'Distressing': Reverend reveals what
evangelicals say privately about Trump
Reverend Rob Schenck, a former evangelical activist, discusses
President Trump's photo-op after police forcibly moved protesters
and what evangelicals are now saying about Trump.
Donald Trump’s Photo-Op and
the Essence of Christianity
by Hunter Bragg
The problem with Trump’s publicity stunt is not that
it is unfaithful to the essence of Christianity; it’s that
it too perfectly encapsulates that essence.
While Donald Trump’s photo-op outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1 has been criticized by Christians on the right and on the left for its infidelity to Christianity and its sacred scriptures, the problem with this publicity stunt is not that it is unfaithful to the essence of Christianity; it’s that it too perfectly encapsulates that essence.
Trump’s photo--taken after police forcefully cleared Lafayette Square in front St. John’s of peaceful protestors—was condemned by church leaders across the theological spectrum. The progressive Disciples of Christ minister Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in a Washington Post op-ed with the author Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove that what is most outrageous about the image is that “Trump and the religious extremists he appeals to have turned Christian faith against itself.”
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopalian Church, Michael Curry, echoed a similar sentiment in a Tweet, suggesting that the meaning of the Bible is antithetical to Trump’s symbolic use of it: “The bible the President held up and the church that he stood in front of represent the values of love, of justice, of compassion, and of a way to heal our hurts.”
The conservative religious position, at least the position of those not blindly beholden to the president, was likewise concerned with what it deemed an inappropriate use of the biblical text. The Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler claims the Bible’s sacred status means that it should remain above political theater. He writes,
“…Christians have to be particularly clear that the Word of God, the Bible is not an instrument of political symbolism. It’s far more than that…And Christians must be concerned when the Bible becomes an issue of political controversy…”
To be clear: I’m a Christian who thinks that the combination of religion and violent force made manifest in the photo is appalling and contradictory to the message inside the book Trump so awkwardly held up. I’m concerned, though, that the immediate denunciations of the image by Christian leaders across the political and theological spectrum are actually harmful to the hopes of many Christians that a more just society will emerge out of the political unrest of the present. By distancing themselves and the faith(s) they represent from Trump’s use of the Bible, Christians fail to account for the ways that Trump’s photo-op is Christianity.
Here’s what I mean: Denunciations of Trump’s Bible photo are premised on the notion that there’s a true essence to Christian faith and to the biblical message. Such claims presuppose that Christianity in its truest form exists independently of its historical and material formations. It’s this idea—that the true Christianity exists outside of its historicity—that gives me pause and that seems so unhelpful in this present moment. To be sure, Barber and Curry would disagree vehemently with Mohler about what the Christian essence is. Yet, whatever the essence they believe to be normative, they all agree that Trump’s stunt doesn’t measure up.
Let me focus on Barber’s and Curry’s statements, since my views are closer to theirs than to Mohler’s. For Barber, Trump’s use of the Bible is squarely opposed to the actual and true meaning of Christian faith and practice. Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him cast a “moral vision of love, justice, and truth” while Trump uses the book that contains this vision to, well, trump up his base. For Curry, what the Bible “represents” is love, justice, compassion and healing, rather than the hatred, injustice and bodily harm that Trump, in his person and in his administrative policies, embodies. From Curry’s perspective, Trump is militantly misusing a text that really stands for justice and peace.
While I’m sympathetic to these logics, I must ask: is Christianity really anything more than its historical and material realities? Beyond the fact that the Bible is not straightforwardly a peaceful text and that the biblical witness to divine justice seemingly requires the execution of an innocent man by the Roman Empire, we might note that since at least the 4th century CE, Christianity has been bound up with political power.
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The 4th century Roman emperor Constantine’s famous (and probably mythical) vision and his subsequent post-conversion military victory under the banner of the Chi-Rho bound Christian faith and military might. His house-theologian Eusebius makes Trump’s resident evangelical theologians look tame, cleanly merging the emperor with Christ such that the rise of Constantine, in all his military power, was the advent of the Kingdom of God (See, Eusebius, “The Oration of Eusebius Pamphili In Praise of the Emperor Constantine”).
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Medieval Christendom likewise utilized Christian theology to motivate the crusades that unified Christians in their opposition to Muslims. Modernity was no better. Christianity was crucial to the legal formation and subsequent enslavement of the very black life that we now insist, many of us on Christian grounds, matters (see, for instance, Willie James Jennings’s The Christian Imagination). In early 20th century Germany, the Christian doctrine of divine sovereignty played a crucial legitimating role in the rise of Hitler to power in Germany (see Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology). And let us not forget that America, according to some, is a Christian nation. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan thought of itself as a Christian organization.
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Now, to be sure, Barber explicitly acknowledges the deep complicity of the Christian heritage in the racist and militarized history of Europe and America. However, he and his co-author do so only by maintaining an ideal form of Christianity not equivalent to any of its historical instantiations. They juxtapose, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “The Christianity of [the United States] and the Christianity of Christ” between which is “the widest possible difference.”
I want to suggest to you that Christianity is no more than what it has been historically. Christianity is the Constantinian nexus of faith and power; it is the Crusades; it is settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK and the police force that cleared the way for Trump and his Bible.
