• Latest
  • Trending
  • All
  • News
  • Lifestyle
What Trump Taught America About the Bible thumbnail

What Trump Taught America About the Bible

September 21, 2020
Melania Trump Roasted for Tweeting About the ‘Legacy’ of Her Anti-Bullying Platform thumbnail

Melania Trump Roasted for Tweeting About the ‘Legacy’ of Her Anti-Bullying Platform

January 16, 2021
How Zombie Movies Prepared You for the COVID-19 Pandemic thumbnail

How Zombie Movies Prepared You for the COVID-19 Pandemic

January 16, 2021
Five things you need to know about on the markets this week – Biden, big banks and central banks, bond yields, and Bitcoin thumbnail

Five things you need to know about on the markets this week – Biden, big banks and central banks, bond yields, and Bitcoin

January 16, 2021
Paris Fashion Week Goes Digital For Haute Couture Season thumbnail

Paris Fashion Week Goes Digital For Haute Couture Season

January 16, 2021
Trump blocks banks from limiting loans to gun and oil companies thumbnail

Trump blocks banks from limiting loans to gun and oil companies

January 16, 2021
Trump supporters among those seeking Jan. 20 protest permits thumbnail

Trump supporters among those seeking Jan. 20 protest permits

January 16, 2021
American trustbusters force Visa to back off Plaid thumbnail

American trustbusters force Visa to back off Plaid

January 16, 2021
How the GOP Fell in Love With Cancel Culture thumbnail

How the GOP Fell in Love With Cancel Culture

January 15, 2021
‘A Fireable Offense.’ Law Enforcement Agencies Grapple With Police Officers’ Involvement in U.S. Capitol Riots thumbnail

‘A Fireable Offense.’ Law Enforcement Agencies Grapple With Police Officers’ Involvement in U.S. Capitol Riots

January 15, 2021
What we know about potential armed protests ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration thumbnail

What we know about potential armed protests ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration

January 15, 2021
Groups ask court to restore protections for US gray wolves thumbnail

Groups ask court to restore protections for US gray wolves

January 15, 2021
Analysis: Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue package offers bridge for hard-hit economy thumbnail

Analysis: Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package offers bridge for hard-hit economy

January 15, 2021
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
  • Donate
Sunday, January 17, 2021
41 °f
Orleans
39 ° Mon
32 ° Tue
29 ° Wed
27 ° Thu
  • Login
  • Register
FREE Cape Cod News
  • Home
  • News
    • Cape Cod News
    • Cape Cod Covid-19
    • Breaking News
    • Cape Cod Weather
    • Storm Watch
    • Environment
    • Tech
  • U.S.
  • Politics
  • Business
    • Real Estate
  • World
  • Entertainment
  • Lifestyle
  • Photos
    • Orleans
    • Eastham
    • Wellfleet
    • Truro
    • Provincetown
    • Brewster
    • Chatham
  • Videos
No Result
View All Result
Free Cape Cod News
No Result
View All Result
Home Opinion

What Trump Taught America About the Bible

FREE Cape Cod News by FREE Cape Cod News
September 21, 2020
in Opinion
Reading Time: 6min read
0
What Trump Taught America About the Bible thumbnail
638
SHARES
1.4k
VIEWS
Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Five years ago this week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hit a snag. The second Republican primary debate had not gone well, and he was taking so much flak for failing to correct an Islamophobic supporter at a rally in New Hampshire that he canceled an event in South Carolina scheduled for the next day. In just 72 hours, he seemed to go from dominant front-runner to an amateur making rookie mistakes. Heading to Iowa on September 19 for a meeting of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, where every major Republican candidate was making an appearance, he apparently decided to try something new.

“I brought my Bible,” he said to the audience of conservative Christians, waving a faded blue hardcover embossed with the words Donald Trump as he took the podium. “See? I’m better than you thought.” In case his intended message was too subtle, he made it plain a few minutes later. “I’m a Christian,” he said. “Do you believe me?”

