I came across a couple of recent “news items” that may help explain the increasing exodus from organized religion.
First, Raw Story tells us that “Mother,” aka Karen Pence,
the wife of Vice President Mike Pence, is planning to rally support for a controversial Republican candidate who has said that women who work are violating “God’s design.”
Local news station WFAE reports that Pence on Friday will join a campaign rally for Mark Harris, a former pastor who has been sharply critical of women who decide to take jobs instead of staying home and supporting their husbands.
Pastor Harris has publicly bemoaned the fact that modern women no longer have “basic” skills–“womanly” skills such as “how to prepare a meal, how to sew on a button, how to keep a home, how to respond to a husband.”
Pardon me while I throw up.
Then there’s the new motion picture release, The Trump Prophecy. As a reporter for Vox has explained,
I sat in an unmarked cinema hall in New York’s Union Square, listening to a group of people praying. We’d just finished watching a screening of The Trump Prophecy, the controversial hybrid docu-drama made in part by students and faculty at the conservative evangelical Liberty University. Images of American greatness — an American flag, an eagle — flickered across the screen. A white man in his 60s sang out verses from 2 Chronicles 7:14:
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
They bowed their heads and thanked God that his anointed one, Donald Trump, was president. Just as the prophecy had foretold.
Scenes like this took place in 1,200 cinemas across the country during a limited release of the film this month. The Trump Prophecy, which played on Tuesday and Thursday nights, has been advertised as an opportunity for prayer groups to come together in an expression of patriotism.
Nauseating as this sounds, and as far from genuine patriotism as it clearly is, the film’s message is far worse.
But The Trump Prophecy is more than a feel-good, low-budget movie. It’s the purest distillation of pro-Trump Christian nationalism: the insidious doctrine that implicitly links American patriotism and American exceptionalism with (white) evangelical Christianity.
Everything about The Trump Prophecy — from its subject matter, to the way it’s shot, to the little details scattered through the movie’s (often interminable) scenes of domestic life — is designed not just to legitimize Donald Trump as a evangelical-approved president but to promulgate an even more wide-ranging — and dangerous — idea.
The Trump Prophecy doesn’t just want you to believe that God approves of Donald Trump. It wants you to believe that submission to (conservative) political authority and submission to God are one and the same. In the film’s theology, resisting the authority of a sitting president — or, at least, this sitting president — is conflated with resisting God himself.
It’s telling that The Trump Prophecy doesn’t even try to pretend Trump is a good, or even acceptable, leader. In fact, it treats that very question as irrelevant. What matters, simply, is that good Christians respect those in power over them (whether good Christians should also have respected, say, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is never explored).
The Vox article explores the theology underpinning this worldview, and it’s worth reading, since these beliefs are foreign to most readers who visit this blog–and for that matter, to most Americans.
As Karen Pence’s support for a reactionary pastor demonstrates, however, this is the theology that motivates Trump supporters, and a belief structure that is well-represented throughout Trump’s Administration. (Think Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos.)