Donald Trump and 1600 Years of the Failure of Christianity

Just as Godzilla was seen as the post-World War II collective guilt of Japan’s sins come back to haunt them, Donald Trump is the logical product of Christianity’s centuries-long doctrinal and philosophical failure.

One of the reasons I’m so consistent about having my morning prayer time is that it gives me a chance to encounter the Living God Who is the entire point, if you will, of the Christian faith. As such, it usually turns into a very supernatural experience, i.e., the “witness” of the Holy Spirit shows up and it’s sometimes very powerful, because God, it seems, wants me to know when I’m saying something true or important (Jn 16:13-15). He also really likes it when the truth is being told about Him.
 
This past weekend entailed two very powerful times like that after going to see two different movies. My routine is to “review” them the next day, because I know God can find the nuggets of truth, the “moral of the story,” in any tale, even ones that aren’t considered “faith-based.” On Saturday morning, I reviewed the movie The Apprentice I had seen the night before. On Sunday morning, I reviewed Saturday Night, the story behind the first ever episode of the now-famous SNL—Saturday Night Live.
 
The Apprentice was based on Donald Trump’s formative years from the mid-1970s to about 1987. It focused on the people and philosophies that formed the attitudes and tactics he’s now so famous (or infamous) for, particularly the influence of his father and the mentoring of Roy Cohn. It was those philosophies, and attitudes, and values if you will, that, when mixed with his aggressive, bullying personality and unbridled narcissism, made him the self-absorbed human trainwreck he is today.
 
Saturday Night was a dizzying, chaotic account of the huge number of cast, crew, network executives and other personnel that put together that maiden episode in 1975. In it, its young producer Lorne Michaels is continually beset by an executive to put into words “what the plan is.” They were so disorganized and ad libbing everything, that they hardly even had a format or script down for a live show that night.
 
In those encounters you could see Michaels struggling to explain to him what the essence of entertainment is—to illustrate situations and experiences in life that help us to laugh at ourselves, talk us down from the ledges, promote better understanding of other people, etc. Plus, just some pleasant sights and sounds to help us relax from the tensions of the week. He had this idea that SNL could serve as something of younger generation’s idea of playing a kind of “master of ceremonies” for people all over New York (and by extension the country), as they went about a wide range of activities at that hour in their lives each week.
 
As I reviewed these movies, each one led to a holy encounter. In the first one, I actually felt embarrassed that it took an explicit, deep-dive into this savior to Evangelicals, to explain how he slowly evolved into the monster, the beast (Rev 13:2) he is today. You would think his real-life actions and words would have tipped people off enough to understand him without such an uncomfortable “spelling of it all out” for people.
 
In the second, I got an insight into what the essence of the Christian religion is. In all religions, it’s natural to ask “what must I do? to be a good…” (fill in the blank)—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, etc. In our faith, it’s usually answered along the line of “read your Bible, pray, go to church, pay your tithes,” etc. And all these things are indeed a part of our expected earthly faith routines. But they aren’t the essence of what the Christian faith is, or even more specifically, how it “saves” us, how it makes our lives more spiritual, more acceptable to God, fit to live with Him forever.

The Real “Work of the Lord“

The Bible is not a “manual for life,” even though it is a guide for all the major moral and existential questions people have ever faced. It isn’t a Book of rules or laws, even though it’s packed full of them. It isn’t a Book of history, even though it’s almost all historical accounts.
 
The Bible is the revelation of God Himself, acting in time and interacting with human beings to save us from the tyranny of ourselves.[1] It’s the unveiling of this unique Being, this personal Deity of infinite power that sustains all existence, and Who owns all of His own creation. It’s all about Him and His rights over His own creation (Dan 4:35; Rev 4:11, etc).
 
Thus, we are exhorted to “know the Lord” through a never-ending, interactive process of sound doctrine and direct experience. This is more than just “being still and knowing He is God.” It’s recognizing that the path to transformation, to sanctification, to personal growth, is simply by “gazing upon the Lord” as pre-20^th Century divines would put it—”But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (II Cor 3:18 NASB).

When you see and hear supposedly-dedicated Christians torturing words and logic to justify their perversely cynical stances and tactics in politics, you don’t need a degree in political science, you just need to think about Jesus Christ. You don’t have to answer the perverse talking points of Israeli hasbara when they try to convince you their many enemies are using “human shields” (something Israel does itself all the time), or just irrationally hate them apart from any behavior and attitudes of their own. You just have to look at the fruit of piles of dead children, all to justify killing one “terrorist” leader,[2] because “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Mt 7:20).
 
As the popular saying puts it, WWJD—what would Jesus do? Or as the prophet put it to Israel, “Are these His doings?” (Micah 2:7). “Is this the work of the Spirit of God?” Is this the way Jesus the Messiah would restore the nation of Israel? Are behaviors like this examples of what it means to be “spiritual”?
 
