Render Unto Caesar

On political idolatry, the church’s forgotten mission, and what Jesus actually said about earthly kings

On Sunday evening, April 13, 2026, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social. The image showed him in a white robe and red sash, hand resting on the forehead of a sick man, with light emanating from his palm and American flags, bald eagles, and military jets filling the background. He deleted it the next morning. Asked about it by reporters outside the Oval Office, the President said he thought it depicted him as a doctor. “I thought it was me as a doctor, making people better.”

The reaction from Christian social media was swift and loud. “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” wrote conservative commentator Megan Basham. “God shall not be mocked,” wrote Riley Gaines. “Faith is not a prop,” wrote Brilyn Hollyhand. The image came down. Statements were made. The news cycle moved on.

I want to move more slowly. Because the image—and the reaction to it—points to something that deserves more than a twenty-four-hour controversy. It points to a question the church in America has been reluctant to ask honestly: How did we get here? And what have we allowed to happen to our witness in the process?

THE IMAGE IN CONTEXT

Let me be direct about the image itself, because the full picture matters.

This was not the first incident. In May 2025, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as pope immediately after the death of Pope Francis, prompting widespread outrage among Catholics. Two weeks before the Jesus image, at a White House Easter lunch attended by more than one hundred faith leaders, his longtime spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain stood before Trump and said: “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you. Sir, because of His resurrection, you rose up.” The White House quietly scrubbed the footage from YouTube after it began circulating online.

The Sunday night post, then, did not appear in a vacuum. It appeared at the end of a pattern.

But here is what I want to say carefully, because fairness matters as much as honesty. The President took the image down. His explanation—that he genuinely did not see it as a Christ image—may well be true. AI-generated content circulates rapidly in political social media circles, and not every person who shares something has studied it carefully. The ferocity of some Christian criticism, with words like “deranged” and “anti-Christ,” overshot the evidence. He is a human being who made a bad call and corrected it. That deserves acknowledgment.

The larger question is not whether Donald Trump is a blasphemer. The larger question is what it reveals about us—the Christians who helped create the conditions in which a post like that could feel normal to anyone near the President of the United States.

The image came down in twenty-four hours. But the underlying problem has been building for years.

AN ANCIENT PATTERN

The people of God have navigated the temptation of political alignment before. The record is not encouraging.

In the first century, two groups illustrate the danger from opposite directions. The Herodians were Jewish political operatives who had attached themselves to the Herodian dynasty—Rome’s local instruments of power. They supported whoever kept their access intact. They believed political stability under Herod was the best available future for Israel. They were not religiously insincere men. They were pragmatists who had decided that proximity to power was worth more than prophetic independence.

The Pharisees, Israel’s religious establishment, should have been different. And yet Mark 3:6 records one of the most sobering verses in the Gospels: “Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him.” Religious purists and political pragmatists, united by a single shared interest—protecting the existing order from the disruption Jesus represented. When the threat to their position became serious enough, they found each other.

“Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him.” — Mark 3:6

Jesus saw through both of them. “Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod” (Mark 8:15). Leaven works invisibly, permeating everything it touches before the loaf is even baked. The warning was not about dramatic betrayal. It was about the slow, invisible contamination of religious life by political calculation.

When the same coalition brought the question of taxes to trap Him—“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”—Jesus did not take the bait of either side. His answer was not a political position. It was a boundary: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). Caesar gets his coin. God gets everything else. The two categories are not equal and not interchangeable.

The Herodians had collapsed that boundary in one direction, subordinating everything to political expediency. Some Christian voices in America have been making a similar error in another direction—subordinating the things of God to the things of a particular political champion. The theology is different. The structural error is the same.

WHAT HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED

I support many of the policy outcomes of this administration. Religious liberty protections matter. The White House Faith Office—whatever its controversies—represents a genuine institutional acknowledgment of faith in public life. These are real gains, and Christians should say so without embarrassment.

But something else has also happened, and it is important to name it. A significant portion of American Christian media has functionally become a wing of political commentary. Programs that once centered on Scripture, prayer, and discipleship have filled their content with polling numbers, legislative updates, and commentary on political enemies. Pastors who were once shepherds have become surrogates. Voices that once called people to the cross now call them to the ballot box—as if the two were equivalent urgent destinations.

According to a 2026 PRRI survey of more than 22,000 Americans, one-third of the country now qualifies as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers—and the correlation between those views and support for Donald Trump is documented in all fifty states. Among white evangelical Protestants who attend church weekly, the majority hold these views. This is not a peripheral fringe. It is a mainstream theological drift.

1 in 3

Americans now qualifies as a Christian nationalism Adherent or Sympathizer, per PRRI’s 2026 survey—with the strongest correlation among regular churchgoers.

67%

of white evangelical Protestants hold Christian nationalist views, per PRRI—the highest level of any major religious group in the country.

