Most fights about “faith in politics” get stuck at the label. The more useful question is: what machinery turns faith into either mercy… or a weapon?

This week you can see two public “faith takes” collide in real time.

At TPUSA’s AmericaFest, JD Vance frames Christianity as a national creed under siege, and celebrates Trump for ending “a war… on Christians and Christianity,” adding: “of all the wars that Donald Trump has ended, that is the one we’re proudest of.”

Days later, the National Catholic Reporter runs the opposite frame: Matthew 6:24 (“no one can serve two masters”) applied to the Alex Pretti killing, arguing some Catholics are choosing MAGA over the Gospel, and pointing at how the administration quickly politicized the shooting, including Vance amplifying Stephen Miller’s “assassin” claim.

I’m not claiming “all Christians” are the same, or that faith in public life is inherently bad. I am claiming there’s a repeatable mechanism here:

• Define faith as identity shield (“Christianity is under attack”) → critics become enemies, not neighbors.
• Move from “war” language to permission structure → emergency framing justifies harshness.
• Convert a contested incident into instant moral certainty (“assassin,” “engineered chaos”) → accountability gets pre-framed as disloyalty.
• Then test it on a real death → do leaders lower the temperature, or monetize it?

US bishops called for peace after the Pretti shooting. Meanwhile, Vance’s AmericaFest remarks declared “Christianity is America’s creed”, framing faith not as personal devotion, but as national identity under siege.

If the goal is social peace + legitimacy, focus on accountability and restraint, not “whose Christianity wins.”

Question for SN: when faith gets invoked after a killing, what evidence tells you it’s being used as moral formation vs political insulation?