Politics and Religion: President Trump at a National Prayer Breakfast

Politics and religion intermeshed can be a nasty business. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, witnessed every venue of his planned tour in Europe cancel because Franklin had “called Islam ‘evil,’ attacked laws increasing rights for transgender people, and told his followers that the legalization of same-sex marriage was orchestrated by Satan.”[1] Although criticizing another religion is religious in nature, turning to laws renders the attack political too. Although Franklin Graham may have assumed that many of his co-religionists would agree with him both in religious and political terms, wading into controversial political matters risks alienating people who are or would otherwise be religious followers. Even the willingness to traverse into the political realm may not be liked by some religionists, whether followers or not, especially if the incursion is into a controversy. Some co-religionists may agree with the distinctly religious belief, yet hold dissimilar political views. Such distance created between religionists can weaken a religious leader’s credibility and even following in the religious domain. Politicians dragging their respective religious faiths into the political domain can also be problematic, though authentic applications can pay off even if there is a cost politically. The incursion of Christianity at the end of U.S. President Trump’s trial in the Senate and as he took a victory lap can demonstrate the complexities of religion distended into another domain. A politician may invoke his or her religious beliefs to justify a political position, as Sen. Mitt Romney did before he voted to convict U.S. President Donald Trump on the abuse-of-power impeachment article. In his speech justifying his vote on the senate floor, an emotional Romney said, “My faith is at the heart of who I am. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential.”[2] Obviously, his vote itself had the immediate effect of isolating him in Trump’s GOP. Even so, incorporating his religious faith in the senate chamber could have cost Romney more politically to the extent that other Republicans did not agree with his political beliefs. Some Democrats (e.g., secular or of other faiths) may otherwise have thought more of the senator in spite of his vote. Also, his denomination of Christianity, the Church of Latter Day Saints (i.e., the Mormon church) may have taken a hit in religious circles. In other words, a religionist who explicitly brings his or her faith across the border to play a role in the political domain may pay a price back on the religious turf.

Even religion itself can suffer from a politician bringing it into the political domain, especially if he or she contradicts his or her religion in political action. At a prayer breakfast on the day after the senate trial on President Donald Trump ended with an acquittal, he said he did not believe in loving enemies in spite of the fact that the teaching even though Jesus includes in his Sermon on the Mount in the Gospels. The president immediately matched his statement, “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you,” with attacks on his political opponents, calling them “dishonest and corrupt people” who “badly hurt our nation.”[3] Then he went after Senator Romney, saying “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.”[4] The charge of religion used wrongly is a good example of how extending the religious domain into the realm of politics can have political costs, as well as costs to the particular religion.

Even though Speaker (of the House of Representatives) Nancy Pelosi was prominently placed at the breakfast and had said that she prays for the president daily, Trump said, “nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that’s not so.”[5] If Pelosi had lied about the praying, then her invocation of her faith meant that she was misusing her religion in the political domain. If she really had been praying in private, then the president misused his religion in going after her personally.

Instead of the New Testament preachment to love thy enemies, Trump had said that he preferred taking an eye for an eye, a teaching in the Old Testament that Jesus rejects in the New Testament. “It’s striking,” one journalist wrote after the prayer breakfast, “to hear Trump, who is a Presbyterian, so directly reject one of Christianity’s core teachings.”[6] In implying that he can be a Presbyterian and not believe in one of Jesus’ core teachings, both the president and his denomination look bad. That is, that the president cited his religious denomination and faith for political purposes hurt both him and his Church, for duplicity or hypocrisy is not generally looked on favorably.

As if to justify opposing Jesus’ dictum to love thy enemies, the president said at the breakfast, “So many people have been hurt and we can’t let that go on.”[7] He chaffed at having to like his enemies. I contend that loving one’s enemies is not the same thing as liking them. A mother may love her son but not like him, so like is not necessarily implied in love. Coming to an enemy’s aid when help could help the person—and valuing doing so—rather than attacking especially when the enemy is down—is the epitome of Jesus’ notion of loving one’s enemies. This goes beyond merely turning the other cheek when attacked. In fact, assent to valuing voluntarily helping people who have insulted, injured, or even physically attacked you can be viewed as the litmus test of whether a person is really a Christian. Even better is having helped a detractor, especially if he or she really needs help.  Resentment and retribution have no place.

