COMMENTARY The tradition of preaching Christianity while practicing cruelty saw a resurrection this Holy Week when the U.S. and Salvadoran presidents doubled down on Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Across Latin America this Easter weekend, Christians will commemorate Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection by indulging in a passion Jesus preached passionately against: cruelty.
They’ll burn, hang, stomp and spit on effigies of Judas Iscariot, the apostle who, according to the Bible, betrayed Jesus to the Romans for 30 pieces of silver.
The first time I watched that frenzy I couldn’t help thinking: TAWJWD. This Ain’t What Jesus Would Do. That sort of punitive brutality, even if it’s just performative, contradicts the humane tenets of the religion Jesus founded.
But then again, maybe I, as a Roman Catholic, should just get with the program.
After all, during this Holy Week we’ve been reminded yet again that preaching Christianity while practicing cruelty is enjoying, well, a resurrection in America and the Americas, thanks to leaders like President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.
It's distressingly evident in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man Trump and Bukele have wrongfully imprisoned in El Salvador — just one of the spiteful deportation wrongs they're refusing to right.
READ MORE: Oopsie! Is El Salvador the future of Trump's America? You bet your Bukele
Let’s back up to last Sunday, Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week, when Trump took to his Truth Social pulpit and waxed piously about Easter, “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” and “God’s boundless Love and Devotion to all Humanity.”
Let’s recall Bukele once telling us: “I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in his word, I believe in his word revealed in the Holy Bible.”
You’d almost mistake Donald and Nayib for the devout Marcellus and Demetrius in the Jesus epic The Robe.
Then pivot to this past Monday, when both men had an opportunity while meeting in the White House to actually emulate their lord and savior, to nod at God’s boundless love for humanity, to back up Jesus’ “word.”
The Christianist crusade sees people like Abrego Garcia not as Jesus-worthy humanity but as Judas-like effigies to be demonized, punished, scapegoated.
They could have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, was living legally in the U.S.; that he’s married to a U.S. citizen with three U.S. citizen children, and that he has no criminal record.
They could have conceded — as a Trump administration lawyer already has in federal court — that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly if not illegally deported to Bukele’s notorious CECOT high-security prison in El Salvador last month after being accused, apparently falsely and with no due process, of being a gang member.
That he was sent there, in fact, in violation of an immigration judge's 2019 ruling that Abrego Garcia had a "well-founded" fear of gang persecution back in El Salvador.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration released new documents it insists prove Abrego Garcia is in fact a member of a gang known as MS-13.
But they contain much the same evidence, based on a confidential informant's claim, that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has already found less than credible. Hence her order this month, backed up by the U.S. Supreme Court, that the Trump Administration have Abrego Garcia released and returned to the U.S.
Also Wednesday, court records emerged that show in 2021 Abrego Garcia's wife, Jennifer Vasquez, filed a temporary protective order against him amid allegations of domestic violence.
Vasquez soon after dropped the case, and this week, while leading calls for her husband's release, she insisted the episode "is not a justification" for Abrego Garcia's deportation.
Orwellian response
So Trump and Bukele could have paid homage to Holy Week by agreeing to return Abrego Garcia to his family and grant him the constitutional legal hearing he didn't get before he was carted off to El Salvador.
But instead of a gesture of Christianity, we witnessed a scene of cruelty.
As Trump looked on in approval, Bukele — the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” — sneered at suggestions he should let Abrego Garcia out of the CECOT, which houses the same vicious Salvadoran gang members the 29-year-old Abrego Garcia claims he was fleeing when he came to the U.S. years ago as a minor.
Bukele called the idea of freeing Abrego Garcia “preposterous.”
“How,” he asked, “can I smuggle a terrorist [back] into the United States?”
Abrego Garcia, while not a saint, is no terrorist — nor are the scores of other migrants with no criminal history whom Trump has summarily deported to El Salvador and the CECOT this year.
But Bukele's Orwellian response is all part of his and Trump’s authoritarian belief that their law-and-order fiat is infallible.
It reflects the truly preposterous claim both have made that they’re “instruments of God.”
And that’s where Christianity starts to morph into what we’ll call Christianism.
We’ve long distinguished the humane religion of Islam from the intolerant Islamism that claims to speak for it. Christianism is Islamism’s cruel cousin.
It’s what drives the Christian nationalist movement that believes messianic bullies like Trump and Bukele are necessary agents who, it hopes, will return America and the West to a white, Christian, heterosexual and patriarchal order.
It’s a crusade that sees migrants like Abrego Garcia not as Jesus-worthy humanity but as Judas-like effigies to be demonized, punished, scapegoated.
Ditto the likes of, say, transgender persons — or folks in poor countries like Lesotho whom Trump has slapped with onerous tariffs.
That’s WTBWD: What Trump and Bukele Would Do.
It’s not what Jesus would do.
