Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world.

Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on the problem at college campuses, which constitutes an incomplete diagnosis. It allows Trump to ignore his own complicity in unleashing the worst wave of anti-Jewish sentiment in generations.

In his first administration, Trump provided rhetorical cover for supporters who blared hateful sentiments—those “very fine people,” Kanye West, and others. This time, he’s placing them in the line of presidential succession. If confirmed, this crew would comprise the highest-ranking collection of White House anti-Semites in generations.

Take Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. He is a fierce opponent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would curtail federal funding for institutions of higher education that fail to address the hatred of Jews when it flourishes on their campuses. There are principled reasons for rejecting the bill. But in the course of arguing against it, Gaetz revealed himself. He asserted that the legislation’s definition of anti-Semitism would penalize the belief that the Jews killed Jesus. This wasn’t a point Gaetz made in the spirit of protecting free speech. He fervently believes it himself. “The Bible is clear. There is no myth or controversy on this,” he posted on X. This is the canard from which the whole Western tradition of anti-Semitism flows, a belief officially repudiated by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council nearly 60 years ago.

And it wasn’t a stray expression. In 2018, Gaetz invited Charles Johnson, a notorious figure on the alt-right, to attend the State of the Union address as his guest. Johnson is a textbook example of a Holocaust denier. He insists that only 250,000 Jews died—and only of typhus—during World War II. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, he wrote that he agreed with a commenter “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.” When confronted with Johnson’s record, Gaetz admitted that he hadn’t properly vetted Johnson before extending him an invitation. Even so, he told Fox Business that Johnson is “not a holocaust denier.” That defense, given all the evidence about Johnson presented to him, is tantamount to an endorsement.

The essence of conspiracism is the description of the hidden hand, the ubiquity of all-powerful evildoers. That is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overriding intellectual habit. He believes that the CIA killed his uncle, and he attributes autism to vaccines. In 2023, he was caught on video suggesting that COVID-19 might be a bioweapon. Espousing such a theory should be disqualifying for the job of running America’s public-health system. But he went further. He said that the disease was designed to attack Caucasians and Black people. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (In case it needs saying, this is false.) As a well-practiced conspiracist, he knew to append his theory with a disclaimer, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” as if he were merely asking an innocent question. And when confronted with his own words, he denied any ill intent: “I haven’t said an anti-Semitic word in my life.”

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

But his insinuation echoed the medieval Christian libel that Jews had poisoned the wells of Europe, unleashing the Black Death. Kennedy’s winking accusation also mimics a strain of white-supremacist pseudoscience, which asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are a distinct race from Caucasians. According to this bizarre, and bizarrely prevalent, theory, that’s what makes Jews so pernicious: They can pass for white people while conspiring to undermine them.

Not so long ago, these sorts of comments would have rendered a nominee unconfirmable—or at least would have necessitated an excruciating apology tour. But anti-Semitism is no longer taboo. And it’s telling that Trump has adopted Elon Musk as a primary adviser, because Musk is a chief culprit in the lifting of that taboo.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he reversed a ban imposed by the company’s previous regime that kept anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers off the platform. Under his ownership, anti-Jewish voices became unavoidable fixtures on the site, broadcasting their bigoted theories without any fear of consequences.

One reason they have little to fear is that Musk has displayed sympathy for their worldview. Like them, he harps on the wickedness of George Soros, whom he once likened to the comic supervillain Magneto, a mutant who plots to wipe out humanity. (Like Soros, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor.) This comparison almost explicitly admits its exaggeration of Jewish nefariousness. And if the thrust of his sentiments wasn’t clear enough, he emphatically endorsed a tweet claiming that “Jewish communities have been pushing … dialectal hatred against whites.”

For a time, Musk refuted his critics by smearing them. He accused the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s leading Jewish civil-rights group, of orchestrating a campaign to destroy him. Eventually, to fend off an advertiser boycott, he apologized, visited Auschwitz, and called himself “aspirationally Jewish.”

The presence of these conspiracists doesn’t suggest that Trump will pursue policies that provoke Jewish suffering. His support for Israel might even win him the approval of a growing segment of organized Jewry. Instead, the danger posed by his appointees is that their mere presence in high office will make American anti-Semitism even more permissible; they will make conspiracies about Jews socially acceptable. Indeed, that might already have happened. Trump just proposed the most anti-Semitic Cabinet in recent history, and that fact has barely elicited a peep.

My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.