Such an obvious ploy seemed unlikely to work. He grinned as he lifted his Bible overhead, looking uncharacteristically sheepish, almost acknowledging the absurdity of it—“the religious equivalent,” CNN commentator Errol Louis noted at the time, “of going to an Iowa farmer in some overalls and some brand new boots.” Taking the stage after Trump, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal tore into his GOP primary rival’s attempt to use holy writ as a shibboleth. “The reality of Donald Trump is that he’s a narcissist. He believes in nothing but himself,” Jindal said. “Folks, he hasn’t read the Bible, you know he hasn’t read the Bible. He only reads books he’s in.”

That both Jindal and Trump received hearty applause suggested a rift in the room that would not soon heal. And yet, somehow it did—thanks perhaps to these remarkable moments when Trump, with a wink, played the part of a man of God, and conservative Christians decided to play along.

Since that day in 2015—which seems to have been Trump’s first public use of the Bible—his relationship to the potent, contentious religious symbol has evolved from smirking, half-hearted displays of feigned piety to grave rituals designed to feed the devotion of his base. As he has repeated the scripture-waving act—a week later at the Values Voters Summit, then in a video thanking evangelicals for their support in January 2016, and most recently in June, when police teargassed protesters outside the White House so he could pose in front of a nearby church—it has grown darker, while its broader significance has become more clear.

Just as the Bible his mother gave him is imprinted with his name, Trump has left his mark on a strain of American Christianity, but in doing so he has revealed something that has been part of the faith all along.

Throughout his campaign and early in his presidency, the unflappable support of many religious voters for an outwardly irreligious and lascivious politician confounded many in Washington and the media. Though no longer a surprise, this support is commonly assumed to be rooted in simple pragmatism or cynicism. But in that otherwise empty gesture five years ago, Trump stumbled onto something evangelicals and others have long demonstrated but don’t often acknowledge: Americans have always been open to remaking God in their image, reframing tradition to fit individual needs and contemporary concerns. In his accidental embodiment of the latent flexibility of even the strictest of faiths, Trump’s treatment of religion is not an aberration, but the norm.


The president’s level of interest in the actual text of the book he has often called his favorite has never been much in doubt. When asked to name a beloved biblical verse in 2015, he punted. “Look, the Bible means a lot to me,” he said, “but I don’t want to get into specifics.”

Through much of the last five years, the specifics have been left largely to Vice President Mike Pence, who raised the hackles of some and the goose bumps of others last month when he blended the New Testament and patriotism in his address to the Republication National Convention. “Let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory,” he said, substituting the Star-Spangled Banner for Jesus in a reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Even in the evangelical fold, some pastors cried foul. “Vice President Pence came dangerously close to blasphemy by literally replacing Christ with the American flag in this speech,” Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Karen Swallow Prior told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “We cannot rewrite God’s word.”

In fact, history suggests that using the Bible this way is both thoroughly Christian and thoroughly American. At least since John Winthrop borrowed a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount to say the Massachusetts Bay Colony should be like a “city upon a hill,” scripture has been used as a lens on the American experience and vice versa. The words have always mattered less than what we say about them, raw material used to craft notions of the Bible that best suit our needs.

Thomas Jefferson took this idea literally. Going through the four gospels line by line to remove parts he felt could not be supported by reason, he cut away the virgin birth, miracles like turning water into wine, and even the resurrection. He called what remained The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, better known now as the Jefferson Bible.

In his way, Trump might be seen as part of this tradition of radically revising scripture, reducing it to the parts that seem to matter most in a particular place and time—reducing it, in this case, until only the notion of it remains. Trump doesn’t want to get into specifics because he doesn’t know them, as his much-derided “Two Corinthians” remark showed. For the most part, whenever he has appeared with the good book, it has remained resolutely closed. When he signed Bibles at a Baptist church in Alabama last year, his Sharpie did not make it past the front cover. As he held a Bible aloft in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in June, he turned it over in his hands, looking for a moment like he was trying to find the “on” button. The few times he has opened it before an audience, he has turned to the same page: the one that shows where his mother wrote his address when he was a boy.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Trump’s religiosity or lack thereof. In a perfect world, what he believes or does not believe would have no bearing on how he does his job or his prospects for reelection. Yet it is significant nonetheless because it lays bare a hidden truth about Christianity in America. The Bible is a powerful talisman for the majority of Americans, but Trump’s successful use of it these past five years suggests that, to many, it is only that: a symbol to be wielded; a book whose content matters less than the one holding it; an expression of tribal identity as much as creed.

