Et Tu, Jesus?
Angel Studios, The Chosen, and the Betrayal of the Teachings of Christ
There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for things you once loved.
For millions of Christians — and many non-Christians drawn in by its humanity — The Chosen represented something genuinely rare: a portrayal of Jesus that felt earned. Not the waxy, stained-glass Christ of religious obligation. Not the culture-war mascot of American evangelical politics. A Jesus who wept. Who laughed at dinner. Who sat with the broken and the excluded and treated them like they mattered.
Then came Rededicate 250.
And with it, Jonathan Roumie — the face, the voice, the embodiment of that Jesus for a global audience of hundreds of millions — standing at a patriotic Christian nationalist rally, telling the crowd that America’s destiny is bound up in God’s covenant, that “one nation under God” is a source of divine protection, and closing with “God bless America.”
It’s worth sitting with the specific sting of that. Because it isn’t just a celebrity making a political appearance. It is the man who plays Jesus — sincerely, by all appearances — lending the emotional and spiritual authority of that role to a theology that Jesus himself repeatedly, pointedly, and unmistakably redirected. Whether that’s strategic or simply unconsidered makes it no less significant. The effect is the same.
What Actually Happened
On the Feast of the Ascension, Jonathan Roumie addressed a crowd gathered for Rededicate 250, a patriotic prayer event framed around America’s 250th anniversary. The event was steeped in the language of Christian nationalism: divine covenant, national restoration, the sacred phrase “one nation under God” repeated like a liturgical refrain.
Roumie’s speech was, in many ways, emotionally sincere. He acknowledged his own flaws. He quoted Matthew 11 — “Come to me, all you who are weary” — with evident feeling. He called people to prayer and repentance. He made a genuinely funny joke about fake AI Jesus apps.
But threaded through the devotional warmth was something else: a sustained theological argument that America occupies a special covenantal relationship with God, that national identity under that covenant provides spiritual protection, and that the task before Christians is to restore the nation to divine favor.
This is not a minor doctrinal nuance. It is a direct collision with the teachings of Jesus.
The Theology Jesus Actually Taught
Let’s be precise, because precision matters here.
Jesus lived under Roman occupation in a culture saturated with exactly the kind of religious nationalism on display at Rededicate 250. First-century Jews were deeply invested in the idea of national restoration — divine favor returning to their people, their land, their political identity. It was the defining hope of the era.
Jesus did not deliver it. He redirected it, consistently and sometimes harshly.
“My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) was not a throwaway line. It was a direct rebuke to the framework of religious-national identity that his followers kept trying to press onto him. When crowds wanted to make him a political king, he withdrew. When disciples asked about restoring the kingdom to Israel, he pivoted to mission. When religious leaders invoked their covenant status as protection, he called them a brood of vipers.
Roumie’s speech leans heavily on Psalm 33: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” This is the kind of Old Testament passage that sounds like a divine endorsement of America when stripped of context — and sounds quite different when you read what the prophets did with that same tradition.
Jeremiah watched people invoke the Temple, the covenant, the sacred traditions of Israel as a kind of spiritual insurance policy. His response was not comfort. It was fury: “Do not trust in deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!’” (Jer. 7:4). The prophetic tradition is unambiguous: God is not impressed by nations that claim his name while practicing injustice.
Micah reduced the entire prophetic tradition to three lines: Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)
The speech Roumie gave covers the third. It gestures at the second. The first is almost entirely absent.
The Missing Gospel
Here is what is striking about the speech when you hold it next to the actual Gospels.
Jesus spoke more about money and wealth than about almost any other topic — and almost always as a warning. He spoke constantly about the treatment of the poor, the immigrant, the prisoner, the sick. His most vivid description of final judgment in Matthew 25 has nothing to do with national identity or covenant membership. It has everything to do with whether you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the prisoner, welcomed the stranger.
“Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:45)
That framework — the one Jesus actually used to describe how nations and people would be evaluated — is nowhere in Rededicate 250.
Instead, the speech’s vision of American renewal is largely sentimental: the childhood comfort of “one nation under God,” the hope that these shores may “remain the land of the free and the home of the brave,” the aspiration to be that nation once more.
It is a vision of America as a beloved thing worth restoring. And that affection, in itself, is not the problem. The New Testament does not prohibit civic loyalty — Paul prays for rulers, acknowledges the role of governing authority, and asks Christians to fulfill their obligations as citizens. Loving one’s country, praying for its leaders, or hoping for its moral renewal are not anti-Gospel positions.
Genuine patriotism, in fact, has a straightforward definition that sits comfortably alongside the Gospels: defending the people within your borders from those who would harm them — enemies foreign and domestic, including the abuse of power itself. That version of patriotism — neighbor protection, not power worship — actually rhymes with “love your neighbor as yourself.” It includes the immigrant, the visitor, the stranger inside the gates. It resists anyone, regardless of their flag or their title, who would prey on the vulnerable. Real patriotism, so defined, is not theologically neutral. It has moral content. It demands something.
