MAKESHIFT MESSIAHS: Why the American Right Keeps Creating Political Saviors By Rev. Jason Carson Wilson, M.Div.
It started with a room full of weeping teenagers.
December 2023. Phoenix, Arizona. Fifteen thousand students packed into an arena for Turning Point USA's AmericaFest. On stage, Charlie Kirk was leading what looked like a revival service. Hands raised. Eyes closed. Worship music swelling. Some students speaking in tongues.
Except they weren't worshiping God.
They were worshiping a political movement.
I'm a Black gay ordained minister. I'm a journalist. I know what worship looks like. I know the difference between religious devotion and political enthusiasm. What I saw at AmericaFest was neither — it was formation. The deliberate shaping of young people into disciples of a political religion that has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with domination.
I knew I had to write this book.
Makeshift Messiahs investigates one of the most dangerous phenomena in contemporary American life: the Right's repeatable, institutionally sustained process for transforming flawed politicians into untouchable religious figures. This book traces that process through three case studies — Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and Charlie Kirk — documenting how the same machinery was built, tested, refined, and weaponized across four decades.
Reagan was the prototype. A barely-churched former Hollywood actor who understood performance better than policy, Reagan gave evangelical leaders the right language, the right enemies, and the willingness to play the role. In return, they gave him something no democratic politician is supposed to have — absolution in advance. The Reagan Legacy Project erased the AIDS crisis, Iran-Contra, and the tripling of the national debt from the conservative canonical record. Reagan proved the concept: with enough money, media, and repetition, you could turn a politician into a prophet.
Trump was the escalation. The Cyrus narrative — the theological permission structure that allowed evangelical leaders to sanctify a thrice-married casino mogul as God's chosen instrument — didn't emerge by accident. It was constructed and enforced by an ecosystem of megachurch pastors, right-wing media, and donor-funded think tanks. Every scandal became persecution. Every critique became spiritual warfare. Every accountability measure became an attack on the faithful.
Kirk was the completion. When a gunman killed him on September 10, 2025, he became what the machinery had been waiting for: a martyr. What took the Reagan Legacy Project years happened in hours. The machinery had become self-sustaining. It no longer needed architects. It simply ran.
This is not an anti-conservative book. Some of the sharpest critics of political messianism have been conservatives who understand that no politician deserves worship. This is not an anti-Christian book. I am a Christian minister who believes in Christianity's capacity for justice precisely because I have watched that capacity be systematically corrupted. What this book is, without apology, is an urgent warning.
January 6 was not an aberration. It was the logical endpoint of decades of machinery teaching people that political leaders are divine instruments and that violence in service of God's anointed is holy. The mob that stormed the Capitol carried Christian flags, prayed in the Senate chamber, and chanted a politician's name. They didn't arrive at that belief spontaneously. They were built.
The machinery is still running. It is faster now. More efficient. And it is coming for the next generation.
Makeshift Messiahs names the pattern, documents the infrastructure, and refuses the mythology — for everyone who believes democracy requires accountability, that authentic faith cannot coexist with political idolatry, and that the only honest response to a machine this dangerous is to see it clearly and refuse to let it run unchallenged.
The reckoning is here. The choice is ours.
Rev. Jason Carson Wilson, M.Div., is an ordained United Church of Christ minister, public theologian, journalist, and author of "Politically Pastoral" on Substack. He is the Founding Executive Director of the Bayard Rustin Liberation Initiative, a forensic psychiatric chaplain at St. Elizabeths Hospital, and a Doctor of Ministry candidate at Pacific School of Religion.