Through his ability to harness that symbol, Trump may have inadvertently created a Bible even more daring than Jefferson’s—one with only the cover remaining.

Tags: massachusettsopinionreligion

FREE Digital Newspaper Subscription!
Sign up for your free digital subscription. The FREE Cape Cod News

Unsubscribe
FREE Cape Cod News

FREE Cape Cod News

Free Cape Cod News is what's happening in the Cape Cod, U.S and World & what people are talking about right now. Local newspaper. Stay in the know. Subscribe to get notified about our latest news.

Related Posts

Dr. Lance Dodes warns we aren't rid of Trump yet: He "will continue to have no conscience" thumbnail
Opinion

Dr. Lance Dodes warns we aren’t rid of Trump yet: He “will continue to have no conscience”

by FREE Cape Cod News
January 15, 2021
Why Republicans Still Shouldn’t Join an Impeachment Effort thumbnail
Opinion

Why Republicans Still Shouldn’t Join an Impeachment Effort

by FREE Cape Cod News
January 13, 2021
What Would Statehood for Washington, D.C. Mean? thumbnail
Opinion

What Would Statehood for Washington, D.C. Mean?

by FREE Cape Cod News
January 8, 2021
Column: As tempting as it will be to ignore him, here's why Trump will make news after leaving office thumbnail
Opinion

Column: As tempting as it will be to ignore him, here’s why Trump will make news after leaving office

by FREE Cape Cod News
January 5, 2021
Load More
Please login to join discussion

Follow Us on Twitter

FREE Cape Cod News - Your source for local Cape Cod news, latest breaking U.S. and World news. Every day, all day. Subscribe for your favorite categories.

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
Orleans Cape Cod. FREE Cape Cod News.

Coyote spotted on Nauset Beach in Cape Cod

January 14, 2021
Trump blocks banks from limiting loans to gun and oil companies thumbnail

Trump blocks banks from limiting loans to gun and oil companies

January 16, 2021
Paris Fashion Week Goes Digital For Haute Couture Season thumbnail

Paris Fashion Week Goes Digital For Haute Couture Season

January 16, 2021
Melania Trump Roasted for Tweeting About the ‘Legacy’ of Her Anti-Bullying Platform thumbnail

Melania Trump Roasted for Tweeting About the ‘Legacy’ of Her Anti-Bullying Platform

January 16, 2021
How Zombie Movies Prepared You for the COVID-19 Pandemic thumbnail

How Zombie Movies Prepared You for the COVID-19 Pandemic

January 16, 2021
Five things you need to know about on the markets this week – Biden, big banks and central banks, bond yields, and Bitcoin thumbnail

Five things you need to know about on the markets this week – Biden, big banks and central banks, bond yields, and Bitcoin

January 16, 2021
Support Local News, Make a Donation Support Local News, Make a Donation Support Local News, Make a Donation

FREE Cape Cod News On Twitter

Today’s News

  • Melania Trump Roasted for Tweeting About the ‘Legacy’ of Her Anti-Bullying Platform January 16, 2021
  • How Zombie Movies Prepared You for the COVID-19 Pandemic January 16, 2021
  • Five things you need to know about on the markets this week – Biden, big banks and central banks, bond yields, and Bitcoin January 16, 2021
  • Paris Fashion Week Goes Digital For Haute Couture Season January 16, 2021
  • Trump blocks banks from limiting loans to gun and oil companies January 16, 2021
FREE Cape Cod News

Copyright © 2020 Free Cape Cod News

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
  • Donate

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • Cape Cod News
    • Cape Cod Covid-19
    • Breaking News
    • Cape Cod Weather
    • Storm Watch
    • Environment
    • Tech
  • U.S.
  • Politics
  • Business
    • Real Estate
  • World
  • Entertainment
  • Lifestyle
  • Photos
    • Orleans
    • Eastham
    • Wellfleet
    • Truro
    • Provincetown
    • Brewster
    • Chatham
  • Videos
  • Login
  • Sign Up

Copyright © 2020 Free Cape Cod News

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Add New Playlist