Easter is supposed to be a season of hope and new life. This year, I find myself instead, like much of the world, in grief and perhaps even despair.

There’s personal financial anxiety, for starters, as a 70-year-old with superannuation watching the daily volatility of markets – trillions of dollars wiped away (even if some of that has been restored now). It’s possible we are on the precipice of recession and a global trade war, thanks to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But that’s not what tempts me to despair. There are a couple of other reasons for that.

First, it’s the complete destruction of USAid – the more than $40 billion withdrawn from the world’s poor. This is the program that supplied the drugs for HIV prevention and treatment; as a result, an estimated 1,192,400 people, many in Africa, will die this year who otherwise would not have. (That’s not a typo.) Over the next five years, another 10 million people will contract HIV.

Another half a million will die needlessly from the withdrawal of the USAid vaccine program, and nearly half a million others in the next year without American funding for food aid. After the earthquake in Myanmar, Trump said the US would help – but he has sacked all USAid workers in the country.

I have seen these things with my own eyes. I was in Uganda and Kenya in February and saw despairing clinicians in slum clinics turn people away because the HIV, malaria, and TB treatments had disappeared from the shelves thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in dismantling USAid. The irony would be comical were it not so grotesque.

The second source of my despair is the fact that evangelicals in the US, whose vote delivered Trump his victory, have been largely silent in the face of this death sentence for so many of the world’s poor. We are talking here about “pro-life” Republican evangelicals.

As I have written before, the fact that so many Christians support Trump has left me feeling like I have lost my tribe. It is hard for me to fathom how people of my faith could celebrate the harm being done to humanity.

I have been trying to remind US Christians of the contrast between Elon Musk, who said to podcaster Joe Rogan recently that the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy, and Jesus – who gave us the story of the Good Samaritan, and said blessed are the poor, and that when you feed and clothe the least of these, you do that to me. Who is right? Musk, a man worth more than $300 billion who reportedly gives nothing to the world’s poor, or Jesus?

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and executed by the Nazis just weeks before the end of World War II, put it: “Your yes to God requires your no to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor.”