So then, what is the work of the Church? What is it we are supposed to be “doing” while on the earth? Is it conquering the Seven Mountains of Culture? Is it a crusade to liberate the Holy Land of infidels? Is it beheading those you don’t agree with? Is it torture chambers and inquisitors? Is it micro-managing people’s sins to the nth degree for their own good? Is it endless rituals and ceremonies? I mean, what is it human beings are supposed to do to be faithful to their religion and various Deities?

The Evolution of the Divine Revelation

This self-revelation of God to the world is quite an evolutionary process in the Bible. He starts out fairly terrorizing the world to get men’s attention, since “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7), (faith and trust its capstone). He told Moses He was going to make a Name for himself in the earth, and indeed He did, first taking down the most powerful kingdom of the day with a series of ten supernatural judgments on their many gods (Ex 9:16).
 
In the rest of the Old Testament, He spent a lot of time exasperated by His own people because they would not follow His simple demands. But with the coming of a better covenant built upon better promises (Heb 8:6), came the other side of God, a new fullness of grace (Jn 1:17), come in an accepted time (Two Corinthians 6:2). This is because it’s the goodness of God, not just the threats and wrath of God (Two Corinthians 5:11), that leads men to repentance too, to reconsider their wicked, stupid ways (Eccl 9:3).
 
Furthermore, much to the vexation of the religious leaders of the time, it came announced by a King not born in a castle, but among the beasts of burden, this signifying that God, though He be high, yet hath respect unto the lowly (Psa 138:6). Or as our Founding Fathers put it, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” at least in the sight of God.
 
Yes, as the old song goes, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” not “Amazing retribution, he vents my spleen for me…”

The Coming of the Bible Hawker in Chief

Speaking of amazing, this is what I find so amazing about the Donald Trump phenomenon, that 80 million Americans, let alone the vast majority of professing Christians, are so undiscerning, so lacking in judgment—largely because they are so poorly taught—to think that even being associated with such a guy is fine, let alone handing over so much power to him. Who, after all, epitomizes the wretched culture of self in our time more than him? Who is not just an acolyte of Ayn Rand’s dunderhead “Virtue of Selfishness” philosophy, but its purest practitioner than him? When you think of narcissistic self-love, who’s the most perfect public embodiment that comes to mind?
 
We’re not just talking here about the bottomless list of vices and crimes Donald Trump in his lifetime has, does and will commit into the future. It’s that at the heart of it, he represents the essence of what the Kingdom of God is not—self-love, self-obsession, self-absorption. Self, self, self. It’s what motivates everything he does. Why then would you think anything good could ever come out of such a man (Mt 7:18)? Why do people think God needs to make a Faustian Pact with such a “son of lawlessness” in order to save America?
 
I’ll tell you why. Because Christians and people in the American heartland have been bombarded for 45 years now with a daily diet of right-wing media trashing anything having to do with the term “liberal.” As I’ve tried to illustrate in these writings, it started in the late 1970s when a medieval Catholic, Paul Weyrich, sought to convince Evangelicals to only vote Republican. From that point on, there could have been a movement begun to make Christians more politically active by urging them to invade both parties, making them moderating voices to curb the excesses of both left and right. But no, they didn’t do that, and so we’ve become one of the biggest factors in dividing America.

It continued on in the late 1980s when members of the Reagan administration (and Murdoch) decided it would be a really cool idea to demonize the word “liberal,” call it the “L” word, and hang it around the neck of Democrats like a burning necklace. Previous to that, “liberal” was a descriptor both parties coveted.

But it didn’t stop there. It continued on with a daily AM radio exercise of stereotyping Democrats as “woke, Marxist, bleeding hearts,” who “don’t know how to run a business,” etc. It continued on with Newt Gingrich’s cynical strategy of defining Democrats, not as the other side of your brain, or the other half of the democratic process of making law, but your mortal enemy, the fount of all evil that must be defeated at all costs in order to “save America.”

Thus, was it left to a world-class demagogue and con man like Donald Trump to roll the whole thing up into open subversion, aligning himself with the greatest enemies America has, gaslighting the world with his perverse values you “values voters,” and his childish, fantasyland “Biblical” “worldview.”
 
But all that is just the social/political level of it all. On the spiritual level, the thing that is the very mission of the Church, the Great Commission, became mongrelized into this obsession with merging religion with politics, the very thing both Jesus Christ (Mt 22:21) and the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid. And that spiritual message is, that the Gospel is so much not about you or us, but about Him, to the point that Paul said it was God the Father’s intention all along to “gather together into one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him” (Eph 1:10).
 
A verse like that, and indeed, there are many more with similar sentiments, may not teach you how to extract as much prosperity out of God as you’d like; it may not inspire you to sacrifice your time and your family’s well-being and finances to ruin your witness by micro-managing other people’s lives, but it’s good Bible teaching. It’s the kind of sound doctrine that Paul said would save both you and them that hear you (I Tim 4:16; John 8:32, etc).

