[D66] Autocrats Love Using the Bible as a Prop

[R.O.]

  Autocrats Love Using the Bible as a Prop. Americans Shouldn’t.

By
Alan Levinovitz
foreignpolicy.com
5 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2F2020%2F06%2F02%2Fautocrats-idolatry-trump-protests-george-floyd-america%2F>

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St John U.S. 
President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St John's Church across 
from Lafayette Park in Washington on June 1. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via 
Getty Images

America opposes idolatry. Not just the act of idolatry but the very idea 
that idols have power. That is why its laws—unlike those of many other 
nations—do not criminalize the burning of holy books or the destruction 
of sacred images. Its citizens do not worship pictures of leaders. The 
power of words and images in the United States is in the values they 
represent, not the objects themselves. Even the perpetual attempts to 
criminalize flag-burning consistently—and rightly—fail.

Just as destroying these objects has no magic power, neither does 
holding them up. Only idolaters believe that waving a flag makes you a 
patriot or wearing a cross makes you a Christian. As the singer John 
Prine, who died of COVID-19 in April, put it: “Your flag decal won’t get 
you into heaven.”

When U.S. President Donald Trump brandished an upside-down Bible in 
front of a church he rarely attends and whose leaders and congregation 
work against the policies he trumpets, the clouds of tear gas deployed 
to part peaceful protesters and allow his visit still hanging in the 
air, it was idolatry.

It was the same idolatry that whitens the teeth and tans the cheeks and 
furnishes the mansions of the prosperity gospel pastors who pant for 
attention at his side, before returning to homes like Trump’s, choked 
with the same precious metal that King Nebuchadnezzar used to craft his 
image of gold <https://biblehub.com/niv/daniel/3.htm>. And it was the 
same spirit that drove Vladimir Putin to coyly boast 
<https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1695787-9,00.html> of 
the Bible on his plane and Saddam Hussein to have a Quran 
<https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/saddam-husseins-blood-quran> written 
in his own blood.

Far before Trump’s election, televangelists like his thrice-married 
personal pastor Paula White were busy rotting their religion from the 
inside by making wealth and power the goal of prayer. For white 
evangelicals, the most stalwart block of Trump supporters, that has long 
meant embracing racism, from the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s lack of concern 
about apartheid South Africa (Bishop Desmond Tutu, he said, was a 
“phony” 
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-28-me-25050-story.html>) 
to overwhelming pushback against accepting refugees. Dazzled by the 
promise of gold and scared at the prospect of having to share it, they 
worship a king instead of love.

Nebuchadnezzar’s sin wasn’t merely the creation of his golden idol. 
“Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship,” explains the 
Catechism of the Catholic Church 
<https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c1a1.htm>. 
“It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in 
divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and 
reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for 
example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, 
etc.”

John Adams also understood the broad nature of the term, writing with 
concern <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0096> 
about “universal Idolatry to the Mammon of Unrighteousness.” He 
recognized how all tyrants, from Julius Caesar to corrupt governors, 
exploited 
<https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-02-02-0001-0005> “the 
mad Idolatry of the People,” which inevitably turned into “the surest 
Instruments of their own Servitude.”

Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, warns Second 
Corinthians—or, as Trump calls it, “Two Corinthians 
<https://www.npr.org/2016/01/18/463528847/citing-two-corinthians-trump-struggles-to-make-the-sale-to-evangelicals>.” 
But disguises and displays do not disclose what matters, and using them 
has no transformative power. The people who revel in display are 
suspect, says the book Trump waves but does not read. “When you pray, 
you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray 
in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by 
men.”

Only idolaters would believe there is something evil in the mere act of 
Trump’s holding the Bible upside down or saying “two” instead of 
“second.” The display, in itself, has no power. No, the evil, as Jesus 
warned, is pretending that a display of religion is actual religion. The 
evil is confusing the good book with a good prop.

This should matter to all Americans. Even those who don’t care about the 
Bible should oppose drafting it into a photo-op. “I am outraged,” said 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/bishop-budde-trump-church/2020/06/01/20ca70f8-a466-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html> 
Bishop Mariann Budde of St. John’s Church, when she heard how her place 
of worship had been desecrated by the photo-op. “He did not pray,” she 
added 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-st-johns-church-bible.html>.

It was a desecration far more disgusting than any physical damage could 
ever be. Wrath and crime are bad, but they are easier to forgive than 
idolatry. That’s why church leaders responded differently to the 
basement fire set by rioters only hours earlier. “I want to point the 
attention back to where it really should be,” the church’s rector, the 
Rev. Robert Fisher, said 
<https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2020/06/01/fire-causes-minor-damage-to-st-johns-the-church-of-presidents-in-washington-during-night-of-riots/>, 
“which is the purpose of the protests, and the people who did what they 
did to the church do not represent the majority, who are here for 
reasons that we totally support.”

The phrase “virtue signaling” has special currency among Trump 
supporters and other critics of the political left, who see sin in 
displays of liberal ideology that go no further than furious hashtags 
and fair trade handbags. The phrase may be used overzealously, but it 
identifies a real problem—the prioritizing of appearances over action 
and authenticity.

It is hard to imagine a better example of it than the signal Trump sent 
from St. John’s, American flag pin on his lapel, posing for his 
spiritual pornography.

There is concern among some deeply religious Americans that secular 
liberalism poses a grave threat to their faith. The atheists, the 
socialists, the gay-marriers, and the abortion-havers. The godless 
educators who refuse to post the Ten Commandments. But the real threat 
to holy texts isn’t those who refuse to post them. It’s people who think 
that once you’ve posted them, there’s no more work to be done, and go 
right back to the unrighteous idolatry of mammon, blind to sin as long 
as it is draped in a flag or decorated with a cross.

Americans should all be terrified by this unholy political theater. 
Terrified because in this unprecedented crucible of intersecting crises, 
the United States needs genuine faith and love. Terrified because if 
Americans are shaped instead by hollow leaders holding empty symbols, 
they will emerge battered and broken and divided, incapable of 
distinguishing even the crassest propaganda from the truth. And 
terrified because, as the president gleefully calls in the military 
after posing with the unread word of Christ, the idolaters may have 
finally won.


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