In September of last year, a funeral was held for right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Nearly 100,000 people, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, gathered to honor the life of the Turning Point U.S.A. founder. As clips of the funeral made their way to social media, I came across an unassuming image: a man pictured rolling a large cross mounted on wheels during the procession. It was a simple image, but for some reason it struck me. As I reflected on the image, I realized that while the cross itself was present to symbolize faith and perseverance in a time of tragedy (and was given wheels to be easily moved about a funeral procession), it offered a haunting metaphor for what has become modern American Christianity, particularly groups of the MAGA movement. The cross, the most sacred emblem of sacrifice and compassion, had been placed on wheels. It was no longer borne with the weight of conviction, but rolled along effortlessly, repositioned at will.
The Christian call to “bear your cross” comes from Jesus’s invitation to his followers to accept hardship and sacrifice in the service of love. To bear one’s cross is to take on the suffering of others, carrying burdens not for personal glory but out of a deep concern for the plight of others. Yet in today’s politicized Christianity, this sacred act has been transformed into something unrecognizable. Both the cross and Christian theology have become a tool of self-justification to support the definitively anti-Christian ideals of the MAGA movement. No longer a symbol of self-sacrifice, compassion, and care for the marginalized and vulnerable, the cross has become a prop wheeled into public life when convenient, and just as quickly rolled away when it demands real sacrifice. Where the Bible says to care for immigrants and refugees, it is wielded as a political shield, used to defend cruelty toward immigrants, disdain toward the poor, and hostility toward anyone who doesn’t fit within the narrow moral, racial, and ideological framework MAGA has constructed.
The metaphor of the wheeled cross captures this distortion perfectly. The mobility of the cross symbolizes how easily belief is repositioned to align with political convenience. When Trump or the MAGA movement contradict Christian ethics, boasting of wealth, demeaning the vulnerable, and glorifying violence, the cross and its teachings are simply reinterpreted to make room for the contradiction. It is a performative Christianity that thrives on spectacle and grievance, feeding off the fantasy that American Christians are under attack while simultaneously wielding enormous cultural and political power and using that power to ignore the rights and dignity of others.
To truly bear one’s cross is to stand still long enough to feel its weight, and to love others, even those whom the world tells you not to. The very meaning of the cross lies in its permanence, in the fact that it cannot be rolled away when it becomes uncomfortable. The “crosses” the Trump-led MAGA movement represents serve as a warning, reminding us that faith without sacrifice is hollow, and that a religion untethered from love becomes merely a political costume. True Christianity calls for the courage to stop rolling the cross to wherever its values are most useful to us, and to answer its call in full by consistently putting the needs of others above our own without the need for praise or external validation.
Copy edited by Jenna Kanaan
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