The problem is the specific move Roumie’s speech makes: from civic affection to covenantal claim. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord is not a prayer that America would become more just or more faithful. It is an assertion that America already occupies — or can re-occupy — a special position in God’s redemptive design. That is the theological step that runs directly into the prophetic tradition, and into Jesus himself. The prophets and the Gospels do not evaluate nations by their patriotic self-understanding. They evaluate them by how they treat the vulnerable. Full stop.
The “Chosen Effect” and Why It Matters More Here
If a random Christian actor delivered this speech, the theological critique would still apply — but the stakes would be lower.
Jonathan Roumie is not a random Christian actor. He is, for a significant portion of the global Christian population, the most emotionally resonant portrayal of Jesus in living memory. The Chosen has been viewed billions of times. It has reached people who hadn’t engaged with Christianity in decades. It has made Jesus feel real to a generation that found church culture alienating.
That is a genuine and significant achievement. It is also precisely what makes this moment so troubling.
Roumie himself acknowledged the tension at the top of his speech:
“God doesn’t need prayers from the flawed human who plays Jesus on TV.”
That’s a healthy disclaimer. But disclaimers don’t undo the reality of how audiences process embodied portrayal. When the voice that says “Come to me, all you who are weary” at a patriotic rally is the same voice millions have heard saying those words as Jesus — the lines collapse. The emotional authority of the role travels with the actor. Angel Studios knows this. That’s why he was invited.
Which raises the harder question: what is Angel Studios doing?
Angel Studios and the Christian Nationalist Turn
The Chosen is produced and distributed by Angel Studios, a faith-based entertainment company that has built its brand on accessible, emotionally resonant Christian content. The studio has been careful, at least publicly, to present The Chosen as transdenominational — a Jesus for everyone.
Rededicate 250 is not transdenominational. It is a patriotic Christian nationalist event, organized around the premise that America has a special covenantal relationship with God that needs to be renewed. That is a specific theological and political position. It is contested by serious theologians. It has a specific demographic and political valence. And it is, as argued above, in direct tension with the teachings of Jesus.
By deploying their most valuable asset — the actor whose face and voice is Jesus for their audience — at this event, Angel Studios has made a choice. Whatever their internal reasoning, the message received is clear: The Chosen’s Jesus is available as a symbol of Christian nationalist politics.
That is a betrayal of the very thing that made The Chosen powerful.
The Jesus of the Gospels was not a symbol of national restoration. He was, in the eyes of the religious and political establishment of his time, a threat to it. He was executed, in part, because the fusion of religious and political power found him dangerous. The irony of using his image to sanctify that same fusion should not be lost on anyone paying attention.
A Note on Sincerity
None of this is an argument that Jonathan Roumie is a bad person, or that his faith is fake, or that The Chosen has no value. He appears to be genuinely devout. The speech is emotionally sincere. The devotional content — the call to prayer, the emphasis on repentance, the invitation to bring burdens to God — reflects real Christian spirituality.
Sincerity is not the question.
The question is whether a person can simultaneously embody the most-watched portrayal of Jesus in modern history and lend that embodiment to a movement that contradicts what Jesus taught — and whether the institution behind him should be held accountable for making that possible.
The answer to both is yes.
What the Gospels Actually Emphasize
It’s worth being direct about the contrast, not as imaginative reconstruction but as straightforward Gospel inventory.
Jesus spoke extensively about immigrants and strangers — not as romantic symbols of national heritage, but as people his followers are commanded to welcome. The stranger appears in the judgment scene of Matthew 25 not as a metaphor but as a test.
Jesus spoke more about wealth and its dangers than almost any other subject. His warnings were not soft. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” is not a gentle suggestion about financial moderation.
Jesus spoke directly about enemies — instructing his followers not to invoke God’s protection against them, but to love them. That teaching was not incidental. It was central and scandalous and repeated.
Jesus warned constantly about public piety performed for audiences. The Sermon on the Mount dedicates substantial attention to the gap between visible religious devotion and the inner life God actually sees.
These are not peripheral themes. They are the spine of the Gospels. And they are largely missing from Rededicate 250 — not because Roumie is cynical, but because the event’s frame actively works against them. Patriotic rallies organized around national restoration have their own structural logic: they celebrate, they unify, they affirm. There have been Christian movements — anti-war traditions, reconciliation movements, communities of conscience — that managed to hold patriotic love and prophetic challenge together. It is not impossible. But it is genuinely hard, and it requires deliberate resistance to the incentives of the format. The structure of a rally like this tends to push “love your enemies” to the margins and center “God is with us.” That gravitational pull is visible throughout the transcript. You cannot easily dwell on wealth’s corrupting power at a celebration of national greatness. You cannot linger on the command to welcome strangers when the emotional frame is restoring what was lost. The frame doesn’t prohibit the content — but it quietly crowds it out.
That Jesus — the one whose teachings keep creating that kind of friction — is the one The Chosen once seemed to be reaching for.
It’s worth asking whether they still are.
If you found this piece valuable, share it with someone wrestling with the same questions. The conversation matters.