Christianity doesn't need Donald Trump's protection
He's doing a pretty good job tarnishing the faith though.
There's a famous passage in 1 Corinthians, one that you've likely heard at a wedding you've been to. It goes like this:
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
I really like this verse, and I think it’s too bad it just gets relegated to the context of romantic love today, because that’s not really what this about. Love here is one of the core aspects of God, as we are reminded in 1 John, and for Paul, who wrote this letter, it is an aspect of God we are called to imitate and to participate in everyday, in all moments of our life. Love is the central paradigm of Christian life, and here in this passage, Paul states unequivocally what it looks like to live with love: patience, kindness, humility, joy, endurance, goodness, truthfulness.
I thought about this verse this morning when I read about Trump’s new order creating a task force to fight “anti-Christian bias.” He made this declaration at that great idolatrous gathering, the National Prayer Breakfast. Apparently, Trump’s new White House Faith Office, headed by prosperity gospel televangelist Paula White, has convinced him that not only is Christianity under attack here in America (it’s not), but that it requires federal protection (it doesn’t.) This verse popped into mind because I thought about the profoundly unchristian voices driving this initiative, people like Paula White, and Charlie Kirk, among others. These are the people driving Trump to issue a call to “bring God back” (did God leave? Does God come at Trump’s beck and call?) and to use the power of the federal government to go after people who take issue with White and Kirk’s brand of un-Biblical heresy and false teachings.
I think about what the imitation of love calls us to do, and I just have a really hard time imagining that it wants us to wield state power to brashly and hubristically assert Christian dominance over others. I have a hard time imagining Paul exhorting us to trumpet our supposed “persecutions” and to make ourselves public victims of “anti-Christian bias.” I can’t imagine the spirit of love leading actual Christians to demonize those who believe differently, look different, or pray differently. I know, for a fact, that God doesn’t want us wielding power as a cudgel against immigrants, or religious minorities, or in order to wage war on Gaza or Panama or Greenland or whoever the Christians nationalists have in their crosshairs today.
This order against “anti-Christian bias” is anti-Christian in and of itself. This is not what Christians do, or need. Those who praise these initiatives, or view Trump as some kind of vehicle of God’s will, or see his actions and words as somehow in alignment with the Gospel message, or believe the lie that this administration is pro-Christian, have forfeited what it means to be a disciple of Christ. I’m a Christian. I don’t need the government to combat “anti-Christian bias” on my behalf. In fact, I very much don’t want it to. God doesn’t need Donald Trump’s protection. Neither does this church. Conservatives and evangelicals: please stop taking God’s name in vain and invoking the Divine to justify your sin and your heresy.
And to those who are not Christians, who watch this going on with growing disgust towards the church: please know, this is not Christianity, not how it should be practiced. Please know there are so many Christians out here disgusted by Donald Trump, and by the fusion of Christianity with right wing politics and dangerous nationalism. Please know our faith is one of peace, and justice, and humility, and compassion. These people do not speak for us.