In spite of loving your enemies being viewed as a strength rather than weakness by Christians, religion itself may be weak relative to political force once in the political domain. Pelosi may have been praying for the president, but this didn’t stop the president from going after her (and literally waving a newspaper whose headline was “President Acquitted” in the air) at the National Prayer Breakfast, which was “typically a nonpartisan event that organizers say is meant to provide a spiritual refuge from political warfare.”[8] Not even at such an event could religion have the upper hand; the president could disgorge Jesus’s famous dictum and attack his enemies even in victory. To be sure, that the president could be both a Presbyterian and an eye-for-an-eye guy points to a weakness within institutional Christianity. Even so, extending religion beyond its own domain into another may not be a good idea. However, if Sen. Romney bucked his own political party, which was controlled by the president, on the basis of his faith, then religion starts to look very good indeed in the political realm. Religion can be a strength even beyond its own domain, yet only if religion itself does not expand into something other than religious and, even worse, bring the other back into the religious realm as religious.

Religion must be authentic rather than employed as a political tool to have strength in the political realm. Yet even as authentic, a religious element can be vulnerable and even make the politician politically weaker. Sen. Romney and National Prayer Breakfast itself were vulnerable. The ways of the world are not those of the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached.

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[1] Rob Picheta, “Evangelist Preacher Franklin Graham Planned a Seven-City UK Tour. All Seven Venues Have Dropped Him,” CNN.com, February 6, 2020(accessed same day).

[2] Michael Warren, “Guilty Vote Against Trump Casts Romney in a New Role: GOP Maverick,” CNN.com, February 6, 2020 (accessed same day).

[3] Daniel Burke, “Love Your Enemies? Nah, Says Trump,” CNN.com, February 6, 2020 (accessed same day).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

Can the Medium of Film Surpass the Bible in Biblical Storytelling?

For anyone interested in filmmaking, a film that features the internal operations of a film studio—especially one during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood (i.e., the 1940s and 1950s)—is likely to be captivating. After all, as Eddie Mannix, the studio executive in Hail, Caesar! (2016), says, the “vast masses of humanity look to pictures for information and uplift and, yes, entertainment.” This film provides all three for its audience in terms of filmmaking and the studio system. The film could have provided the three in terms of Christian theology too, but the treatment is hurried and thus difficult to digest, with the exception of Baird Whitlock’s emotional speech on a studio set as the Crucifixion scene is being filmed within the film. Eddie Manix’s meeting with a rabbi, Catholic priest, Greek Orthodox priest, and Protestant minister is flooded with fast-moving theological points, and is unfortunately of little use to the viewers of Hail, Caesar!  This is interesting because the scene’s role in the film’s narrative is to make the point that Capital Studio’s management takes seriously the informational role the film being shot in the film.

The full essay is at "Hail, Caesar!"

Christianity on Climate Change

First Reformed (2017) contains fundamental ideas concerning the human condition and wrestles with the relationship between religion and politics.  Ideas play a significant role in the film, hence it can be used in support of the thesis that film is a viable medium in which to make philosophical (and theological) ideas transparent and derive dramatic tension from clashing ideas. In this film, the ideas that clash concern the role of religion in the political issue of climate change—or is that issue primarily religious?

The full essay is at "First Reformed."

American religion and politics: A Propensity to Overreach

Even though they are formally separated in the U.S. under the constitutional rubric that the federal government cannot lawfully establish a religion and infringe on the free exercise of religion, religion has ventured into politics and vice versa. Valued ideals pertain to both even though the highest in religion are transcendent, meaning that they extend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, according to St. Denis (aka Pseudo-Dionysius) in the sixth century. So far is the political variety from such ideals as being in heaven! Yet the political sort has enjoyed a near monopoly in the world, including its public discourse. At least as 2019 was giving way to a new decade, captivation on President Trump’s tweets (i.e., brief statements made on the internet’s social media) and the process of impeaching him in the U.S. House of Representatives was strangely devoid of any religious discussion in the public square. This is all the more extraordinary because of the significant role that religion had played historically in presidential politics.

The full essay is at "American Religion and Politics."