In the early 19^th Century, Charles Finney, the prolific lawyer-turned-evangelist developed his entire systematic theology on the premise that “sin is selfishness” in a wide spectrum of manifestation. Everything about what Jesus Christ taught was against the supremacy of self and toward regard for others. To love your neighbor as yourself is indeed the over-arching principle of the New Testament that fulfills the Law (Gal 5:14; Rom 13:9). That, everyone is bound to. But if you want to be a real saint, you can love your neighbor more than yourself, as in acts of charity, self-sacrifice and the like (Gal 5:23).

Thanks Augustine

In the history of Christianity, this obsession with “But, What Do I Do?” largely began with Augustine’s conception of what became known as Roman Catholicism in the early 400s. Before then, “the Church” on the earth consisted of myriads of little local fellowships scattered around the Empire and the rest of the world.
 
Their relationships with one another were “organic,” based on just that—relationships. Their attitudes towards the Gentiles were benign, accommodating and missionary. They would move into other cultures, other tribes, adopt their customs as much as morally possible, try to relate, and try to be good neighbors. With these kinds of attitudes, they won peoples’ trust, piqued their curiosity, and cause them to “ask a reason for the hope within you.” In other words, they earned the right to be heard, and in the interactions of life, God did miracles and the faith grew, in spite of ten vicious persecutions by ten different emperors over a three-century period.
 
It was understood that these fellowships were united by their common faith in Jesus Christ, and that the true Church existed in the Spirit and was ultimately known only to God (Gal 4:9). But with the chaos that came from those persecutions, the uncertainties produced by heresies, and confusion about “Apostolic succession,” over time the idea of a radically-decentralized earthly witness was challenged by “Saint” Augustine.
 
Thus was born the cool idea of centralizing the Church into one institution located in Rome, its hierarchization into a mediating priesthood between God and man, and the ritualization of religious impulses and activities. All this and more was his answer to “what do I do?,” and his idea of fixing “all this disunity, all this intellectual anarchy.”[3] Now, instead of Jesus Christ being the one mediator between God and man that anyone can instantly go to, you could not get the grace of God apart from that hierarchy. In other words, their disapproval didn’t just mean ejection from their church, but excommunication from eternal life. This is how these religious leaders terrorized entire populations for centuries and consolidated Church and State.
 
Augustine had so transformed the conception of Christianity into this new model that he even scrapped the traditional (though vague) Pre-Millennial model for the Second Coming. With his “Amillennial” theory, now the Church age was itself the millennial reign of Christ (gag). This was, it seems to me, the first instance of a “Kingdom now” eschatology that has inflamed the minds of Dominionists to this day.[4]
 
The Reformation of course, tried to correct all of that and restore a de-centralization process to our earthly witness, making our mission a more spiritual focus once again. Furthermore, I think this process is not over with yet, and is what the harvest of the “144,000” is all about (Rev 7:4,9). As all of this Churchianity of one form or another fails in our time for one reason or another, a remnant is going to arise that will truly “rule and reign with Christ,” but only during His Millennial Kingdom.

This number is not obviously meant to be taken literally as has so often happened, but figuratively. In the Greek it’s literally “144 thousands,” (plural). 144 is 12 times 12, 12 in Biblical numerology signifying government, or “perfection in government.” For the last 1600 years especially, the earthly Church’s example has been sometimes as much of a hindrance as a motivation to faith in others. This coming remnant will be a much better “witness” of Jesus Christ, even though the best collection of Christians do not come close to reflecting the image of God that Jesus Christ embodies.

Donald Trump, Antichrist

At this point, I feel tempted to ramble off on an unfocused rant about endless examples of this principle of self versus love, wherein I’ll be only repeating things I’ve already said in past articles. It may be a bad teaching technique, but I’ve always had this hatred of repeating myself and saying the same thing twice. Maybe I just don’t appreciate the Goebbels principle of repeating something over and over again, pounding it into people’s heads, which seems to be the zeitgeist of our time. Certainly, Lord Trump and all his Pharisee friends around the world are using it to great effect.
 
But I’ve said enough about this here. It’s time to get back down to earth and focus on the depressing process of tearing down everything we once believed in. We’ve got a watershed election coming up and I need to keep making observations about the absurd things the Orange Jesus is saying and doing, knowing it probably won’t make any difference. I just wanted to take a moment to step back and capture an abstract thought here.

Notes:

[1] This indeed, is the objective of His first advent, and one of the reasons He was so rejected by the religious leaders of the day, who merely wanted a savior from their enemies, such as Rome.
[2] Hezbollah for instance, is a self-defense force, borne of Israel’s first invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982.
[3] I’m sure I’m being ignorant and unfair here, but I always got the impression that Augustine had a huge ego, was a control freak, was spiritually pretentious at times, and certainly was not taking seriously Pelagius’ criticism of his idea of the sovereignty of God. Perhaps it was partisanship on the behalf of “fans” of him that pushed that last controversy off the rails. I would love to be a better Church historian, but I just don’t have the time.
[4] Maybe this is why the Dear Leader chose a recent convert to Catholicism to be his running mate, and has not one but two versions of Ave Maria on his playlist now. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/15/trump-dancing-pennsylvania-rally