Trump’s Womanhaters and the Church of Zeus.

One of the most revealing developments of the Trump and JD Vance era is that the American political movement calling itself Christian has become obsessed with putting women back in their place. That is no accident.

Today’s evangelicals demand female submission while excusing, even celebrating, men accused of sexual violence, from Donald Trump to Andrew Tate. So we have to ask a simple question: Are they worshipping Jesus or Zeus?

Jesus never raped anyone. Zeus, the mythological king of the Greek gods, was infamous in the stories about him for pursuing countless human females through coercion, deception, violence, and rape.

Yet millions who claim to follow Christ now applaud a culture that glorifies Zeus-like male domination, excuses Zeus-like abuse, and tells women that their highest calling is submission to powerful, even violent men.

Nothing exposes the revived paganism of the Trump era more clearly than its embrace of Andrew and Tristan Tate. These faux males are not merely crude internet celebrities. They built an empire selling extreme women-abusing pornography, degrading hundreds of women personally, and teaching millions of young men that domination of females is the essence of masculinity.

Now they face some of the most serious criminal charges imaginable in countries they have lived in and, from time to time, fled after being arrested and investigated by the police for serious crimes. Most recently, British prosecutors charged Andrew Tate with multiple counts of rape, sex trafficking, assault, and offenses involving sexual images of children and extreme pornography.

Tucker Carlson gave Andrew Tate a sympathetic platform. Donald Trump welcomed the brothers back into the United States, indeed forced their release from a jail in Romania. JD Vance has repeatedly treated the Tates as symbols of young men supposedly persecuted by liberal culture.

Here, then, is what Trump, Vance, Carlson, and all the rest have ignored and defended, as reported in The New Yorker in “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse” by Heidi Blake, June 8, 2026:

“Tate forged relationships with Barron Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in the weeks before the election. He pumped out pro-MAGA content, mobilizing young men in such large numbers that Kamala Harris later named him as a key factor in her defeat.”

When the result was in, Tate posted jubilantly on X, “The patriarchy is back.” After the inauguration, he added, “The Tates will be free. Trump is the president.”

The invention of the Tate-coddling Church of Zeus, as I call it, did not happen overnight.

For decades, influential evangelical pastors and theologians laid the foundation for the post-Christian American turn to woman-hating paganism. They did this by turning male domination into what they called biblical doctrine.

Baptist theologian John Piper argued that God ordained men to rule and women to submit. New Testament scholar Wayne Grudem supplied the theological framework. Together they helped found the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, making female submission a test of faith.

Albert Mohler Jr., as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, trained generations of pastors to carry patriarchal theology into thousands of churches. His leadership also faced sustained criticism because of his efforts to deny and conceal credible charges of sexual abuse, reinforcing the fact that protecting male authority came before protecting women.

Evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll took the next step, transforming his theology into an actual cult of militant masculinity. He mocked effeminate Christianity, glorified domination, and taught young men that Christian manhood meant power rather than service.

Then political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality Charlie Kirk translated Driscoll’s worldview into politics, telling millions of young men that feminism was a sign of civilization rebelling against God.

Andrew Tate simply preached the same sermon as these evangelical leaders, but without quoting the Bible.

Tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who has pursued a strategy to father a large number of children with multiple women, often under secrecy, using surrogates and offering financial incentives, Christian nationalists, authoritarian pastors hiding abuse charges in their own churches, manosphere influencers raping women as they produce online porn, conspiracy theorists, and MAGA politicians disagree about many things.

To this crew of womanhaters, feminism is the explanation for declining birth rates, family instability, educational change, and even lost wars, because women are now in our military.

The tragedy is that millions of young men have been recruited into what I’m calling the Church of Zeus. These lonely young males were only looking to be seen. Research shows that roughly two-thirds of young men feel that “no one really knows me.”

Into that loneliness pandemic stepped the religious right, Elon Musk’s algorithm-driven platforms, and online manosphere rapists with seductive claims: We understand you. We know who is to blame. Follow us.

Instead of offering friendship, purpose, or genuine human connection, Musk and the evangelical leaders of the Church of Zeus offered scapegoats.

Instead of teaching boys how to become compassionate, resilient protectors capable of love and fatherhood, they sold fantasies of domination, grievance, and control over women.

Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, the evangelical leaders, Trump, Vance, and their imitators packaged cruelty as confidence, wealth as male virtue, and misogyny as strength.

The result is that a generation of isolated young men, whose deepest need was belonging, loving, and being loved, was exploited by political operatives, billionaire-owned algorithms, and self-appointed prophets of fake masculinity who grew rich and more powerful by keeping young males angry, ignorant, lonely, sad, and afraid.

Jesus never healed wounded young males by teaching them to dominate women. Jesus healed wounded men by teaching them to love their neighbors, forgive their enemies, welcome the outcast, wash dirty feet, and carry the cross of self-sacrifice.

The deepest irony is that today’s self-proclaimed defenders of “biblical manhood,” men like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, increasingly resemble the very pagan world Christianity first confronted.

Rome celebrated hierarchy, masculine supremacy, conquest, and brute force. Jesus overturned that order, teaching that the last would be first, greatness is measured by service, and women, slaves, foreigners, and children possess the same God-given dignity as emperors.

Seen in that light, it becomes easier to understand why the more than 20 women who publicly accused Donald Trump over the years of sexual misconduct, assault, and rape did not drive evangelical leaders away from supporting him.

Those accusations were not disqualifying to these evangelical leaders. They were merely an inconvenience to explain away because the movement had already made male power more sacred than female dignity.

That is why so many evangelical leaders now sound less like followers of Christ than the crowd before Pilate crying, “Away with him. Crucify him.”

In choosing domination over truth and power over love, they have perhaps also unwittingly echoed another chilling biblical line: