Saturday, February 2, 2019

How do Christian fundamentalists justify the notion that God wants Donald Trump to be President?

This column by Holly Meyer looks at the superficial use of the Bible by fundamentalist Christian supporters of the xenophobic Trump-Pence Administration (Sarah Huckabee Sanders says God wanted Trump to be president. She's not the only one who believes that. Nashville Tennessean 01/31/2019). One common claim is that God wanted Trump to be President and therefore supporting Trump is the same as following God's will.
Hudnut-Beumler, an American religious history professor at Vanderbilt University ... [explains] ...

It is rooted in an interpretation of Romans 13 that claims Christians need to obey leaders because God put them in positions of power for a purpose, Hudnut-Beumler said. In that section of the Bible, the Apostle Paul is explaining how to handle an oppressive, external authority, he said.

"Contemporary evangelicals, because they are so biblically driven, when they find a leader they particularly like, they love to go to Romans 13 in thinking about why people should obey or why God has perhaps raised up this leader in this time and what providential role this leader, in this case President Trump, should have," Hudnut-Beumler said.
Hudnut-Beumler gives a good, concise explanation there of how a very selective use of Christian Scripture can be used to say that leaders the Christians quoting it support were put there by God but somehow God demands that they work to oust those who they don't support.

I wouldn't want to promote this kind of argument to the level of theology. Because it's a theological illiterate approach. It's cherry-picking Bible verses for simple political propaganda purposes.

A more responsible Christian view would be to see the US as a democracy in which citizens have a responsibility to choose between less-than-godlike candidates. And that God expects Christians to try seriously to make responsible choices.

Given the shortage of divine qualities among both voters and candidates, presumably God isn‘t entirely thrilled with either the elected officials or the very human voters who choose them.

James Madison in a much-quoted passage from Federalist No. 51 defending the Montesquian notion of separation of powers referred to the shortage of divine qualities among rulers. (It was common to use "men" to refer to people collectively at that time. Or maybe he really was limiting these observations to the male gender.)
... the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
I suppose I should add that village atheists, and often more highbrow ones, would agree with Christian fundamentalists, while inverting the argument to say that because Christians must believe the fundamentalist version, even though in the real world most do not, it shows how completely mistaken the entirety of the Christian religion must be. Although it's also fashionable these days for star American atheists to use Islamic fundamentalism to make the same argument. Which finds them arguing about the evils of Islam in the same way Christian fundamentalists do.

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