Ian Linden - President Trump: Defender of the Faith?

President Trump visits St John's Episcopal Church June 2020 after removal of protestors - Wiki Image

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 JD 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.

To read on see: www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/president-trump-defender-of-the-faith

Professor Ian Linden is Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, London. A past director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, he was awarded a CMG for his work for human rights in 2000. He has also been an adviser on Europe and Justice and Peace issues to the Department of International Affairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. Ian chairs a new charity for After-school schooling in Beirut for Syrian refugees and Lebanese kids in danger of dropping out partnering with CARITAS Lebanon and work on board of Las Casas Institute in Oxford with Richard Finn OP. His latest book was Global Catholicism published by Hurst in 2009.