Trump's Christian Right enablers

Trump's "very fine people" comment about the murderous Nazis in Charlottesville 2017 turned out to be one of the best predictors of what was to come. And as of today, he's still President.

This is an interesting report on the Sunday messages from pro-sedition pastors on the (ongoing?) insurrection: 'Wake Up, America!': What Trump-supporting Evangelical Leaders Told Their Flocks Sunday. Haaretz/AP 01/12/2021. Also at Yahoo! News 01/10/2021.

It's an authoritarian cocktail not restrained by facts or consistency.: we need to have "unity" with violent insurrectionists who attempted to murder Members of Congress less than a week ago; hey, so there were a few crazies cuttin' up, what's the big deal?; antifa was behind it all; and, we looove cops, yeehaw!!

Antifa was behind it, it's all Joe Biden's fault, and Blue Lives Matter - especially blue lives cops who colluded with the Capitol invasion and participated directly in it. If you can handle thinking in a muddle like that, you can support the coup attempt at the Capitol last Wendesday and oppose it at the same time! 

This article reminded me of another Sinclair Lewis story, this one from his 1943 novel Gideon Planish.about a rightwing preacher, who Lewis used to illustrate "Research." The example, set in the late 1930s, is the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery. Apparently, he had some problems with his formal credentials, because the narrator refers to him as the "ex-Reverend."

The first step in Research is to gather a bunch of stories from newspapers about Brother Bittery and then write him to get some of his pamphlets. Then you have a few people go listen to his speeches live. With this procedure, it becomes well established that:

... Brother Bittery is a flannel-mouthed rabble-rouser who used to be charged not only with stealing the contents of the church poor-box, but of taking the box itself home to keep radishes in, and who at present if he isn't on the pay-roll of all the Fascists, is a bad collector.

After considering the matter for a couple of years, a Congressional committee proceeds to investigation, establishing for the record that "Mr. Bittery used to be a hell-fire preacher and is now a hell-fire Fascist."

More Research ensues, with scholars applying themselves to the phenomenon, which reveals "that Mr. Bittery used to favor lynching agnostics and now favors lynching socialists."

And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them.

Rev. Bittery never seems to go away.

Michael Mooney profiled one of today's leading Rev. Bitterys. Robert Jeffress, for the Texas Monthly in Trump’s Apostle Aug 2019:

He is also known, of course, as one of the president’s most avid and outspoken advocates. While other evangelical leaders were slow to get behind Trump—James Dobson, for example, wondered about Trump’s religiosity—Jeffress campaigned with him before the 2016 primaries even started, before Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio flamed out. If some evangelicals who now back Trump fret that they’ve entered into a Faustian bargain, for Jeffress it’s a wholehearted embrace. It’s become one of the most fascinating symbiotic relationships in modern politics: the pastor gets a national platform for his message and a leader who appoints conservative judges who will in turn restrict access to abortion; the president gets the support of evangelical voters he needs to win reelection, along with an energetic and effective promoter who can explain or excuse all manner of polarizing behavior.

The Christian Right evolved a Biblical theory to justify their idolatrous support of seditionist Donald Trump. A theory which from a Christian theological viewpoint looks even more blasphemous today than it did a week ago. Hamid Dabashi provided a description of it in Is Trump a King Cyrus or a Queen Esther? Aljazeera 04/11/2019:

Back in 2016, during a televised conversation on whether Trump has a “biblical mandate” to be a president, evangelical thinker Lance Wallnau opined: “America’s going to have a challenge […] With Trump, I believe we have a Cyrus to navigate through the storm.”

Then just a few weeks ago, during his visit to Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked: “Could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?” To which he responded: “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible.”

Thamar Gindin gives a quirky scholarly take on the Cyrus-Esther narrative at the Atlantic Council website, Which biblical Iranian character are you? (2019).

The Cyrus narrative was already used by Christian Right Trump supporters during the 2016 campaign. (Rebecca Cusey, Trump as God's instrument: A fairy tale of biblical proportions The Hill 10/11/2016)

The Christian Right's political theology is heavily influenced by Christian Zionism, which adopts a reading of Biblical prophecy popularized by the 19th-century sect leader Charles Nelson Darby that gives Israel a central role in the End of the World, which they expect relatively soon. In practice, in US politics that means they support hawkish policies favored by neoconservative militarists in the US and by rightwing politicians in Israel. There's also a strong anti-Semitic component of Christian Zionism, though rhetorically it's "philo-Semitic," which contributes to its adherents openness to conspiracy theories.

There is a huge literature now - scholarly, journalistic, and popular - on Christian Zionism. A recent scholarly analysis is from Sean Durbin, "From King Cyrus to Queen Esther: Christian Zionists’ discursive construction of Donald Trump as God’s instrument" Critical Research on Religion 8:2 (2020). He makes a couple of central arguments about Christian Zionism. One is that "religious rhetoric that represents Trump as God’s instrument works because it fits within a preexisting binary apocalyptic worldview that circulates widely in American evangelical culture, and the actions of the Trump administration comport with this worldview."

His second central argument is that the Christian Zionist narrative "functions to advance and naturalize themes of Christian nationalism, American exceptionalism and empire." This means that Christian Zionists viewed Barack Obama as an enemy of God and a partisan of Satan: "the rhetorical construction of the Obama administration as anti-Israel and therefore demonic, contributed to an environment in which the reversal of Obama-era policies are easily constituted as acts of divine will."

Although Durbin doesn't stress it in that article, the American Christian Zionist worldview also has a big white supremacist element. Because especially after the Six-Day War of 1967, Southern segregationists began imagining Israel as a nation of white people successfully lording it over an inferior dark-skinned population.

Christian Zionism provides a framework for authoritarian rule, a framework that created the conditions for Trumpism in addition to Trump utilizing their beliefs for his own ends. But even if his Christian idolators turn on him after he leaves office, they will be in search of another authoritarian to succeed him. Trumpism doesn't end with the Trump Presidency this month. As Durbin observes, during the Obama-Biden Administration, the spent "eight years framing the Obama administration as anti-Israel, and thus anti-American and anti-God." Including presenting the nuclear arms-controls agreement with Iran "as evidence that Obama was in league with Satan."

There is no small amount of cynical hucksterism to the Christian Right appeals, following as they do in the tradition of the fictional Rev. Bittery and his real-life parallels.

But because they are an influential and well-financed political faction, it's worth taking note of this paragraph in which Durbin recaps the rhetorical strategy involving Israel, Iran, and American power that the Christian Right used against the Obama-Biden Administration:

During the eight years that spanned the Obama administration’s two terms, his critics and opponents spent a considerable amount of time and energy demonizing him as anti- Israel and anti-Semitic, due to his stilted relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as his pursuit and successful passage of the Iran Nuclear Deal. The latter was construed as foolish diplomacy when what was really needed was raw military might. For Christian Zionists influenced by dispensational theology these critiques were injected with even greater urgency due to the theological lens through which they were interpreted. For them, Obama was quite literally demonized as an agent of Satan attempting to destroy Israel, inviting divine judgement on America in return. Within this cultural context the conditions to constitute Trump as God’s instrument were easily established. Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, his withdrawal from the Iranian Nuclear deal, verbal sparring with Iran, and, most recently, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, have provided opportunities for Christian Zionists to constitute him as God’s instrument. For these Christian Zionists, God is using Trump to return America to its global position of power, and save Jews from destruction, thus paving the way for Jesus’ return—all of which hinge on the fact they are framed as reversals of the previous administrations’ intentions. [my emphasis]