Words: Liv Tolson (she/her)
When the Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde delivered her homily at the inaugural prayer service on the January 21st 2025, she concluded with a direct address to the president, urging him to ‘have mercy upon’ the millions of Americans predicted to be discriminated against, and indeed criminalised, with the advent of a new far-right regime. Budde’s plea for sympathy with LGBTQIA+, non-Christian, and immigrant Americans embittered Donald Trump, who took to TruthSocial to slander the bishop as a ‘radical-left Trump hater.’
This is not the first time the bishop and the president have come to blows. In 2020, Budde condemned Trump’s posing for a photo, Bible held aloft, outside of a church in Washington. The area had been cleared of peaceful demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd moments beforehand. Budde decried the act as ‘antithetical’, since the president used ‘sacred symbols’ to present himself as a ‘spiritual authority’, whilst upholding positions which scorn the principles of the very book he held in his hands.
From an affair with a sex worker, to allegations of sexual harassment, to countless instances of wilfully spreading misinformation, Trump’s violation of these biblical prerequisites is well-documented. Why, then, are he and other American Conservatives obsessed with promoting an ideology that they will not (and cannot in good faith) follow? Right-wing commentator Nick Fuentes repeatedly proclaims that the USA is a “Christian country” (never mind that the US has always been secular), and must be preserved as such. In an interview on the Victory Network, multimillionaire televangelist Kenneth Copeland alleged that the Devil put Muslims in Congress. There are 3 reasons for the seemingly gaping inconsistencies between this interpretation of scripture and Budde’s:
- Christian doctrine lends legitimacy to otherwise discriminatory or nonsensical views.
- Christian values attract white working-class and religion-oriented Hispanic voters.
- The promotion of Christianity can conceal white supremacy.
When Fuentes says he wants to live in a society where ‘we’re all Christians’, he doesn’t appreciate that 70% of immigrants living in the USA are also Christians. As the new HR executive at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Stephanie Holmes, calls for an interpretation of DEI that ‘aligns with our faith’, she means to scrap anti-discrimination policies in the workplace – not to promote loving thy neighbour as thyself. When Musk expresses outrage on Twitter that transgender day of visibility was scheduled on Easter Sunday, he isn’t outraged in the name of Jesus.
Here, Christianity is manipulated to legitimise hateful views. A Baudrillardian simulation is endorsed by puritanical bigots who read between its lines of scripture and call themselves children of God. Most racists, naturally, don’t want to come across as racists. The argument for preserving “Christian culture” is far more palatable than, say, ‘white is right’. In framing the “Great Replacement” as an issue of culture and nationhood rather than race, the exact same rhetoric we balked at with the Unite the Right rally in 2017 is repackaged in St John the Baptist’s hair shirt and gulped down by the discontented masses.
Whilst it is ironic that fascists hide behind the iconography of a bastion of equality, the greatest irony may still be to come. As powerful men start revoking our supposedly inalienable rights, expecting the advent of apocalypse within our lifetimes isn’t unreasonable. Nor is predicting that a new age of theism comes with it – we may be left praying to the same Gods in whose name the world was torn down.
Resorting to God for strength and guidance is an indispensable step of despair in times of crisis. Despite having been raised an atheist, everyday for months after my grandma died I would get the early bus to my CofE school to pray in the chapel, stringing religious-sounding words together. I wanted to know that she was okay. And no one Earthly had answers for me. The Bible has appropriate vocabulary for the end of the world in spades: as seen in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, where characters anticipating Armageddon ask for grace from God. But McKay offers more than this. He is reminding the audience of the comfort inherent in the belief of a higher power. However, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the old man does not necessarily put stock in a creator. He saves his faith for humanity: he says of his son ‘if he is not the word of God then God never spoke’.
So will we, when the world is brought down by fascists clutching blood-soaked rosaries, have to stoop to praying to the God who supposedly got us here? Or will there be one God who lives on, legacy untarnished? The God within us all?
