For as long as it has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows–and it has been a while1–I would offer that there has never before been such a strange set as those joined in this year’s Trump campaign for U.S. president. Riding sidecars on Trump’s chariot toward ultimate power are one of history’s most inspiring and loving religious leaders and perhaps the most evil person to darken American politics.
The Bible tells a loosely similar story, but with a twist or two, in 
describing the Fall of Lucifer. Lucifer was once one of God’s most powerful angels, until his lust for worship caused him to rebel against the Creator, resulting in his fall from grace
and eternal life to become the destroyer of worlds. It has been said that Lucifer took at least a third of the angels with him in his rebellion and fall, and that he did so by deceiving them with lies.2
What the Bible does not foretell is that Lucifer ever again joined forces with God or Jesus. His exile was to be in perpetuity. So: How in the world did we reach today’s pairing of this political Odd Couple?
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Perhaps at no other time in our modern history have church and state been so little separated in the U.S. And this despite the national decline in religious affiliation and attendance in recent decades. Prayer has re-entered a number of public schools. Municipalities contest the prohibition of posting the 10 commandments in public buildings. Conservative ministers preach hard and angry political positions from their pulpits.
And religious affiliations correlate with solid support for political parties and their candidates. Among Christians today, 82 percent of white evangelicals and 61 percent of white Catholics support Donald Trump for president in this Tuesday’s election. That professed followers of Jesus’s teachings could support such a man remains at least a partial mystery, but not one having anything to do with the 20 Mysteries of the Catholic rosary. Could there be any greater contradiction in morality than that between Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount–in which he urges as the highest ideals those of love for the other, compassion, and mercy–and the former president’s hateful and dehumanizing rhetoric, his mendacity, and his urge to punish opponents and dominate the land in his narcissistic self-interest?
Believer or not, everyone must ask themselves which of these two visions is most likely to lead to extended human welfare, and which to ever greater human suffering.
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Of course we can understand much of this otherwise mysterious contradiction by noting the qualification of race above. For large majorities of both white evangelicals and Catholics, race has trumped religion. Much as the moon hides the sun in a solar eclipse, these ‘believers’ have been blinded from their creeds by their fear of and even hate for peoples of color as the nation transitions to a minority majority country.
And in accepting the lies and following the dictates of their Chosen false prophet, these religious conservatives have in effect also reversed their traditional support for the country’s military (Trump has characterized the nation’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers”), American police forces (Trump describing his supporters’ Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Police as a “day of love“), and their own children’s futures (in the face of ever more devastating fires, floods, hurricanes, and sea rise, Trump has called climate change “one of the great scams of all time” and promises to undo national climate change policies and to silence science on the issue).
While still fervently claiming Jesus as their lord and savior, they have set his example aside entirely to join Lucifer’s similarly misled fallen angels.
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Adolph Hitler is a more recent addition to the Trump campaign, at least explicitly. He whispered in code in the background during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, but this time around the frenzied former president has brought Hitler into clear focus. He has closely embraced the former führer.
Trump’s supporters–at least the more sophisticated among them–could scarcely have missed his deepening connection with Hitler’s fascism. Four-star Marine General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff in the White House from 2017 to 2019, recently reported that the president more than once said that “Hitler did some good things,” and that he wished he had “German generals” like those who had served Hitler.
While Trump’s campaign has denied Kelly’s statements–as of course it would–Trump’s own words have increasingly betrayed his fondness for Hitler’s deadly brand of fascism. Beginning with his 2015 declaration that he was running for president, he has falsely labeled undocumented non-white immigrants as murderers, rapists and drug dealers, then elevated his hate speech over the years. In the current campaign, he has labeled these immigrants of color as “animals” and–in the words used by Hitler to justify the extermination of millions of Jews–has said repeatedly that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
He has similarly dehumanized Americans of all colors who politically oppose him as “vermin” who are out “to destroy America.” He has promised prosecutorial vengeance against these “enemies” if he is returned to the presidency.
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In Trump’s aping of Hitler’s deadly language, there is a deep historic irony. As the Yale law professor James Q. Whitman shows in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model,3 Hitler and his Nazi
government had taken inspiration in the 1930s from America’s racist laws that enshrined Jim Crow segregation, racially restricted immigration, and that in many states criminalized interracial marriage (antimiscegenation laws). For the Nazis these American laws served as models for the two key German laws designed to protect the racial superiority and domination of the Aryan race.
These Nuremberg Laws,4 issued in 1935, were the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. The first of these laws restricted German citizenship only to persons who were “of German or related blood.” As such, the law came to deny political rights first to Jews, then soon also to blacks and Gypsies. The second of these laws was designed to protect the purity of Aryan blood by banning intermarriages and sexual relations between pure-blooded Germans and the nation’s non-citizens. These laws–and similar rules that later issued from the Reich–not only created a permanent underclass in the country, they also made way for the Holocaust that followed.
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The irony, of course, is that almost 90 years later Trump comes to envy Hitler and his generals, and thus to reverse the direction of racist inspiration. As noted, he dehumanizes people of color and political opponents alike, referring to them frequently as vermin, thugs, and animals. When he portrays his political opposition and the media as “enemies of the people,” he marks them as both despised and disposable. He says out loud that he will have “his” Department of Justice prosecute his opponents. He threatens that in a second term as president, he will turn both the police and the national military against protestors, presumably converting these forces into the sort of “public” servants he can finally respect. They will finally be his servants. He imagines a fascistic society in which he is the One Ruler, the Chosen One.
And his party, the former party of Lincoln, supports him in this assault on American democracy, one rooted in corruption, racism, and deeply flawed faith. Religion and politics have never made good bedfellows.
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- The American writer Charles Dudley Warner offered this statement to the world in his 1870 book, My Summer in a Garden.[↩]
- See “What Was the Fall of Satan in the Bible,” in The Collector.[↩]
- Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Princeton University Press, 2017.[↩]
- So named because they were announced first at a Nazi rally in the German city of Nuremberg.[↩]
I agree on all points, Peter.
And let’s not forget what happened in the year 13 of the Common Era — Jesus had his bar-mitzvah. Most people in the fray like to ignore this.
Moreover, you mention the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places. Let’s also remember that the efforts to do so, and the attendant legal shenanigans and so on, rarely if ever confront the inconvenient dilemma that there are at least three extant iterations of the Ten Commandments, and they are different! One is Jewish; one is Protestant; and one is Catholic. So, which one?
And finally, there is the conundrum of the Trump Commandments: “Thou Shalt Not! But, Hey, I Shall!”