What Did Trump Say About the Bible

In extreme circumstances like the present, people go back to their deep beliefs and look into their souls. The Democratic Party, by way of the Joe Biden campaign, has announced that the upcoming Presidential election will be "a battle for the soul of America." But, in religious terms, what kind of a soul will that be? America remains a Christian-majority nation, and evangelicals are an important and dependable part of President Trump's base; part of his "Make America Great Again" theme has been his in-your-face cheerleading for Christianity. Although Trump has lived more or less the opposite of a Christian life, many evangelicals see him as their heaven-sent ally, an instance of God's well-known habit of working in mysterious ways.

A faithful churchgoer he's not. After he held up a Bible for his violence-enabled photo op in Lafayette Square, a reporter asked him, "Is that your Bible?" He replied, "It's a Bible." If, as he seemed to be saying (unsurprisingly), this particular Bible did not belong to him, its actual owner remained unknown. Ivanka Trump had carried it in a designer handbag during the walk from the White House to St. John's Church and had given it to her father so that he could pose with it, but apparently it wasn't hers, either. After the photo op, nobody stepped forward to claim this Bible as his or her own and take pride in its having participated in an important moment in history.

Of course, there are millions of Bibles out there that don't technically belong to anyone. Maybe this was just a copy that the White House had on hand. In courtrooms, for the swearing-in of witnesses, there are Bibles that are the general property of the court. At a witness's request, a court might provide a copy of the Torah instead; in places with more diversity, courts might also offer Qurans and Bhagavad Gitas. The option of not swearing on any text at all exists, too. Atheists, for example, don't have to raise their right hands and swear on a hardback of Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion" but may simply affirm that what they say will be the truth. Some judges make a point of telling jurors to remember that a witness who chooses to affirm rather than swear is no less likely to be truthful.

For Trump's purposes in Lafayette Square, however, only a Bible would do, because he was once again making a claim about America and Christianity. His senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis later told the Washington Post, "For me, as a constitutional law attorney, as an American, and as a Christian—all those things came together for me in that moment." In America's past existential battles, both sides were emphatically Christian. During the Civil War, Confederate troops prayed in revival meetings, sometimes led by their generals, and Union Army regiments sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as they marched. Nowadays, only the Trump side is hugging the faith to its bosom, having trained it for combat during the so-called War on Christmas, in which Trump seems to have subdued the enemy to his satisfaction. Late in 2017, when announcing his huge tax cut for corporations and the rich, he said, "We will give the American people a big, beautiful Christmas present," thus combining Father and Son—God and Money—with the Holy Spirit, which would be himself. Meanwhile, the anti-Trump side remains formally ungirded in holy armor, maybe so as not to leave anybody out. It's a big country, after all, and the Trump-supporting evangelicals are outnumbered by the many millions of Americans who aren't.

Imagine that, in previous struggles, only the wrong side—the demonstrably wrong side, as revealed by history—had been loudly and avowedly Christian. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, the wrong side, would have presented himself as the Christian champion, and Abraham Lincoln, whose position was considerably closer to the teachings of Christ, would have stayed disinterestedly and tolerantly silent. Lincoln was not a Bible-thumper, as Bible-brandishers used to be called in an age before Lafayette Square, but he wrote and spoke and thought in terms of Scripture. In his Second Inaugural Address, near the Civil War's end, he framed the two warring sides like this: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

Then he went on, with that moral clarity combined with dry frontier wit which made him not only our greatest President but one of our greatest writers: "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged."

At that moment, he had reason to hope that the war would soon end in victory, but he took nothing for granted. It could go on for a long time:

Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

The struggle did go on for a long time after the war ended, and it continues, but not as Lincoln envisioned it. His speech urged compassion for the other side but said nothing about what the people formerly held in slavery would do. As it turned out, former combatants on both sides found that they had a common enthusiasm for white supremacy, postbellum, and wounds were duly bound. When asked how the freedmen and -women were going to get along without property or education or prospects, Lincoln answered, "Root," abbreviating a rural expression for getting by in tough circumstances: "Root, hog, or die." The terrorism and lies of white supremacy and a hundred and fifty-five years of "root" have brought us to the present day.

The civil-rights movement of the nineteen-fifties and sixties would not have happened without the black church in America and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. A person of any faith, or none at all, could be excused for wishing that King had somehow miraculously returned to thunder at Trump when he posed with the Bible, as you might wish that your school principal had arrived when a playground bully was smacking you around. The Bible talks about justice, and faith, and humility, and love—what obvious things this President obliges us to assert and reassert!—and a number of dissenting voices pointed that out after the photo op. Biden said that Trump should not just brandish the Bible—he should open it and read it.

What Did Trump Say About the Bible

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trump-and-uses-and-misuses-of-the-bible

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