Financial Scandal in the Vatican: A Historical Perspective on Christian Economic Ethics

In the history of Christian economic thought, theologians, with the exception of Clement of Alexandria, interpreted the biblical story of the rich man who refuses to part with his wealth in order to follow Jesus as meaning that having wealth is itself indicative of the presence of the underlying sin of greed. The dominance of this anti-wealth paradigm only began to give way during the Commercial Revolution in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the expansion of trading made it possible for ordinary people to save, and thus hold wealth without any sense of an underlying sin. Hence, Aquinas differed from Aristotle in allowing for moderate profit without the assumption of any underlying greed. In the Renaissance, theologians generally agreed that the Christian virtues of liberality and munificence could justify even being rich. Even Cosimo de Medici, who made his fortune from the sin of usury (i.e., interest on loans), gained the approval of the Pope in Rome by donating a fraction of the fortune to the Church. Under the dominance of the pro-wealth paradigm, Christians could be wealthy without being assumed to be greedy.[1] As for the Church itself being able to hold wealth, the collective wealth, gained from donations and selling goods, of monasteries in the Middle Ages was the door-opener. It was not as if a greedy individual could be said to exist if a religious organization owned the wealth. Aquinas approved of such wealth, a stance that, with his approval of moderate profit earned (and held as wealth) by individual Christians, began the shift that would result in the hegemony of the pro-wealth paradigm.[2] Unlike individual Christians holding coin without being presumed greedy, monasteries owning substantial wealth could be subject to a critique based on Jesus’ objection to money-changers in the Temple. When I visited a convent in Tucson, Arizona once, a sister rebuffed my request to pick a couple of oranges from the trees behind the building. “We make juice that we sell,” she replied. I had the impression that I had witnessed greed over charity in a religious vocation. Such hypocrisy, enabled by the allowance for collective monastic wealth, rivals Pope Eugene IV’s absolution of Cosimo de Medici, in spite of his fortune having been gained entirely from usury, because he renovated a monastery in Florence. This historical background can help us situate the Vatican’s financial scandal that culminated in five Vatican officials being suspended in 2019.

The scandal centered “on a large building in Chelsea [an upscale area of London] that was co-owned by the Vatican and an Italian business partner, London-based financier Raffaele Mincione,” who said “that the Chelsea investment had been highly profitable for the Vatican, which he said bought out his share [in 2018]. Mr. Mincione said the Vatican had invested a total of €320 million ($353 million), including the assumption of a €130 million mortgage, but that the building, at 60 Sloane Avenue, [was] worth €390 million” in 2019.[3] Complaints from the Vatican Bank itself and the office of the Vatican’s auditor general led Vatican investigators to raid and seize documents and electronic devices “from the offices of the Vatican’s powerful executive, the Secretariat of State, as well as the Vatican financial watchdog that monitors the long scandal-plagued Vatican Bank.”[4] The scandal was thus hardly the first for the Church’s bank. Even the Vatican’s financial watchdog had become culpable. The suspended employees “include Tommaso Di Ruzza, the number-two official of the financial watchdog,” as well as “Msgr. Mauro Carlino, a former aide to then-Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, one of the highest officials at the Secretariat of State [the Vatican’s executive office] until 2018, when Pope Francis made him a cardinal and put him in charge of the office for the canonization of saints.”[5]

Besides a possible unethical collusion between the Vatican’s executive’s office and the financial watchdog, the connection between Carlino and Becciu may mean that Becciu was ethically compromised even when he served as head of the office of the saints. That office may have been ethically compromised before Becciu, when Pope John Paul II, who had kept Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston in office there and then promoted him all while knowing that Law had knowingly moved rapist priests around rather than defrocking them and handing them over to the local police, was made a saint regardless. The corruption in the Vatican was thus not limited to financial scandals. Greed and ideological favoritism are arguably both species of self-aggrandizement, or self-idolatry in religious terms.

From an institutional perspective, the suspension of Di Ruzza, the number-two official of the financial watchdog founded by Pope Benedict in 2010, implicates the functioning of the department itself as a check on financial wrongdoing. Fortunately, “Pope Francis established the office of auditor general in 2014.” However, the auditor general position was still vacant since 2017, when the occupant “resigned and accused powerful officials of obstructing him.”[6] Given Di Ruzza’s suspension, as well as that of Carlino of the Secretariat of State office, perhaps powerful officials involved in the London real-estate scandal captured the financial watchdog. In short, the Vatican’s internal firewalls had likely failed completely, meaning that the Vatican could not hold itself accountable. This was readily observable to the public in the Vatican’s cover-ups protecting clergy, whether high officials such as Cardinal Law, or the rapist priests themselves, during the sex-abuse scandal.

