PITTSBURGH (TNS) — More than half the nation’s Republicans see Donald Trump as a “person of faith,” meaning some kind of serious Christian, which strikes me, to be honest, as preposterous.
And worse than preposterous: dangerous.
It expresses a huge error in discernment among a large and politically powerful group, giving them a definite answer to the perilous question of who is on God’s side. Or, as it is asked in American politics: Whose side is God on?
I think the answer is always “everyone’s and no one’s.” What that means in any political system takes a lot of careful thought — and, the religious person would add, prayer and practice. You have to doing the thing seriously to have any idea how to apply it.
Whose side is God on? We are definitely not good enough nor wise enough to answer “Mine.” But that is what this sadly widespread belief in Trump’s Christianity encourages, and that’s why it’s dangerous.
In saying “preposterous,” I’m not making any judgment about the status of Trump’s soul before God. That’s a mystery to any human observer, because we have no idea at all why he is the way he is. I might not have done as well, and you might not have done as well, with whatever conditions warped a little boy growing up in Queens into Donald Trump.
We can’t know why he is who he is, but we can know who he is by the evidence, and whatever he is, he is not a man of faith. We must apply what we find to evaluating him as a politician, and his followers must apply it to how much trust they can place in him.
Trump shows no interest at all in Christianity — his is some kind of Protestant version — except as a political aid. He’s happy to have a bunch of prominent preachers tell their followers he’s a man of God. He’ll stand still in the Oval Office with his head bowed while they pray for him, and (crucially) people get it on film. He’s happy to endorse a couple issues religious people care about that fit with what he cares about.
I think, for what it’s worth, that he didn’t appoint the three Supreme Court justices he did because he thought they would vote against Roe v. Wade, but because he thought they would vote on other issues as he wanted them to. How often, if ever, has he spoken of the unborn as a pro-lifer naturally would? The nominations got him a twofer, court decisions he wanted and happy voters he wanted to please.
Trump shows no evidence that he cares about the practice of the faith, that he ever prays, reads his Bible, does anything because he thinks his religion requires it — that he even has a religion that might require anything of him. You can find no evidence in all his talks since he first began running for president that Christianity has formed his mind in any way.
He does not speak as a man who has any clue about intrinsic and universal human dignity. About kindness and forgiveness. About mercy.
You may remember the stunt he pulled with the Bible during the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C., walking from the White House to St. John’s Church, just to stand in front of the church sign and hold up a Bible, after a couple minutes in which he and his aides tried to figure out what to do with it. He then gave a short talk all about making America great again with no religious content whatsoever. Then he walked back to the White House.
Who knows what he was doing, except blasphemously using the Bible as political prop. His evangelical supporters pride themselves on being “Bible Christians,” and this bothered them not at all.
Far from being “a man of faith,” Trump’s a textbook example of what some writers call the “post-Christian” or “post-religious” man. He’s unreligious in a way no serious atheist can be, because the atheist cares about the ultimate questions. He’s in the same universe of thought as the religious, only with a different answer than theirs.
As far as I can tell, Donald Trump doesn’t consider that there are any ultimate questions.
Having said all this, I don’t hold Trump’s lack of actual religion against him, as a person or politician. We don’t know why people believe what they believe. Christianity teaches that belief is a gift that we don’t deserve.
And it complicates the matter by claiming that people can truly believe without knowing it. (Narnia readers will remember Emeth in “The Last Battle.”) The New Testament writers rank love of others much higher than explicit belief.
Donald Trump is who Donald Trump is. He’s not the devil. I respect people who vote for him because they think he’s the best candidate or because they have to, given the alternatives. Electoral politics is a messy thing.
But for heaven’s sake, don’t claim that he’s a religious man. And don’t use that as a reason to feel God is on your side.
(David Mills is the associate editorial page editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, dmills@post-gazette.com.)
