When sacred texts are inconvenient
The Constitution. The Bible. What do they matter, really, if Trump isn't winning?
For pretty much my entire adult life, the GOP has been the party of piety.
I mean this in the religious sense — we all know about white evangelical conservatives at this point. But I also mean this more broadly: I’ve long called Republicans the “more Constitutional than thou” party because of their determination to worship the Founders and the Founding documents. In 2011, the GOP celebrated winning back the House of Representatives by reading the Constitution out loud. In a few weeks they’ll do it again.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is still short on the Republican support he’ll need to succeed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the next Congress. The GOP leader is also still looking for ways to impress members of his conference, especially on the far right.
To that end, McCarthy last week pitched an idea via Facebook: “Next year, Republicans will start every day of Congress with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. No exceptions.” It wasn’t long, of course, before annoying people like me reminded the congressman that Congress already starts every day with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance — it’s literally a written rule of the U.S. House of Representatives, as it’s been for many years — and his vow was entirely redundant.
It’s hard to escape the sense that this is a branding exercise as much as anything, virtue signaling for the right. Praying on street corners is for hypocrites, after all.
But what happens when the Constitution is insufficient? How about the Bible?
I thought a little bit about all of this reading Michelle Goldberg’s interview with Russell Moore, a former Southern Baptist official who is now the editor of Christianity Today. Moore has long openly lamented Trump’s influence on evangelical Christians. He’s still worried.
The last six years, said Moore, has changed the character of conservative evangelicalism, making it at once more militant and more apocalyptic — in other words, more Trump-like. For some people, Trump may even be the impetus for their faith: a Pew survey found that 16 percent of white Trump supporters who didn’t identify as born-again or evangelical in 2016 had adopted those designations by 2020.
“I see much more dismissal of Sermon on the Mount characteristics among some Christians than we would have seen before,” Moore said, referring to Jesus’ exhortation to turn the other cheek and love your enemies. There is instead, Moore said, “an idea of kindness as weakness.” Pastors have spoken to Moore about getting blowback from their congregants for preaching biblical ideas about mercy, with people saying, “That doesn’t work anymore, in a culture as hostile as this.”
He’s not wrong. Muscular Christanity, it seems, requires abandoning the tenets of the faith.
Which brings us back to Trump directly. He once swore an oath to defend and protect the Constitution. Now, well…
Former President Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election and reinstate him to power Saturday in a continuation of his election denialism and pushing of fringe conspiracy theories.
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in a post on the social network Truth Social and accused “Big Tech” of working closely with Democrats. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
“Trump, the once and aspirationally future Republican president, has long praised the Constitution and touted his own defense of it in heroic terms,” David Graham writes at The Atlantic, and adds: “He claims to cherish the Constitution, but as usual, Trump holds fast to only one thing: his own interests.”
You can see what’s going on here. Values — whether secular or sacred — mean everything to leaders and their followers right up to the point that privileges and power are threatened. Then they become not so useful. Indeed, they even serve as their own justification for being dismissed. The Founders would not want Donald Trump to lose an election, right? Turning the other cheek doesn’t “work” in a culture hostile to Christian values.
But values, if they’re instrumental, aren’t values at all — they’re tactics. A means of getting what you really care about. Piety is only useful, it seems, if it’s profitable.
Well said.
I also see that Trump is trying to -- wait for it -- walk back his original Truth Social posts, saying he meant the Constitution would only need to be suspended until he was reinstated. Then everything would return to normal. Yeah. That’s it.
The Torah, Bible, Quran & most other religious texts are nothing but books of myths aka fantastic lies