Of God and Donald Trump

I received an email a few days ago from a friend who wrote in part:

“I’ve only spoken to two or three friends who I know voted Republican.  I don’t understand them, but I care about them.  When I say that I am grieving the results of the election, their response has been, ‘Don’t worry, God is in control.’  What is a response to that?”

They are wrong, my friend!  Dead wrong!  God is not in control.  Donald Trump is in control.

Christianity teaches that God gave people dominion over the Earth, and now We the People have elected to pass that control on to Trump – control of our government, anyway.  Your friends are placing their faith in Trump’s version of religion, which is a hypocritical self-serving version of Christianity that is no Christianity at all.

Trump knows nothing about Christianity.  He has often boasted of his religious credentials, but he has none.  Remember when he said the Bible is his favorite book, then famously could not name a favorite verse?   Or when he referred to Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians”?  Second Corinthians was published about 50 years after Jesus died, and no church since then has ever referred to it as “Two Corinthians”.  Only ignorant Trump has.

He once told an Iowa evangelical gathering, and later repeated on CNN, that he had never asked God for forgiveness — a central tenet of the Christian faith.  And the Presbyterian church he says he attends in Manhattan has said he never attends or participates in any of its programs.

A lot of Trump’s followers believe God protected Trump when that bullet nicked his ear and Trump has never denied it, but that is just plain down airheaded bull — feathers.

For one thing, it implies that God chose to save Trump after allowing Trump’s mentor, Adolf Hitler, to cause the murder of 6 million Jews and half-million gypsies in the 1930s and ‘40s.  It also implies that God doesn’t care enough to protect those thousands of children who are starving in Gaza today.  Knowing MAGA Christians, it would not surprise me to learn they believe God allowed all that because those victims were merely Jews and Muslims, not good Christians like themselves.  There are numberless other examples.

Not one of the world’s major religions – Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Hinduism – believes in a God who would protect me but not you.  Although they disagree on a lot – Hinduism believes in a million gods where the others believe in one – they all are in lockstep when it comes to the heart and soul of religion: Put others above yourself.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  However you want to say it.

Trump and his brand of “Christians” are the anathema of that.  Trump, instead of putting others first, is famous for putting himself first, almost to the point that he considers himself the Christ when, if anything, he is the antichrist.  I am not judging him.  I am only observing him.

Even Trump’s gilded “God Bless the USA” Bible is unholy.  The Rev. Loran Livingston, an evangelical pastor in Charlotte, N.C., drew national attention when he gave a sermon denouncing it as “blasphemous” and “disgusting” for tying the Bible to American politics.

Others have called the Bible pernicious, sacrilegious, heresy, and a violation of the Ten Commandments because it takes God’s name in vain.

But it’s far worse than that. Trump uses his Bible purely to profiteer, and he does it in full view. He had the Bibles printed in China (can you believe that?  China’s the country that the he has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices! ),and he paid less than three dollars apiece for then.  Then he sells them for $60 apiece.  That’s a markup of two thousand percent.  Compare that with what legitimate publishers’ charge: about fifteen percent for hardcover books, half that for trade paperbacks, and five percent for mass-market paperback sales.

It gets even worse.  Much worse.  This “God Bless the USA Bible”, which was inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood’s popular song of the same name, comes complete with the text of the King James Version of the Bible along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance.  But Trump uses the secular section to lie by omission.  He leaves out the Constitution’s 11th through 27th amendments, thus eliminating the provisions that abolished slavery, granted women and Black people the right to vote, and limited presidents to serving only two terms. In other words, Trump cut out all the “equal protection” amendments that his supporters might not like, and the “presidential term limits” amendments that Trump might not like his supporters to know to  know about.

Yet another problem with the God Bless the USA Bible is its poor physical construction.  YouTube Bible reviewer Tim Wildsmith’s review of it described it as “a really cheaply made Bible that did not cost them very much money to make.” Wildsmith found sticky pages that ripped when he tried to separate them, and said the letters were packed too tightly to easily read.

But that’s the version of the Bible and that’s the version of the Constitution that Trump wants his followers to know, and unfortunately they’re gobbling it up.

This is all about Christian nationalism, which has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with power politics.  Christian nationalism is the belief that America is a Christian nation so the American government must be a Christian government, and the  hell with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and all the rest.  Their religions and thoughts do not matter.

In a way, my friend’s friends are right.  God is in control – but that’s true only if you believe in the god that Donald Trump believes in. Its name is Donald Trump.

But not to worry.  All false Messiahs soon fall.