Trump’s Bible, Part Three

This essay is a follow-up to Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting and Trump’s Bible, Part Two

Howard Thurman

Growing up in White Protestant Christianity, I remember hearing how Jesus never preached against Roman occupation of Israel. This seemed strange, my teachers said, because Jewish leaders of the First Century CE definitely unified around opposition to Roman dominion. But Jesus never said “boo” against Rome, which proved—proved I say!—that Christianity is apolitical, and Jesus wanted to save souls, not start a revolution.

In adulthood, I recognized this belief as specious. As Howard Thurman writes, Jesus wasn’t a Roman citizen, and therefore couldn’t speak freely under imperial dominion. Then as now, empires crushed agitators, and though violent imperial death was probably Jesus’ original intention, he couldn’t risk it happening ahead of schedule. The Apostle Paul, who was a citizen, felt no such circumspection, when he wrote to the Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

My teachers hand-waved the statements against “this dark world” by claiming it meant either demonic powers or “secularism.” But in context, Paul clearly means political, economic, and military forces which dominated ordinary residents’ occupied lives. We fight the forces of poverty, conquest, and subjugation, the same soul-destroying powers which Dr. King called “the giant triplets”: racism, materialism, and militarism.

Early Christianity flourished behind this revolutionary ideology. Where kingdoms brought war, Christians brought meaning. Where empires fled from turmoil, Christians ran into the worst domains, carrying blankets and cold water for the afflicted. Where Rome reduced women entirely to their childbearing capacity, the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla record that women embraced Christianity because it gave them individual, autonomous meaning.

James H. Cone

Then the Constantinian Shift happened. Organized Christianity threw its support behind the Emperor, and reorganized itself to support imperial values. It became the very things its founders inveighed against: imperialist, hierarchical, phallocentric, middle class, and violent. When Christian authority became insufficient to support the putrefying empire, popes and patriarchs stepped into that role, investing kings with earthly authority and blessing campaigns of military conquest.

Yet speaking broadly of “Christianity” overlooks the fissures within. While Romanized Christianity survived, through its alliances with kings—and, not coincidentally, through its near-monopoly on written texts—dissident groups nevertheless arose to challenge human political authority, and also the Church that clothed human kingdoms in religious vestments. Groups like the Albigensians, Bogomils, Waldensians, and Dulcenaeans threatened Roman hegemony, and Rome crushed them violently.

This pattern repeats throughout religious history. Prophetic voices which arise in opposition to state power, eventually ally themselves with human states. Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah railed against kings, before their books got sewn into the state religion. The Buddha rejected his (half-legendary) princely upbringing, but Emperor Ashoka granted Buddhism imperial authority. Luther and Calvin skipped the interregnum and raced straight into relationship with princes.

Italian semiologist Umberto Eco, though an atheist himself, explicated this pattern cleanly. His authorial self-insert, the skeptical Brother William of Baskerville, explained that in attempting to purge Catholicism of heresies, the Church became exactly what the heretics accused: imperial, power-mad, and brutal. Dissident groups that survived did so by compromising their founding principles; those that couldn’t compromise, died in fire.

Donald Trump so badly wants us to see him as
religious that he shared this AI image which,
if you look closely, shows him having six fingers
on his right hand (source)

Which returns us to Donald Trump. His revolting “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible,” apparently actually compiled by Lee Greenwood, represents yet another attempt to sacralize state power. Those Christians who benefit from the existing social order, mostly White, middle-class, and heterosexual, will gobble this trifle up eagerly, despite whether they actually buy the Bible. Because for them, as James Cone writes, Jesus came to bless the old order.

Meanwhile, Christian dissidents who oppose this beatification of power go largely unheard. Like the Cathars and Dulcenaeans which Eco describes, they provide a welcoming refuge for spiritually-minded citizens who reject the power structure; but, like their forebears, they lack necessary access to challenge the state. They provide localized, narrow relief, but are unlikely to change the religious landscape, unless, like Luther, they become willing to partner with princes.

If Trump wins reelection this November, Christian history will certainly remember him alongside the Emperor Constantine. Christians, or anyway White middle-class Christians, want the power which potentates can distribute, and they’re willing to squander their unique spiritual claims to achieve it. We Christians who disavow such Whiteness and conservatism, don’t know how to organize to resist this historic sell-out.

And, like the Bogomils, we’re on track to be crushed by “the powers of this dark world.”