Finally, in historical perspective, the unbridled greed even at the highest staff levels in the Vatican can be said to have been not sufficiently constrained by Christian economic ethics. In decoupling wealth from the stain of greed, the pro-wealth paradigm is susceptible to wealth from greed. This is not to suggest that a return to the hegemony of the anti-wealth paradigm, which held sway for at least the Christianity’s first millennium (with a last stance amid Europe’s economic (and population) contraction during the plague-infested mid-fourteenth century, after the Commercial Revolution). To say that virtually any profit-seeking and wealth must invariably involve the sin of greed is to make an overgeneralization, but so too is the claim that wealth itself is devoid of greed. I submit that given the power of the Roman Catholic Church due to its membership-size and sheer wealth, even high-ranking clergy are subject to a significant temptation of greed both personally and for their institution. Wealth held collectively is not immune from the greed of members whether religious or not. With the pro-wealth paradigm as a floor, Christianity itself may not be able to proffer a sufficient constraint, especially on the money-changers in the Temple—the Vatican Bank, whose existence itself may instantiate hypocrisy. This may be why the auditor general and the financial watchdog failed as checks.

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon. The related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed, is also available at Amazon.

2. Ibid.

3. Francis Rocca, “A Top Vatican Official Resigns Amid London Real Estate Scandal,” The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2019.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

Religious Violence as Hypocritical

In the movie, Boy Erased (2018), the director of a church’s conversion therapy program invites the immediate family members of one gay boy to hit him with a bible to drive out the underlying demon. The boy subsequently commits suicide. Lest this notion of using violence to remove a sin in the twenty-first century is assumed to lie in the realm of fiction, John Smyth, an Anglican, was accused in 2017 “of subjecting at least 22 teenage boys to savage beatings in his garden shed” at “an elite Christian camp for boys. His intent was “purging them of perceived sins such as masturbation and pride”[1] A Christian charity group oversaw the camp, yet I contend that the camp was not Christian.

The Latin root of charity is caritas, which means human love raised up to loving God, which as Augustine writes, is love. Whereas human love of God is caritas, God’s love is agape, which is self-emptying love. Some theologians have claimed that humans are capable of this selfless love, but Augustine says the taint of original sin is too great for divine love. John Smyth is a poster child for Augustine’s point, even though he doubtlessly thought that he was being pious in purging sins in others (it is doubtful that he savagely beat himself to purge his own sins).

If God is full or perfect being as Aquinas and Leibniz assert in their respective writings, then sin represents less than full or perfect being. Smyth’s claim then is that beating someone is a way of adding more existence to the person, which I submit does not make sense. Moreover, the beatings violate Jesus’ teaching, let the person without sin throw the first stone. Also, being focused on purging the sins of other people overlooks the plank in one’s own eye. Is masturbation such an awful sin, if the instinctual behavior is indeed sin (rather than a matter for biology). So Smyth was not acting as a follower of Christ, and thus as a Christian, even if he believed that Jesus is the Son of God and Savior.

Nevertheless, the Prosperity Gospel holds that a Christian having true belief (i.e., that Jesus is the Savoir) will receive not only soteriological benefits, but also earthly wealth from God. This relatively recent belief comes from Judaism, in which Yahweh promises to make Israel prosperous if it keeps to the covenant. At least through the first millennium of Christianity, the dominant theological attitude toward earthly wealth was negative.[2] The Prosperity Gospel could only take on after centuries in which a pro-wealth paradigm dominated Christianity. At any rate, Smyth’s abhorrent attitude and behavior suggests that having true belief counts for naught if the Christian is acting contrary to Jesus’ preachments and example. This suggests that the person who does not help a detractor or foe when he or she is in need is not a Christian even if the true belief is intact. Allowing help to flow over old and even new wounds, essentially relativizing them, is two degrees of separation from violently going after sins of others.

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[1] Ceylon Yoginsu, “Doubt Cast on When the Archbishop Knew of Abuse,” The New York Times, October 15, 2017.

[2] Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010). As this text is an academic treatise, and thus difficult for non-theologians and expensive, the same idea is in the nonfiction book, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.

Boy Erased

The film, Boy Erased (2018), is a drama that deals in a serious  way with the question of whether homosexuality is a choice, and thus whether conversion therapy is effective or an ideological ruse under the subterfuge of psychology and religion. Directed and adapted to the screen by Joel Edgerton, he could have dived deeper in writing the screenplay by making explicit the contending assumptions and ideas. Surprisingly, nowhere in the film do any of the biblically-oriented religionists quote the applicable verses in the Old Testament or in Paul's letters, or engage in a theological debate. The film could have gone further intellectually than the relatively superficial emphasis on the dramatic narrative. 

The full essay is at "Boy Erased."