By Ben Johnson

If voters ever needed proof of the cultural and spiritual importance of what is at stake in a presidential election, they need look no further than this Easter. This year, President Donald Trump began the celebration of blessed Holy Week, the days leading up to the annual remembrance of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead, by issuing a remarkably erudite and theologically precise presidential message on Palm Sunday. Just one year ago, President Joe Biden rang in Easter by urging Americans to celebrate the Transgender Day of Visibility.

President Trump’s Holy Week message reads like it could have been written by a combination of Adrian Rogers and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. “In His final hours on Earth, Christ willingly endured excruciating pain, torture, and execution on the cross out of a deep and abiding love for all His creation. Through His suffering, we have redemption. Through His death, we are forgiven of our sins. Through His Resurrection, we have hope of eternal life,” wrote the president. “On Easter morning, the stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and light prevails over darkness — signaling that death does not have the final word.”

The statement of Trump, a Presbyterian, managed to sound simultaneously more revivalist than George W. Bush, who became a born again Christian after a personal intervention from Billy Graham, and more Roman Catholic than the nation’s second Catholic president. “Beginning with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and culminating in the Paschal Triduum, which begins on Holy Thursday with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, followed by Good Friday, and reaching its pinnacle in the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night,” wrote President Trump. “This week is a time of reflection for Christians to memorialize Jesus’ crucifixion — and to prepare their hearts, minds, and souls for His miraculous Resurrection from the dead.”

“This week, we pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our beloved Nation,” continued President Trump, who named Paula White-Cain, a Pentecostal, as his special adviser to the White House Faith Office.

Nor did the president endorse only a mental faith, putting his political capital on the line to defend evangelical Christians, who gave Trump 81% of their votes in the 2024 presidential election. “This Holy Week, my Administration renews its promise to defend the Christian faith in our schools, military, workplaces, hospitals, and halls of government. We will never waver in safeguarding the right to religious liberty, upholding the dignity of life, and protecting God in our public square,” he vowed.

The president’s message constitutes just one public act celebrating the religious faith of America’s maligned majority. In an additional post on Truth Social, he added, “In that moment of His Resurrection, History was forever changed with the Promise of Everlasting Life.” Indeed, the second Trump administration’s “White House Faith Office has put together an extraordinary weeklong celebration for Holy Week ahead of Easter Sunday,” declared Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who recently appeared in a candid social media video capturing her praying before a White House press briefing.

The White House Faith Office announced, in addition to the president’s message, the White House would release a special presidential video, host a pre-Easter dinner, and hold a White House staff Easter communion service led by White, Franklin Graham, Greg Laurie, and Jentezen Franklin. It will be “a special time of prayer and worship at the White House to be shared with Americans,” according to the office’s faith director, Jennifer Korn.

Christians praised the Trump presidency’s high-profile celebration of faith. “It is so encouraging to see people who believe in the power of prayer in this administration!” said Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse. “I voted for this,” said Megan Basham, author of “Shepherds for Sale.”

Compare this Holy Week under the second Trump administration to the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to divert the nation’s collective attention away from Easter Sunday and direct it toward the Transgender Day of Visibility, one of the endless string of nouveau LGBTQ holidays which fell on Easter (March 31). This year, President Trump posted his statements on Palm Sunday to celebrate all the sacred events of Holy Week. Last year, Biden’s White House released a high-profile statement on the Trans Day of Visibility on Good Friday, so Americans could revel in the celebration all weekend long. Biden rolled out his last paschal statement only on Easter Sunday itself.

In both timing and substance, the Biden administration clearly saw Easter as an afterthought to advancing the LGBTQIA2S+ agenda. The Easter statement released by President Biden (or whomever controlled his autopen) amounted to six terse sentences featuring nebulous references to “the power of hope” and “the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities.” But its 2024 Trans Day of Visibility proclamation ran six effusive paragraphs and contained 675% as many words as his Easter statement. In it, Biden warned darkly that “extremists” attempting to prevent the transgender industry from carrying out cross-sex hormone injections or surgeries on “transgender kids” actually “attack our most basic American values.”

That overheated rhetoric actually constituted a step down from 2023, when the Biden White House issued a statement, a “fact sheet,” and a presidential proclamation that declared, “Transgender Americans shape our [n]ation’s soul” (which is true, but not the way Biden implied).

When confronted over last year’s panegyric to gender confusion, America’s “devout” Roman Catholic president denied issuing the statement. “I didn’t do that,” Biden (who was no stranger to confusion himself) told reporters, deriding Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) criticisms as “thoroughly uninformed.” Then-White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre categorized public backlash as “dishonest,” “misinformation,” and “untrue.” And then-Assistant Secretary of Health at HHS Richard B. “Rachel” Levine derided Christians for engaging in “faux outrage.” But Levine — who had previously lobbied the medical profession to remove age barriers for transgender procedures on minors and for the administration to transform Pride Month into “a summer of Pride” — protested too much.

Joe Biden spent four years encouraging gender confusion, suppressing the manifesto of trans-identifying mass child murderer Audrey “Aidan” Hale, hosting trans-identifying influencers (one of whom flashed his artificial breasts at the White House), and promoting outright heresy by implying God approves of transgenderism. Biden told trans-identifying “young people” that their artificial gender identity is “made in the image of God.” President Trump by contrast, in his most recent speech to a joint session of Congress last month, responded, “Our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”

Biden’s indifference or hostility to the things of God mirrors that of his entire party. Then-vice president and “candidate of joy” Kamala Harris famously called out two students at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse who praised Jesus’s Name at one of her campaign events. “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” Harris chided them. To recapitulate: A major party presidential candidate thought the most important thing she could do in the waning moments of an election she knew she was losing was to tell swing-state voters she would have zero tolerance for those who believe “Jesus is Lord.” Days later, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance told a crowd in Waukesha, Wisconsin, “That’s right. Jesus is king.” 

The most popular figure in the Democratic Party’s grassroots, Senator Bernie Sanders (technically an Independent and democratic socialist from Vermont), thanked a trans-identifying male who belted out a blasphemous song depicting the Lord as a sexual predator and describing Almighty God’s genitalia during a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally (also, coincidentally, in Wisconsin) on March 7.

Indeed, Ryan Burge, an associate professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University and research director for Faith Counts, has noted, “When Democrats don’t go to church, a huge chunk of them say that religion is ‘not important at all,’ about 70% in 2022.” Among Republicans, the level is closer to 40% — something Burge called “pretty good evidence for Cultural Christianity.”

This week’s changed tone proves that elections have consequences. One of them is the fact that the president commands a federal bureaucracy — a workforce so vast, no one really knows how many people work for it (although Elon Musk has made tremendous strides to make bureaucracy both accountable and countable). President Trump has reclaimed it and turned it toward promoting truth instead of lies. Even Trump’s Truth Social media message eerily paralleled the language used by extreme gender ideologues. “We need God, we want God and, with His help, we will make our Nation Stronger, Safer, Greater, more Prosperous, and more United than ever before,” he wrote.

In May 2023, Nebraska State Senator Machaela Cavanaugh (D-6) had a meltdown during a speech in the state Capitol, chanting, “We need trans people! We love trans people! Trans people belong here!” (The president previously exclaimed, “We want God!” during his momentous July 2017 speech in Warsaw, Poland.) G.K. Chesterton once observed that “hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything.”

President Trump deserves praise for emphasizing the second half of the bully pulpit this Easter.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.