On Sunday, in the midst of a Truth Social tirade against Pope Leo XIV, President Donald Trump shared an image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.
The picture, which appeared to be AI-generated, presented Trump as a healer dressed in the kind of red and white robes seen in biblical art. Towering over devotees — with the American flag, bald eagles and warplanes flying in the background — the Trump figure rested one hand on the forehead of an ailing man, while a beam of divine light emanated from the other. (The right-wing influencer and State Department special envoy Nick Adams shared a nearly identical image in early February; in Trump’s version, one of the soldiers in the background has horns.)
Christians across faith traditions — even many in the MAGA universe who have otherwise supported Trump — roundly denounced the rendering as “blasphemy.” Some on the right went further. “It’s more than blasphemy,” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. “It’s an Antichrist spirit.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.
On Monday, the post was deleted, and the president denied that he had represented himself as Jesus: “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better,” he told a reporter. “And I do make people better.”
As president, Trump has embraced both religiosity and self-promotion to degrees far beyond anything done by his White House predecessors. By combining the two, though, the image earned a secular political office an unusually intense chorus of theological criticism.
“Blasphemy” entered English around the 13th century from the ancient Greek “blasphēmia” via French and Latin, generally describing speech or actions that show irreverence for God, sacred people and sacred things. But before it came to mean denigrating the divine, the word referred more broadly to the act of slandering someone, says Kim Haines-Eitzen, a professor of early Christianity and early Judaism at Cornell University.
Though “blasphemy” appears in the Bible in both senses, it eventually took on a religious meaning with serious implications: God tells Moses in the book of Leviticus that “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death;” In the New Testament, Jesus himself is accused of blasphemy before his execution.
As the followers of Christianity came to equate Jesus with God, Haines-Eitzen says, blasphemy also came to include words or actions that denigrated Christ. Over time, this would also extend to institutions such as the church, to saints and the pope, and to religions beyond Christianity: In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” an insult to Islam and issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the author; English language media reported that Rushdie had been accused of “blasphemy.”
“It can be pretty broad,” Haines-Eitzen says. “It’s also broad in the very meaning, because what does it mean to slander God? What does it mean to denigrate the divine?”
Today, the charge of “blasphemy” refers not only to offending God and the sacred but also to offending the sensitivities of believers, Len Gutkin writes in The Yale Review. This can include, as in the case of Trump’s Truth Social post, ascribing divine features to mortal beings — or, in other cases, ascribing mortal features to divine beings.
In the ’70s and ’80s, two particular depictions of Jesus prompted accusations of “blasphemy” from the Christian right, says Isaac Butler, author of the forthcoming book “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.” One was Martin Scorsese’s film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which portrayed Jesus struggling with such human temptations as fear, doubt and lust. The other was Andres Serrano’s photograph “Immersion (Piss Christ),” which depicted a crucifix submerged in a tank of the artist’s urine and also purportedly meant to show a human side of Christ: “What it symbolizes is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him but so did the piss and the shit,” Serrano told The Guardian in 2016.
The right-wing outrage over these two works of art also turned into a debate about the extent to which one could play around with Christian iconography, Butler says. Scorsese and Serrano are both Catholic, a tradition that has historically used religious iconography in devotional practices. Many of their detractors, meanwhile, were evangelical Protestants. Though Scorsese and Serrano both said they were sincere in their depictions of Jesus, Butler says the religious right saw their work as “blasphemy.”
“What blasphemy does is move the conversation from one First Amendment area, freedom of expression, to another First Amendment area, of freedom of religion,” Butler says. “And what they are arguing — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — is that this is violating their rights as Christians, that this is not art, these are not speech acts, they’re not photographs, they’re not movies. They are anti-Christian discrimination. And the word blasphemy allows them to do that.”
This time around, Christians on the right are contending with “blasphemy” from a president they consider an ally.
The Trump administration has been accused of “blasphemy” before. Last year, Trump posted an AI image of himself as the pope, offending Catholics just as the conclave approached. And a week before the recent Truth Social post, at an Easter event at the White House, Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain likened the president to Christ, comparing his legal battles to Jesus’ suffering. But for some Christians, the president’s depiction of himself as Jesus finally seemed to cross a line.
To some other Christians, it isn’t merely the comparison to Christ that constitutes blasphemy. Jim Wallis, chair and director of the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice, also took issue with the inclusion of the warplanes in the image, which he says dishonors two of Jesus’ core teachings: His assertion that “blessed are the peacemakers” and his concern for “the least of these.”
“All the words apply: heresy, apostasy, blasphemy,” he adds.
Dennis Doyle, a Catholic theologian and professor emeritus at the University of Dayton, says intent matters in judgments about blasphemy, and for that reason, he’s reluctant to accuse Trump of committing it. “Technically, that’s blasphemy, what he did,” Doyle says. “But morally speaking, is he a blasphemer? Well, I think only God can be the final judge of that.”