I am not raising this as a partisan argument. I am raising it as a pastoral one. When the faith becomes so entwined with a political identity that Christians cannot critique a political leader without feeling they are betraying their tribe, something has gone wrong with the faith. Not with the politics. With the faith.

Paula White’s Easter remarks were a symptom of this. She did not make those comparisons in a vacuum. She made them in a culture that has spent years preparing the ground—a culture in which Christian leaders have described a sitting president in near-messianic language, in which criticism of the President feels to some believers like spiritual betrayal, in which being a good Christian and being a good partisan have become nearly synonymous. Once that culture exists, the words she spoke become almost inevitable.

When you cannot critique a political leader without feeling you are betraying your faith, the political leader has taken a place that belongs only to God.

THE MAIN THING

Jesus gave the church two primary commands. Not ten. Not fifty. Two.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40).

Discipleship. Evangelism. Love for God. Love for neighbor. These are the main things. Everything else—including politics, including policy, including the legitimate work of engaging government—is secondary. Not unimportant. Secondary.

Here is what troubles me as someone who travels, interviews, and speaks across the Christian world. The people who are finding Christ today—the unchurched, the skeptical, the spiritually homeless—are not finding Him through political rallies. They are finding Him through personal encounter: through testimony, through prayer, through a relationship with a believer who looked them in the eyes and showed them the love of Christ. When the church leads with politics, it repels exactly the people it is called to reach. Evangelical Protestants have declined from 23% of the U.S. adult population in 2007 to 23% today—and while that number has stabilized, it has not grown. A church that has spent fifteen years intensifying its political identity has not seen fifteen years of evangelistic fruit.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were not godless men. They were men who loved the law, who prayed, who fasted, who tithed meticulously. Their failure was not irreligion. It was misplaced priority—majoring in minors, attending to the periphery while the center went unguarded. Jesus said it directly: “You have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). He did not say those minor matters were wrong. He said they were minor. And the minors had eaten the majors.

“You have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” — Matthew 23:23

HOW TO HOLD THIS RIGHTLY

None of this means Christians should disengage from civic life. The opposite. The Scriptures call us to pray for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), to seek the welfare of the city in which we live (Jeremiah 29:7), to be salt and light in the world (Matthew 5:13-14). Political engagement is not a betrayal of the gospel. It can be an expression of it.

But there is a difference between engagement and capture. Engagement means bringing the values of the Kingdom to bear on the questions of the age—speaking with moral clarity on life, on justice, on the poor, on the marginalized—regardless of which party that aligns with on a given day. Capture means the reverse: allowing partisan loyalty to determine what moral positions you take, what you will criticize and what you will excuse, whose sins you name and whose you quietly overlook.

The church in America has been drifting from engagement toward capture. The AI image is a small symptom of that drift. The Easter lunch remarks are a larger one. The fact that both incidents were initially met with more outrage from the secular press than from within the evangelical community is the largest symptom of all.

Christians should hold their political leaders with appreciation where appreciation is warranted, with honest critique where critique is warranted, and with the unwavering conviction that no earthly leader—no matter how much good he does or how many Christian causes he champions—occupies the place that belongs to Jesus Christ alone. That is not an anti-political statement. It is the most basic statement of Christian theology.

Appreciation where it is warranted. Honest critique where it is warranted. And the unwavering conviction that no earthly leader occupies the place that belongs to Jesus alone.

WHAT JESUS SAID TO PILATE

At the end of His ministry, Jesus stood before the most powerful political figure in Judea. Pilate asked Him: “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus answered: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place” (John 18:36).

He was not withdrawing from the world. He was clarifying the nature of His authority. It does not come from Rome. It does not come from a political alliance. It does not require the endorsement of any earthly power. It is from another place entirely.

That is the message the church is called to carry. Not the message of whoever currently holds the White House—however sympathetic that person may be to Christian concerns. The message of the One whose kingdom is from another place. Who healed the sick not as a political prop but as a demonstration of who He is. Who did not need an AI-generated image to make His power visible. Who walked out of a sealed tomb under Roman guard without anyone’s permission.

The image on Truth Social came down after twenty-four hours. The drift it represents will not resolve that quickly. It will resolve when Christian leaders—including voices like mine—decide that the main thing is, and always has been, the main thing. When discipleship and evangelism return to the center. When no political figure, however helpful, is allowed to occupy the ground that belongs to Christ.

When we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—our engagement, our prayers, our honest participation in civic life—and render unto God what is God’s. Which is everything else.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” — Mark 12:17

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About the Author

Randy Kay is the founder of Heaven Encounters with Randy Kay and Randy Kay Ministries, host of The Last Call with Randy Kay, and serves on the board of Sid Roth’s Messianic Vision. In April 2005 he was clinically dead for over thirty minutes and encountered Jesus Christ.

His new book, Heaven Encounters: 140 Near-Death Experiences Revealing the Afterlife (Charisma House, May 2026), is available now on Amazon.

randykay.org