Michael Coren is an Anglican priest and author. His latest book is The Rebel Christ.
It’s never a good idea to try to understand a world drenched in religiosity through the filter of the secular. It’s one of the reasons Western intelligence services, with all of their resources, got Iraq and Afghanistan so painfully wrong. For myriad people, God is much more important than traditional politics.
This also applies to the phenomenon of Donald Trump, a man who baffled the conservative as well as liberal establishment, and now has a stranglehold over Republican politics. Indict him, condemn him, expose him, even incarcerate him, and enough Americans will remain vehemently loyal to maintain him as a dominant figure.
There are millions of people with no particular faith who lionize the man, but the hardcore, indefatigable fanatics are overwhelmingly Christian. More than 80 per cent of white evangelicals support Mr. Trump, and a good number of conservative Catholics. Which may, and should, come as a surprise in that the founder of Christianity was a 1st-century Jewish radical born to poor parents living in an occupied country, later surrounding himself with the powerless and rejected, warning of the dangers of wealth, legalism, and power, and speaking of love, forgiveness, social justice, and grace. But then we’d be naïve, and historically illiterate, to believe that 2,000 years of Christians have always listened to the original source.
With Trump Christians, it’s more specific and arguably less inconsistent than sheer hypocrisy. They have a rigid ideology regarding their country as being chosen by God, set apart with a special purpose and vocation. It’s very much a 17th-century phenomenon, a mingling of Calvinistic predestination and raw nationalism. The centuries have rather perverted the original Puritan idea, however, expunging much of its sense of community and good works. What we now see is almost post-Christian, even ironically pagan. The trappings of faith wrapped around fear-based reaction. This fear is blended with warped nostalgia, and the sacraments of the bunker. As mainstream Christianity has increasingly embraced reason and dialogue, the Christian right has done the precise opposite.
The tenets are extraordinary. There is, they believe, a cosmic and human battle taking place between forces not always fully understood – hence the embrace of conspiracies with no evidence. The “non-Christian” powers in the country want to limit religious freedom, impose state power, and break up the traditional family. This last belief is behind the roaring homophobia, the sometimes-violent opposition to women’s choices, and now the obsession with labelling opponents as pedophiles.
There’s a constant eschatological theme too, a belief that the end of the world is close, where the “remnant” – those believers who reject anything progressive in Christian thinking – will be saved, and the rest of us doomed to Armageddon. So, elections are about far more than changing government policies, and concern the future of people’s souls.
There are plenty of Republican politicians who pay lip service to some of this, many of them fellow evangelicals, but Mr. Trump will say pretty much whatever is required. Yet he’s known to be a philanderer and a liar, and was always pro-choice and socially permissive. Such is the hysteria of his fundamentalist devotees that they will simply deny this, or claim that flawed people can be used by God for noble purposes.
They point to the examples of King Cyrus II and Emperor Constantine. The former was the despot who allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, the latter the Caesar who in the early 4th century gave his support to Christianity after a lifetime of war and slaughter. This may sound bizarre but I assure you it’s all over pro-Trump Christian media platforms. As for Joe Biden and his genuine commitment to Roman Catholicism, or Barack Obama’s thoughtful and wise Christianity, these men and all like them are dismissed as compromisers and the perennial social media accusation of “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
The more Donald Trump is condemned or prosecuted, the more obvious it is to the zealots that he’s a victim of great persecution, with the legal system as culpable as the governing and media classes. It’s hard enough to believe that a whale swallowed Jonah; these people will believe that Jonah swallowed the whale if Mr. Trump tells them so!
But it’s no laughing matter. The storming of the Capitol building led to mayhem and death, and could easily have been far worse. The relative moderates in the Republican party are despairing and impotent, reasonable Christians have been silenced, and the more extreme the action or statement, the greater the appeal.
The late U.S. senator Barry Goldwater once said, “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem … these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.”
And we once considered him a dangerous right-winger.