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]

Christian Zionism from John Nelson Darby to John Hagee

This is a surprisingly good overview of contemporary "Christian Zionism"" the set of conservative Protestant religious and political ideas that lead to often very uncritical support for the hard-right parties in Israel. And it's from MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) which itself is known for its less-than-critical support for Israeli policies: Mimi Kirk, Countering Christian Zionism in the Age of Trump 08/09/2019.

It focuses in particular on the approach of "the main US Christian Zionist organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI)" founded and led by John Hagee. It also highlights the role of the 19th-century British evangelist John Nelson Darby [1800-1882] in elaborating Christian Zionism as we know it today, and the role of the 1909 Scofield Bible in popularizing it in the US. Somehow Christianity managed to go for 18 1/2 centuries without understanding the Christian Bible as prophesying what today's Christian Zionists see as the End Times and the particularly ghastly fate of Jews in it. Although, as Kirk notes, some "Protestant sects in sixteenth-century Europe held proto-Zionist ideas."

John Nelson Darby

Darby is mainly remembered today for his influence on millennialist End Times thinking among Protestant fundamentalists, George Marsden writes that the term fundamentalism came into usage in the 1920s in the United States to describe "broad united front of the kind of opposition to modernism that characterized" a series of Christian booklets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth by the American Bible League in 1910–15. They advocated a very conservtive reading of the Bible which was very suspicious of 19th century science (Darwinian theories) and critical academic Biblical scholarship. (Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd Edition, 2006)

A focus on End Times theories like Darby's "premillenial dispensationalism" were very much a part of this current of thinking in the 19th century. Marsden explains:

... the millenarian (or dispensational premillennial) movement had strong Calvinistic ties in its American origins. The movement's immediate progenitor was John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), who broke with the Church of Ireland and became the leader of the separatist Plymouth Brethren group. During his later career Darby spent a great deal of time proselytizing in North America. He found relatively little interest there in the new Brethren sect, but remarkable willingness to accept his views and methods of prophetic interpretation.

It's also worth remembering that Darby's influential tendency of Protestant theology was part of an ascetic, fractious Christian religious view. A 19th century sketch of him by George Stokes, "John Nelson Darby Stokes," The Contemporary Review; 07/01/1885, stresses this aspect. Darby was part of the Church of Ireland and was attracted to conservative ecclesiastical and theological "Separatist" ideas of the first quarter of that century that was highly critical of official state church positions, which they saw as too compromised by their need to conform to state requirements." Stokes describes the official Evangelical Church of that time as characterized by an "intense secularism. He writes, "The High Churchmen ... of that generation were simply ultra-Protestants of a political type."

The Brethren group was founded in 1831 and Darby soon became it's main leader. Darby also became "intensely ascetic" and focused on what he took to be the imminent end of the world as prophesied in the Bible:

The overstrained expectation of Christ's speedy personal Advent worked in 1830 the same practical results as they did in the second century with the Montanists, and again about the year 1000 A.n., when men thought the end of the world was surely at hand. ... Darby lived on Calary Bog - a lofty upland a thousand feet over the sea, just beyond the Sugar Loaf mountain-in a peasant's hut. He lived the life of an ancient anchorite, like an Anthony of Egypt, or a St. Kevin of Glendalough, in his own immediate neighbourhood. His raiment was of the meanest kind, his personal appearance neglected; so neglected, indeed, that a gentleman is said to have once flung bim a penny in the streets of Limerick, mistaking him for a beggar; while as regards food, his body seemed almost independent of such a casual consideration. Day and night were devoted to his pastoral work, striving to rouse his highland flock to a sense of the impending Advent. So ascetic, indeed, was his life, so rigorous his self-denial, so unceasing his labours, that his Roman Catholic parishioners concluded that one of the real old saints had risen up again in his person. This asceticism was not confined to Darby. It was a common feature of the movement. [my emphasis]

Stokes also gives a vivid description of the kind of intense sectarianism which characterized the Brethren and its theological milieu:

The year 1848 was marked by a division, which has never since been healed [1885], but has been the cause of as much heartburning and bitterness as any religious feud that ever existed. It has been, indeed, an illustration of the oft-made remark that theological quarrels increase in bitterness in the inverse ratio of the difference between the combatants. ... The Brethren to an outsider appear one in doctrine, yet the hostility between an Ulster Orangeman and the most devoted Ultramontane is nothing as compared to the feeling with which an Exclusive or pure Darbyite now regards a Müllerite or Bethesda adherent of the same party. [my emphasis]

And this description of Darby's later years describe a pretty authoritarian approach:

Those who disagreed with him on any point of doctrine or of discipline, he excommunicated at once, and regarded as outside the covenanted mercies of God. During the later years of his life he lived at the Priory, Islington, which, during the decade between 1870 and 1880, was regarded by his followers as a kind of local Vatican, Thence issued decrees on all topics, demanding instant and unmurmuring obedience. Why, even the very change of a meeting from one locality to another without permission was regarded as an act of carnal self-pleasing and rebellion, and punished as such. And the end of a movement for spiritual independence and in defence of the rights of the individual Christian conscience was a very disappointing one, for it only terminated in the establishment of a crushing and intrusive spiritual tyranny, embracing all the pretensions, but carrying with it none of the antiquity and historic glory which cast a halo round Papal Supremacy. [my emphasis]

One of Darby's Brethren associates and later rivals, that Francis William Newman, went to Iraq as a missionary to Muslims. Like most Christian missionary efforts toward Muslims, it didn't have a great deal of success. He wound up being very impressed with the Islamic faith, which apparently influenced him in reading the Gospel of John in a way that led him to reject the divinity of Christ.