PRESIDENT TRUMP: DEFENDER OF THE FAITH?

The crisis in America is many-sided.   One aspect is to be found within the Christian Churches.  At a prayer breakfast last Thursday, President Trump announced a Task Force on “anti-Christian bias” within the Federal Government, a new Commission on religious liberty and a ‘Religious Office’ in the White House.  He had changed his mind about religion, he explained; God had saved him from an assassin’s bullet.
 
Faith seems to be rising in prominence in divided USA.  But faith in what?  Faith in Trump Towers growing out of the rubble of a US-controlled Gaza strip?

Shortly before Trump’s announcements and with  Elon Musk’s possible vast cuts to US overseas aid threatening, Catholic Vice-President J.D. Vance and Rory Stewart were debating the question “Who is my neighbour?” in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan.  Defending the US Government’s current treatment of undocumented immigrants and the demolition of USAID, Vance cited  St. Augustine of Hippo’s  ‘ordo amoris’:  family first, then the folks next door, and then outwards, nation and globally.    But according to the eminent historian of the early Church, Peter Brown,  the main criterion for selecting bishops in the late Roman Empire was that they should be ‘lovers of the poor’.   You wonder what Augustine would have replied to Vance. 
 
Not only does the US Government encourage citizens to believe that there is no crisis in the USA - just necessary disruption for the greater good – but also that their actions are entirely compatible with faith and religion.  Mr. Google describes gas-lighting as “a psychological manipulation technique in which a person tries to convince someone that their reality is untrue”.   You can smell the gas like an old London fog. 
 
Last Thursday the Jesuit London Centre and Catholics for Labour organized a webinar for Rev. Jim Wallis who  in the late 1970s in Washington DC founded  the Sojourner communities, and the Sojourner magazine.  Wallis’ vision  reflects  in many ways, the priorities of Latin America’s Basic Christian Communities and of Liberation Theology  within the movement of the American Evangelical churches, seeking  to apply the values and moral precepts of the Gospels to contemporary circumstances.  By 2013 Wallis had been arrested 22 times for civil disobedience.  A friend of Senator Obama, he became President Obama’s spiritual adviser in 2019.  In 2021, he was appointed to the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at the Jesuit Georgetown University, Washington DC.   A nice denial of the opposition often perceived between two tired terms used for dismissing people: academic and activist.

The long-term political significance of Jim Wallis’ work mainly derives from the cultural and political importance in the USA of the evangelical community to which he belongs.  There are probably about 40 million evangelicals - figures are confusing – making  up about 12% of the US population, concentrated in the ‘Bible-belt’ of south-eastern States running west to Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma.   In America, differences in voting are associated with age, education, gender and ethnicity – overlapping - and in the 2024 Presidential elections, the 14 States with 30% or more of the population identifying as evangelical had thumping Republican majorities.  Some 85% of White evangelicals - compared to 59% of White Catholics - voted for Trump and, ethnically,  Whites still remain the majority of evangelicals.  In 2007, Jim Wallis was talking to receptive audiences about an evangelical movement taking a Gospel perspective on social justice, moving away from Right-Wing Republicanism.  In the last decade or so this trend reversed. 

The title of Jim Wallis’ The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith & Refounding Democracy”, MacMillan 2024, sums up his webinar talk last week or, at least, its background.  He didn’t say that America had spawned a new Christian heresy though this book’s title could summarize the South African Council of Churches’ denunciations of apartheid religious ideology in the 1980s.   Wallis takes a strong-line on the Good Samaritan parable, emphasizing how it was  a Samaritan, belonging to a rival Temple cult, despised and shunned by the Judeans, who rescued the man by the roadside and paid generously for his treatment (two denarii was about two weeks’ wages).  Jesus’s own actions demonstrated what this teaching might mean in practice.   Wallis' message: all Christians were accountable and should heed the message of the parable’s teaching in Luke 10:25-37.

This emphasis on Jesus’ teaching and relationships with strangers, and even enemies,  challenges the US White, Protestant evangelical community today and indeed, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference which supports Trump.    In contrast, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition has been moderately critical of Trump’s policies on Aid and immigration.  But how can so many who place the Bible at the heart of their faith support such government cruelty to immigrants?  How can they not be writing to their congressman or woman in droves to stop Musk’s attack on USAID with its consequences for the world’s poor?

Wallis reaches beyond the Christian Churches to others who are already resisting.  Encouragingly, he sees disparate forces, legal, secular, Muslim, Jewish, Christian,  plus  NGOs and community groups coming together to oppose this assault on shared moral values.  Drawing on his experience of the Black Churches and on Catholic Social Teaching, he speaks with hope rather than optimism calling not simply  for resistance but for a deeper resilience.  Even on-line Wallis radiates a comforting serenity.  When you are listening to him, suddenly the way transactional language   is replacing moral and legal terms within discussions of political choices comes into sharp focus.
 
The American Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) used the classical Greek concept of a Kairos moment for a time of great danger but great opportunity, demanding conversion and transformation.   It is hazardous to make comparisons but  The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa, signed by over 150 Church leaders in 1985, responding to the brutality of the  apartheid regime’s State of Emergency, comes to mind.    This today is a time of great danger for Christian leadership, both in the USA and globally, but also great opportunity to speak out strongly and to act  with the authority of the Gospels.
  
On 22 January, the Archbishop President of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, Timothy Broglio,  described some of Trump’s executive orders as ‘deeply troubling’ causing harm to “the most vulnerable”. There is now much more to be said. No ethical system can justify the freeze on some $43 billion USAID annually, including over £17 billion for health and humanitarian aid purposes , 2/3rds of this for sub-Saharan Africa.  Where are the values expressed in the outcry against and cruelty towards migrants to come from?    The Catholic hierarchy need the unity and courage clearly to speak truth to power.  It is a heavy responsibility for Christian leaders to shoulder.  But as politicians struggle how to react to Trump’s new disorder who else but the US Churches are in a position to defend and advocate the values of truth, compassion, justice, human dignity and equality now threatened by the current crisis in the West?
​     
Meanwhile, if you, like me, are in search of Pope Francis’ “tangible signs of hope”, or even trying to be such a sign, try tucking in to Rev. Jim Wallis’ talks and books.