I admit that I want quickly to add, “but that’s not all it is…” There’s a sense in which Curry and Barber and Douglass are correct. Indeed, Christianity is a multi-faceted movement that encompasses numerous organizations and individuals with irreconcilable commitments. If slavery is Christian, so too is John Brown. If the KKK is a Christian organization, so too are the innumerable black churches worshipping a black Christ.
But, this mode is precisely the one I’m resisting: of course there are other Christianities, other modes of engaging Christian symbols, of doing Christian practice, and of forming Christian community. However, these alternative formations don’t have any greater claim to being the ‘true’ form of Christianity than do Trump and the Christian right. In fact, given the constant intertwining of Christianity and power throughout Christian history, I’m making a case that, if anything, Trump’s version may be the ‘truer’ one.
This doesn’t mean that this is all Christianity can be. Christian symbols, like all symbols, exceed our ability to grasp and control and so can take on new meanings and give rise to new possibilities for human and nonhuman life. We—we Christians, we American Christians, we white American Christians—need the outcries of Christian leaders like Curry and Barber pointing us to a different, though still not normative, form of Christianity.
The material and discursive witness of minority and oppressed communities, like those informed, for instance, by womanism and black feminism, who have shaped their individual and communal spaces in defiance of the dominant white Christian model, gives hope that Christianity can be something other than what it has been and what it remains to this day (see, for instance, Kelly Brown Douglas’s What’s Faith Got to Do With It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls or Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle). Likewise, the vibrancy and creativity on display in LGBTQ-affirming churches suggest to us that Christianity’s resources for forming lively Christian community are not exhausted.
Even still, these possibilities won’t come to prominence apart from the death of Christianity as it is. This would entail Christianity’s rejection of its alliances with political power, with military might, and with extractive empire. As we’re seeing in the weeks following George Floyd’s murder, this rejection, this death, will not be a peaceful one. Like it’s life, Christianity’s death will be violent.
The Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his famous “Critique of Violence,” envisions a divine violence that negates and destroys all law-making and law-preserving violence, including and especially that of the police. Unlike Trump’s police, divine violence strikes at systems, not at individuals, for its violence is “for the sake of the living” (297). It destroys these systems, but it doesn’t create the inevitably violent foundations for another system that would take its place.
Might it be that Christianity itself—in its historical formations and material concretions—is precisely that system that needs to be exposed to divine violence? And indeed, if Christianity is the interlocking systems of injustice that are on display in June 2020, then are not the protestors whom the police removed from Lafayette Square, not to mention the scores across the country confronting police violence, participating in a divine violence of this sort? Benjamin, if he were here, would not tell us for sure, for he warns that divine violence is never clearly identifiable as such. I’ll take his advice and refrain from drawing the connection between divine violence and the protests too strongly, but not without noting the possibility.
In any case, a negation of Christianity in the name of Christianity. Perhaps surprisingly, this would not be new. Negative theology—the practice of unsaying and unlearning what one says and knows about God—has a long history dating back to interpretations of the cloud that descended upon Moses on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20). The 13th century mystic theologian Meister Eckhart enjoins his listeners to “pray to God that we may be free of ‘God’” (200). Getting free of “God”—God, as we have conceived and named ‘him,’ God, as we have used ‘him’ to legitimize all sorts of ungodly powers—is perhaps the work of the present, of this present.
Like Benjamin’s divine violence, the negation of Christianity and its God offers no concrete system, no positive conception of God to take God’s place. However, the process theologian Catherine Keller reminds us that a de(con)struction of the kind I’m envisioning does not limit the possibilities for who or what God might be; it infinitely expands them. Indeed, negative theology [sic, post-structural theology - res] destroys what we think we know to be ‘true’ and ‘essential’ only to open the way for other, ever mysterious, life-giving possibilities. For Keller, this entails the awakening of what she calls, drawing from William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe, an “amorous agonism” that ties us all—human and nonhuman—together in relations of cooperativity and solidarity (155).
Let me affirm Keller’s negation. And let me add that in this this particular moment, “keep[ing] faith” with Christianity’s failures, as Keller puts it, requires those of us who come from majority white Christian traditions to keep a literal silence as well. This silence is not an apathetic disconnection, but a pathos-filled connection both to the pathetic failure of Christianity and to the immensely creative black and indigenous formations of theology and politics that have arisen from its margins. It’s a silence that allows the voices most necessary for the present to come in loud and clear.
The divine violence is one in which Christian claims (even, I admit, my own) about what Christianity is are negated—destroyed. Such a negation opens us to listen to others for guidance on a new possibility of life and politics. But first, Christians must own up to the reality of what Christianity has been. Trump’s photo-op lays this bare for us. So, before we Christians distance ourselves from Trump’s photo, perhaps we ought to recognize that it’s a photo of ourselves.
* Hunter Bragg is a Ph.D. student at Drew University in Madison, NJ. He works in the discourse of political theology and explores its intersection with American criminal justice. He currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee.
** res - Addition by R.E. Slater
** res - Addition by R.E. Slater
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