How Can True Evangelical Christians Glorify the Godless Trump?
This article first appeared on the History News Network.
This
Advent season, while watching Donald Trump in front of a garishly
green-and-red banner which proclaims “Make America Great Again,” take
the opportunity to reflect on the Faustian bargain which allowed
conservative evangelical Christians to “Keep Christ in Christmas” while
seemingly divorcing Christianity from Christ.
That Republican
supply side economics, exemplified by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s
cruel tax “reform,” contradicts Matthew 5:3 is clear. That Trump’s
draconian immigration policy, which new reports indicate could now
involve splitting families apart, violates the essence of Exodus 22:21
is obvious.
And
it shouldn’t have to be said that the new nationalism, this new
fascism, with its “blood and soil” metaphysic, stands in opposition to
the sublime universalism of Galatians 3:28.
For those 81 percent
of white evangelicals who voted for Trump, and more troublingly for the
profoundly inhumane, greedy, wrathful ideology that he embodies, and who
have seemingly forgotten their scripture, I have another passage to
remind them of: Matthew 4:10.
Following the dark Adversary who
took Christ up “an exceeding high mountain, and shewith him all the
kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All
these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”
And
Christ, choosing to follow the small, humble, yet sacred path, rejected
the temptations of worldly power declaring, “Get thee hence, Satan: for
it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt
thou serve.”
America’s conservative evangelicals, however, have
taken up that diabolical offer. Witness the self-debasement of a man
like neurosurgeon and current H.U.D. secretary Ben Carson offering
prayers for Trump on December 19, with the president “quipping” to the
press that they “need the prayer more than I do…. Maybe a good solid
prayer and they’ll be honest, Ben, is that possible?”
Or when at
that same meeting Vice-President Mike Pence (one for whom we are
perennially reminded of his piety while he seemingly forgets Matthew
6:6) offered a master class in saccharine sycophancy when he grovelled
to Trump with, “Mr. President, I'll end where I began and just tell you,
I want to thank you, Mr. President. I want to thank you for speaking on
behalf of and fighting every day for forgotten men and women of
America… the forgotten men and women of America are forgotten no more,
and we are making America great again.”
Or if those examples
condemn the powerful at the expense of regular evangelicals, consider
that 80 percent of white, self-identified evangelicals in Alabama voted
for the disgraced and disgraceful losing pedophile Roy Moore.
Presiding
over this nightmare of abandoned principles (or perhaps more
disturbingly the embrace of principles that were always there) is Trump
himself, the philandering, vulgar, immoral New York real-estate
developer of seemingly no authentic faith who promised evangelicals that
“I am your voice.”
The Public Religion Research Institute
reported that over the past five years the “percentage of white
evangelical Protestants who said that a politician who commits an
immoral act in their personal life could still behave ethically shot up
from 30 to 72 percent. The percentage saying such a politician could not
serve ethically plunged from 63 to 20 percent.”
The difference,
it would seem, is a certain Fifth Avenue resident who promised them that
“If I become president, we're gonna be saying Merry Christmas at every
store .... You can leave happy holidays at the corner."
What
easily bought faith! In 2017, all it takes for many right-wing
Christians is to be taken to the top floor of Trump Tower, be shown all
the kingdoms of the world, and they’ll gladly prostrate themselves
before an idol for a bit of temporal power.
Christianity, by its
own definition, is a countercultural faith, one which stands in
opposition to the things of this world while still being in this world.
But humans being humans the history of the religion is replete with
moments where Augustine’s City of Man has overwhelmed the City of God in
the heart of the believer.
From Constantine’s usurpation of the
Roman Church to Henry VIII’s appropriation of ecclesiastical power,
Christians have been more than willing to sell their allegiance for
thirty pieces of silver. Trumpian Christianity is but one chapter in a
long lineage of hypocritical capitulation of principle to sovereigns in
the name of worldly power.
A supreme irony, for one of the most
important aspects of the Constitutional principle of disestablishment is
that it preserved the independence and sanctity of religious practice
from the machinations of a meddling state.
But while there is a
long custom of right-wing evangelicals bellyaching about their perceived
oppression (when such calls for “religious freedom” are often really
just a justification for denying the rights of others), there are now no
compunctions about jumping into bed with the most manifestly
irreligious of presidents in modern history, for whom the only scripture
is that of Norman Vincent Peale’s prosperity gospel combined with an
endlessly renewable faith in himself, regardless of what reality
dictates.
There is an irony in all of this. Since the resurgence
of politicized evangelical Christianity with the ascendency of Ronald
Reagan, many apocalyptic minded conservative Christians made a sort of
prophetic parlor game out of conjecturing who the potential anti-Christ
could be.
Figures from Hal Lindsey, to Pat Robertson, Oral
Roberts, and Jerry Falwell often fingered world leaders or liberal
politicians as being in league with Satan. An irony, since if the
anti-Christ is supposed to be a manipulative, powerful, smooth-talking
demagogue with the ability to sever people from their most deeply held
beliefs who would be a better candidate than the seemingly
indestructible Trump?
Well, I don’t believe in a literal
anti-Christ, and to accuse Trump of being one gives the president far
too much credit. At his core he is simply a consummate narcissist with
little intelligence and less curiosity, one who has somehow become the
most powerful man in the world. And that’s certainly dangerous enough
without invoking anything supernatural.
