God and the Presidency
Political idolatry is a bipartisan affair
Americans are obsessed with the president. The news cycle revolves around him. And even when there’s an event that clearly falls outside the president’s constitutional purview, we still expect him to intervene. When individuals run for president, we expect — and some voters actively implore — them to make grandiose promises they cannot possibly keep. Whether health care, climate change, immigration, policing, education, employment growth, or cultural issues, the country looks to the president for solutions to nearly every conceivable problem.
Inevitably, this outsized confidence in the president’s power has led many to endow the person in office (and sometimes those just running for office) with religious significance.
“The Chosen One”
A few weeks ago former Texas Governor and current Secretary of Energy Rick Perry made headlines when he declared that Donald Trump was chosen by God to lead the country. In an interview with Fox News, Perry recounted a conversation he had with the president in which he gave an impromptu Bible lesson, summarizing Ancient Israel’s kings and how they were ordained by God. Perry went on to tell the president that he too was put in power by the Almighty; he is “the chosen one.”
Coincidentally, Perry made these comments around the same time the popular evangelist Franklin Graham asserted that opponents of Trump were under the influence of “demonic powers,” a postulation eagerly endorsed by his interviewer Eric Metaxas. Graham’s evidence that Trump’s critics are servants of Satan? They stubbornly refuse to support him despite the fact that the economy is doing well. (Curiously, in the Bible demons seldom get upset about robust GDP growth, nor did God show favor to King David because of his ability to keep unemployment low.)
But these statements were mild compared to what President Trump’s own “spiritual advisor” has said about him. During a conference-call prayer, Paula White, chair of the administration’s evangelical advisory board, alleged that the president’s critics are engaged in “sorcery and witchcraft.” Her prayer continued: “Any persons [or] entities that are aligned against the president will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”
In White’s mind, God didn’t just tap Trump to be president because he’d be a competent leader. Rather, White asserts, Trump is essentially a Divine emissary. “To say ‘no’ to President Trump would be to say ‘no’ to God,” she claimed. It was only natural, then, for her to declare the White House as “holy ground” (though strangely she still wears shoes in the Oval Office).
Of course, investing the president with providential importance is not solely the prerogative of conservatives. During Obama’s presidency, progressives heaped adoring praise upon the man whom television host Barbara Walters once thought of as “the messiah.” Comparisons between Obama and Christ were uncomfortably common, from a painting depicting the president wearing a crown of thorns to a Newsweek headline dubbing Obama’s 2013 inauguration as “the second coming.”
Obama himself added fuel to his messianic fire, famously declaring that his presidential nomination signaled the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.”
For Obama and his followers, the president is not meant to serve such pedestrian goals like ensuring domestic tranquility or providing for the common defense. Rather, he is to be a radical harbinger for societal transformation. If one takes the words of progressives seriously, their anointed politicians are expected to usher in the eschaton, a new era of everlasting peace, prosperity, and ecological renewal — in short, everything that the God of the Bible promises.
The Politics of Idolatry
Politics has a nasty habit of making idols out of politicians. Thomas Paine, writing in his great revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, argued that to exalt one person “so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature.” Doing so would promote idolatry, he wrote.
Today no politician’s fans are more fawning than Senator Elizabeth Warren’s. When given the opportunity to speak with her, they become enraptured in what can only be described as a quasi-religious experience. Warren’s fans are so worshipful that they put the followers of Baal to shame.
Playing on Warren’s signature slogan, one supporter named Ashley Black took to Twitter to ask if Warren had a plan to fix Black’s love life. When the presidential candidate actually called her on the phone, the elated woman afterwards said she was “crying and shaking.”
As Vox reports, Black isn’t the only one to have received a special phone call. For months Warren supporters “have been popping up expressing their joy and surprise that they’ve received a call from the senator herself.”
“Joy and surprise” may be an understatement. One supporter proclaimed that Warren’s phone call “made her whole life.” Another, far more obsequious fanatic said that speaking to Warren was so amazing that it killed her. Thankfully though, “nothing will bathe your soul in healing waters quite like Senator Warren calling to say she really believes we can do this,” and thus after being submerged within Warren’s baptismal font, the woman was born again.
So why are fans of Warren so shamelessly devoted to her when other candidates, such as Joe Biden, do not inspire anywhere near the same adoration? Because unlike other candidates — except Bernie Sanders — Warren has promised her supporters they will inherit the earth. From her gracious bounty, they will receive a whole host of cost-free goodies: universal health care, a college education, paid family leave, and free childcare. She also promises to eradicate corrupt corporate lobbying, defeat tech monopolies, and alleviate climate change. The list goes on and on.
It is not surprising that voters who truly believe these things are politically and economically possible would offer up their souls to the person who vowed to accomplish them. It is idolatrous through and through.
And it is no less idolatrous when the Religious Right dresses up their devotion to Donald Trump in religious garb. As Ben Howe has shown in his recent book The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values, the convoluted theological defenses of Trump’s brazenly un-Christian behavior are merely a cover for what truly motivates many of his evangelical fans: a lust for power, and how that power could benefit them.
Then again, perhaps the Rick Perrys of the world are right. Perhaps God did predestine Donald Trump to become president. But if that’s true, then to quote Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
