The recent news story about Donald Trump signing Bibles led to the whole range of response from religious people, from those who PTL (praise the liar) to those who condemn it as heretical. I am on the side of those who say it's heretical, or would be if any more thought went into it than it does when Trump does his zig-zag scrawl on some MAGA item. I wonder if the Orchids of Asia madame got him to sign her bejeweled MAGA bag. I wonder if she's got a Bible signed by Trump in it.
Some claim that presidents signing Bibles is an old custom, though the examples I saw, such as FDR signing the family Bible used to swear him in are hardly the same thing as what Trump did. I mean, I suspect FDR may have had some familiarity with the book, as I've mentioned before, when Trump revisited the Presbyterian Church he was confirmed in as a teenager, he had to ask the pastor if Presbyterians are Christians? Trump is a full blown Pope of Mammon, he is the first overtly pagan "president" as Christian as the sleaziest Las Vegas style show.
What is remarkable about the nominally Christian support that Trump has is that it proves how entirely phony so much of Christianity in the United States is. There is no way you can serve Mammon and serve the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, not to mention Moses and Jesus, the extent to which someone serves Mammon is a fairly used measure of how much they don't serve God.
As I've been studying Hans Kung's work this year, here is a relevant passage from page 619 of Does God Exist:
Faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob means the fall of both ancient and modern gods. It prevents both the deification of natural powers and the turning of political powers and rulers into idols.
If there is one thing that is obvious among the nominally Christian and other members of the Trump cult it is that he is just such an idol. Such an idol as is shown in his most depraved and cruel and anti-Christian acts. Just a few particulars:
- his purposely cruel detention of children after he has ripped them away from their parents,
- his incitement to violence and his peddling the "goodness" of neo-Nazis and fascists and white supremacists,
- his cruel inflictions on the already destitute and those who are made destitute by his policies,
- his robbery of the poor and middle class for his fellow billionaires and multi-millionaires,
- his sexual and other debauchery,
none of that has been enough to overcome the idolatry of TV and radio and mega-church "pastors" and the Bible-thumping racists and TV trained-envious paranoiacs and the marginally rational.
There is no way that it is compatible to support Trump and to support The Law, the Prophets and The Gospel. To support Trump is a definitive discrediting of the Christianity of those who do so. To call them Christians is to discredit Christianity and to aid their lies. There is no reason for mainstream Christians to maintain that policy of niceness when it means the discrediting of the Gospel, The Prophets and The Law.
The one-God faith of course does not involve a social program, but it has incisive social consequences. It dethrones the divine world powers in favor of the one true God. In primitive societies, it means the radical repudiation of the deified natural forces in the ever-recurring cosmic dying and coming-to-be. But even in our apparently atheistic age, it means a radical repudiation of the many gods without divine titles that are worshiped by men today: of all earthly agencies with divine functions, on which man thinks that everything depends, in which he hopes and which he fears more than anything else in the world. In all of which, it is of no importance whether modern man - sometimes a monotheist, at other times a polytheist - addresses his
Holy God, we praise thy name;
Lord of All, we bow before thee*
to the great God Mammon or the great God Sex, or the great God Power, or the great God Science, the great God Nation or the great God Party.. The one-God faith is utterly opposed to any quasi-religion. It throws down all false Gods.
To that list I would add the great God Fame, the great God Celebrity, the great God, TV, the great God, Media, the great God Hollywood. Donald Trump is the son of those gods, the gods that are, actually worshiped by such who call themselves Christians while idolizing Trump. I take their asking Trump to sign those books as evidence of that idolatry, not at all dissimilar from the idolatry of other despots in the modern age, especially in those officially secular-atheist states.
A while back I said that one of the reasons I thought "mainstream" churches were in trouble was that they either were embarrassed to discuss their boldest claims, to own their boldest convictions, such as the meaning of The Incarnation. I think another reason they are in trouble is that out of feelings of gentility and niceness and a pose of fairness of the free-speechy kind, they don't call out this kind of idolatry in those pseudo-Christian churches and sects that practice it. It is one of the things which, especially as the Kavanaugh hearings forced me to look at it with more focus, the affluent prep-elite University style of Catholicism, I find ever more disgusting about the church to which I am still a member of, though I now find the order of Roman Catholic Women Priests** more credible than the Vatican and the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. I think we're way overdue some real old-fashioned fights on these matters and the longer we put them off the worse it will get.
* I should point out that Kung's use of that text is not intended to be impious but to point out how profound that idolatry is.
** Looking at Bridget Mary's Blog, I was interested to see that the noted Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan celebrated Mass with her community the other day. He gave an interesting homily.
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