Still, it’s surprising
that evangelical Christians, who for years preached about such a figure,
seem to lack the self-awareness to identify something so anti-Christian
in Trump himself. Or worse yet, they certainly recognize it, but don’t
care.
I don’t wish to engage the “No True Scotsman” fallacy;
conservative Christians presumably arrived at their faith and their
conclusions for their own reasons, and the fact that I disagree with
them on a litany of issues theological and political, from abortion to
taxes, does not invalidate the legitimacy of their own faith.
But
there is something undeniably strange and supremely hypocritical in
seeing the embarrassing spectacle of religious leaders bow to such a
spiritually illiterate man, a moral midget.
Jerry Falwell Jr.,
cognizant enough of the disjuncture between personal piety and support
of Trump but apparently not cognizant enough to avoid uttering inanities
like the following, has compared the president to King David. That is
to say that he acknowledges Trump’s copious personal failings (and
steadfast refusals at contrition for any of them) but sees the president
as a tool of the Lord meant to enact Christian policy, and so it
behooves evangelicals to support him.
One imagines that whatever
makes it easier for the good Rev. Falwell to sleep better at night, but
perhaps he is the sort of man whose sleep is untroubled, for hypocrisy
has a handy ability to cleanse the conscience.
Currently
evangelical Christianity in the United States is certainly still
classifiable as a flavor of orthodox Nicene Christianity. But it’s not
like there isn’t precedent for the church to contort itself to the
heresies of a totalitarian regime.
Consider the promulgation of an
Aryan “Positive Christianity” in the Third Reich, in which all Jewish
elements of the faith were expunged, and the gospels rejected in favor
of a deadly and noxious blood-and-soil ideology, where the “Fuehrer is
the herald of a new revelation.”
This consolidation of all the
Protestant denominations of Germany featured no Apostle’s Creed, or
Nicaean, rather only allegiance to the state, a complete capitulation to
the Prince of this World and an ascent to the temptation upon that
desert mountain top.
We must remind ourselves of such compromises,
bargains, and contracts as a perennial threat to the inner life of the
faithful. While there is certainly no corollary to such a phenomenon in
the United States today – yet – one must be vigilant and on guard to
those like Rev. Falwell who see no blasphemy in comparing a president to
the Anointed One.
Trump is arguably the logical culmination of
some strains of right-wing evangelical Christianity in America, from the
political theology of dominionism to the hermeneutics of
presuppositional apologetics, dogmas which see no inconsistency to
rendering all to a Caesar whom they have declared to be a Christ.
We may have yet to see the arrival in the United States of a type of powerful, theocratic, fascistic Protestant
Falangism enabled by the opportunism of a Trump, and which makes the traditional Christian Right look positively liberal.
And
with the global rise of the new nationalism there is a disturbing
degree of collaboration between rightest religion and racist ideology,
from the Orthodox mysticisms of those in the Kremlin who follow the
crackpot historian
Aleksandr Dugin
to Stephen Bannon who wishes to preserve his understanding of
Christendom not because all of us are children of God but because only
some of us are white.
Christianity, when allied to the powers of
the world, has a way of promulgating distinctly anti-Christian beliefs.
Do not read me as hyperbolic, the threat is global, powerful,
interconnected, and real.
When 60,000 Polish fascists marched in
November, promoting a Poland without Muslims and Jews, they chanted “We
want God” – a phrase from a speech delivered in Warsaw by Trump earlier
that year.
Nazi “Positive” Christianity was countered by the
resistance of the Confessing Church, the underground network of pastors
and parishioners who operated in opposition to the glorification of
worldly power as represented by the regime.
One of the greatest of
souls and theological intellects was the Confessing Church minister
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis at
Flossenbürg Concentration Camp in 1945.
Witness
to the rise of compromised fascist Christianity in his own country, he
aptly diagnosed the equivocations and capitulations some Christians were
willing to make in order to sup at the table of power, but he also
understood that from a theological perspective there should be nothing
surprising about this.
He explained that for “evil to be disguised
as light… is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional
ethical concepts, while for the Christian who based his life on the
Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.”
But
even while acknowledging the fundamental wickedness of that evil,
Bonhoeffer stood in opposition to it, and lived a life testament to that
gospel.
So, this Advent, if you’re looking for a bit of the
promise of that first Christmas consider this: whenever some persons
trade their faith for the treasures of this world, elsewhere a remnant
of true faith always seemingly endures. A faith that answers power with
mercy, hate with love, a shout with a whispered prayer.
It’s
written that nobody can serve two masters, even as many evangelicals
seem content to try and serve God, Mammon, and darker gods aside. But a
compromised faith, a tainted faith, an implicated faith can only
flourish for so long, and genuine faith can never be extinguished.
Writer
and scholar Burke Gerstenschlager writes for our current moment that
“In the midst of Propaganda and Gospel, we must resist … with love where
there is hate. Resist with kindness where there is abandonment. Resist
with grace where there is cruelty. Resist with justice where there is
impunity. Resist with knowledge where there is ignorance. Resist with
truth where there are lies. Advent is our season.”
For if
Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church provide us any Advent succor it’s
this: even at the darkest of hours when faith seems all but extinguished
a faint light can still glimmer so that we may see.
And to those
implicated, those collaborators, those who’ve traded faith for power,
and those who chant “We want God” – consider that you should be careful
what you wish for. God may be precisely what we get.
Ed Simon is the associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books,
a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books.
