Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:13 pm
As announced the other day, Bible in hand, Donald Trump strutted out before the crowd gathered to hear him at the Values Voter Summit and proclaimed he is a Christian.
“Most importantly,” he said, “I brought my Bible,” and lifted it up for all to see.
Given what followed, you can be sure he is not very familiar with its contents, as he spent the next 20 minutes on his usual spiel, showing a complete lack of humility and loads of hubris, and an utter disparagement of everyone who is not Donald Trump.
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Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
“I’m going to be the greatest jobs president God ever created,” he boasted. You know, because boasting is so very godlike. Listening to him, you’d have thought the book he carried out was about him, and not God. Because he didn’t spend much time on God. It was a prop, pure and simple, no different than Clint Eastwood’s chair.
In fact, he got so far off the subject of being a Christian that he felt the need to reassure the crowd that he really is:
“People were not sure I was a nice person,” he said, “and I am. I am. I am. I am. I’m a giving person. I believe in God, I believe in the Bible. I’m a Christian. I have a lot of reasons. I love people.”
And he showed just how much he loves people by attacking Marco Rubio, He earned the first boos of his campaign when he referred to Rubio as “this clown,” telling the crowd “I’ve been so nice to him, so nice…”
He closed by saying the Bible (again held aloft) is “the key” but how much of a key is it if he fails to obey some of its most basic strictures, like turning the other cheek? Later, when questioned by reporters, Trump continued the attack, calling Rubio a “baby” who is simply “using me for publicity.
Pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz did his best to re-purpose those boos as a new species of boo, “boos of agreement,” in a tweet:
I’m the last person you’d expect to defend Donald Trump, but these sound like boos of agreement, not against him.
http://t.co/V4Fu60UEzh
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 25, 2015
But Red State was having none of it. Nor were any of the mainstream media outlets.
On the other hand, he gave a not-so-ringing endorsement of Kim Davis by telling Huffington Post in an interview Friday, “I haven’t been opposed to her stand and I think it’s fine,” he said.
Trump has claimed he is very popular with Evangelicals, but Gallup has exposed the holes in that assertion, and his new national co-chairman had recently questioned his “moral center” in emails.
Trump is going to have a difficult time convincing many people that he is a genuine Christian. Of course, fake Christians will be more than satisfied with his bona fides (his Bible) because they have not read the book either. Simply having it, pointing to it, invoking it or holding it, has a magical power all its own.
Without doubt, many Evangelicals are leery of Donald Trump. Progressive Christians are not fooled at all. His performance Friday will satisfy the bigots for whom the Bible is simply a weapon, but the more religious type of Evangelical will have problems with Trump, and doubts he did nothing to dispel Friday, about his sincerity.
In the end, he did nothing at the Values Voter Summit to convince them that he is one of them. The very fact that he felt the need to wave a Bible and proclaim himself one (when have you ever seen Obama do that?) shows that Trump himself understands the extent of the gulf between them.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
