From Trump To $JESUS Coin: Spreading The Theology Of Crypto
President Donald Trump’s promise at the Bitcoin 2024 conference that the United States would become the “crypto capital of the planet” was old news by the time he was sworn in this past January. What got less attention was a nearby screening of the documentary “God Bless Bitcoin,” which promoters argued was another way for technology to “serve God better.”
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Inevitably with crypto, a scam is never far away. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 21, a pastor from Michigan, Lorenzo Sewell, launched a self-titled memecoin to piggyback off his appearance at the event. After telling his followers it was their religious duty to invest, he was quickly accused of being a swindler. The coin’s value remained stagnant.
A Denver-based pastor, Eli Regalado, had also started selling a currency to his flock, INDXcoin, that turned out to be worthless. He insisted he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” It came alongside news that the pastor of a church in Washington, Francier Obando Pinillo, had been convicted of running a crypto scam between 2021 and 2023 — a venture he claimed had come to him, Jacob’s Ladder-style, in a dream.
Furthermore, Brazil, New Zealand and Samoa have already seen pastors launching crypto scams. Professor William Schultz of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School warned that this capacity to lure in the vulnerable could become even more global.
There’s no doubt that like a religion, giving value to crypto requires faith. Those evangelizing for it certainly seem to be on a moral mission. For now, they seem unstoppable — and there’s more than the hard-earned savings of believers at stake.
“Not every megachurch pastor or crypto entrepreneur is a scammer, but there’s enough of them out there to make it inevitable. Look at Nigeria, South Korea — anywhere where the churches are large institutions with insular communities that trust each other. It’s easy to prey on that,” he said.
Yet that doesn’t seem to deter true believers. A glance at X is enough to demonstrate how much crypto has become not just another spurious get-rich-quick scheme, but a whole way of life — one that for some is intrinsically bound up with their faith.
One enthusiast described crypto in prophetic terms, calling the $JESUS coin “the most positive movement for humanity the world has ever seen.” Another lauded the evangelistic potential of $Saint, a coin launched to mark the canonization of the Gen Z Catholic icon Carlo Acutis.
There’s even an online community called Crypto Church, which besieges visitors with kitschy images of Jesus wearing sunglasses and brandishing what look like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), in a way that would make any medieval peddler of indulgences blush.
For those on the outside, it seems like a bizarre departure from orthodoxy. Crypto speculation is, after all, somewhat close to gambling. Focus on the Family, that bastion of America’s old-school religious right, issued sceptical guidance for anyone seeing it as a short-cut to fathomless riches, citing Proverbs 28:20 (“whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished”).
But what about the charge of idolatry? It’s difficult not to see the flashing fields of gold on the Crypto Church’s website and be strongly reminded of the beguiling and glitzy bovine worshipped by the Israelites in the Old Testament. Professor Schultz argued that for libertarian-leaning Christians obsessed with the end times, crypto makes perfect theological, and monetary, sense.
“There’s the apocalyptic element — crypto allows freedom from what they see as a dictatorial, satanic central government,” he said. “It’s not so much about speeding up the Rapture; the Antichrist will persecute true Christians through the power of the financial system. It’s about protecting themselves, their family and their possessions during the end times.”
He pointed to the role of figures like Cindy Jacobs, a self-declared ‘prayer warrior’ who leans heavily into warnings about the evils of centralised government to get Christians interested in crypto.
For Christians less prone to millenarianism, does crypto hold any appeal?
Despite sharing a billing with Trump last year, the makers of the documentary ‘God Bless Bitcoin’ have tried to engage with more progressive concerns. They claim to have brought bitcoin experts and interfaith leaders together to discuss how crypto can liberate us from an unjust monetary system that is “intimately connected to the military industrial complex and the propagation of war” and erodes the savings of the hard-working poor and middle classes.
Yet there’s no denying the even darker political undercurrents fed by crypto. In the U.K., Christianity’s role in the rise of the political far right has mostly been in the foreground, but it remains an important facet. According to Dr. William Allchorn, Senior Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and a specialist in radical-right movements, such groups use crucifixes and Bible verses to “tap into mainstream patriotic sentiments about faith and flag and family.”
“They see Christianity as a way to save the nation,” he added.
He said groups like the Patriotic Alternative (promoters of the ‘white genocide’ myth) are unhierarchical and use crypto wallets to offer members access to their leadership. In the process, they diversify their funding sources in a way that’s harder for governments to monitor.
What unites Christian crypto-apologists on both sides of the pond is a sense of persecution. A break from fiat currencies represents the powerless slaying of the ultimate false godhead - the state.
“It’s part of a broader anti-mainstream and anti-government sentiment that wants to take things back into the hands of ordinary people,” Allchorn said.
Given how swathes of Europe are falling to a Christian-tinged right, crypto can clearly do more than swindle the gullible. It can play a sinister role in the erosion of social cohesion, all in the name of religion.
And while it might be too glib to call crypto a religion, Schultz highlights that crypto’s biggest prophets are undoubtedly looking at the spread of Christianity as a source of inspiration:
“They don’t see themselves as making a new religion,” he added. “They ask themselves what they can learn from the successful spread of religion.”
Maddy Fry is the editor of the Westminster Abbey Review magazine and the founder of U2 and Us on Substack. She writes about politics, religion and pop culture, with bylines in The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Time, The New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She also enjoys drinking stout, listening to U2 and telling you why you are wrong about the “Star Wars” sequels.