On the need to dissent from Trump’s new theology
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| Source: The Guardian |
Prologue
In recent years I have often brought before you two quotations which have stood as reminders about why I say some of the political-theological things I do in my addresses and thoughts for the day.
The first is the insight of the British philosopher, Peter Thompson, who, in 2009, noted that twenty-first-century liberals need to be acutely aware that,
“. . . religion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparently inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain” (Introduction to Ernst Bloch’s “Atheism in Christianity”, Verso Press 2009, p. ix).
And the second is an insight of the German Jurist and Political Theorist, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), who, as a member of the Nazi Party, was an acute observer, analyst and dangerous exploiter of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. In 1922 he wrote:
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” (Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty, MIT Press, 1985, p. 36).
And both these warnings, for I think they are warnings, inform my thought for the day here.
On the need to dissent from Trump’s new theology
I’d like to begin this thought for the day proper with a short piece written by Andrew Carey called “(Over) Determination and the need for mist,” in which he writes about those occurrences which cause us spontaneously to ask, “Yes, but what does it mean?”
“It’s a common enough occurrence. Something happens that feels significant. You know the sort of thing: an owl hoots at the moment you read the last words of an old friend; a scarab beetle taps at the window at a crucial moment in a therapy session. If you are a child of the European Enlightenment, you are trained to dismiss the idea that this occurrence can have any meaning. If you lean towards the magical, you may persuade yourself that the universe has taken time to send you a tailor-made message. If you study Indigenous wisdom or the wilder ends of systems thinking, you may allow that the occurrence lets you create your own meaning in a less than random way. Whatever. These occurrences continue to occur.”
OK. Hold these words of Carey’s in your mind as we now turn our thoughts to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, 2024 and, in particular, to the extraordinary and uncanny photograph taken by Evan Vucci showing Trump, with blood smeared across his face from his bleeding ear, his clenched fist raised defiantly heavenward whilst standing beneath the Stars and Stripes, and surrounded by five Secret Service personnel, including one woman, who were still attempting to protect him from any further shots.
So, what does this occurrence, captured in Vucci’s remarkable photo, mean?
One thing we already know is that those who lean towards the magical — the millions of Make America Great Again (MAGA) believers in Trump — have already interpreted this occurrence as being a tailor-made message sent to them by God saying that Trump is God’s chosen leader. And this meaning of the occurrence is not only held by millions of MAGA foot-soldiers, but by some of the movement’s very senior figures. So, for example, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has said “God protected President Trump;” Speaker Mike Johnson has said Trump’s survival was “miraculous,” a sign of God’s work that he then compared to George Washington staying alive during the Revolutionary War; Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader, said on Fox News that “God’s hand of protection” was on Mr. Trump; and Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, has said that Trump was protected by “the armor of God.”
Now, you and I, as children of the European Enlightenment, are going to look at this interpretation and say, in considerably less polite terms than I’m going to put it here, that this is arrant nonsense, and that it was simply the chance concatenation of events that caused the bullet to miss Trump. God was nowhere to be found in this, and we know he simply got lucky and so dodged the bullet — as all of us, either metaphorically or actually, have at some point in our lives dodged a “bullet.”
But saying this — and firmly believing it, as I do — this does not, at the same time, mean this occurrence has no meaning, is meaningless. To claim this would be to be as utterly deluded as are those who claim the occurrence was a tailor-made message from God. And here we can see we have arrived at one of those moments that Carey refered to when writes about hearing an owl hoot at the moment we read the last words of an old friend, or when a scarab beetle taps at the window at a crucial moment in a therapy session.
As you have just heard, Carey finishes his short piece by saying, “if you study Indigenous wisdom or the wilder ends of systems thinking, you may allow that the occurrence lets you create your own meaning in a less than random way.” In both these ways of thinking you will find that context, and the ever-present complex inter-weaving and intra-action of contexts, is what generates meanings in ways that are far from random, and far from being able to be dismissed as merely meaningless, chance occurrences.
Now, in what I think is a quite brilliant and insightful — if also profoundly disturbing and upsetting — piece, the Guardian’s art correspondent, Jonathan Jones, alert us to just these kinds of meanings that can be found in the occurrence summed-up in the aforementioned photo by Evan Vucci.
Here are just four important, relevant paragraphs from Jones’ piece:
“We see in this picture what a potent political bricoleur [Trump] is, borrowing images and rhetoric from any source and combining them in new, lucid collages with changed meanings. In this case, its meaning is given by the context, and that is a former US president with blood on his face in a huddle of protective agents under a billowing US flag. The flag and fist together are what make this picture so powerful: Trump reaches upward to make himself the embodiment of a wounded yet defiant America.
Remarkably, through a magical cocktail of chance and Vucci’s excellent eye, this scene with the close-knit human group under the stars and stripes echoes Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of US Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima in 1945. Both pictures portray an embattled collectivity with the stars and stripes triumphant above them. A similar scene was invented by Emanuel Leutze in his 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. This photograph joins those timeless patriotic images. It would not be the same without Old Glory. The American flag is the best-designed in the world, its abstract beauty striking and poignant in any setting. Here it is surrounded by violence and fear, as in the US national anthem: Trump makes his defiant call to fight on with the star-spangled banner perfectly situated parallel to his fist.
Yet the heart of this picture’s meaning can be summed up in one word: blood. And the connotations of that go deeper than politics or patriotism. Christian supporters of Trump won’t be slow to see his survival as mystical. And they will be right, at least from the perspective of art history. Whatever else this scene may be, it is, at the iconographic level, religious. It is almost literally a resurrection. Trump has risen up from below the podium where he’d hidden, as if he were Christ rising from the tomb. In great paintings of that central Christian moment, such as Matthias Grünewald’s spooky, perturbing vision of a triumphant Jesus in the Isenheim Altarpiece [on the right of altarpiece in its second, open form], there is blood. Grünewald’s risen Christ shows the bloody spear wound in his side, the bloody nail holes in his hands, just as in this picture we can see Trump’s gory ear and the crimson blood on his cheek.
Trump truly appears to be giving his blood here, a sacrifice for America. Like Jesus, he survives the sacrifice and rises again. Yet that resurrection is combined with details typical of the way earlier moments in the story of the Passion are depicted in art: the Secret Service agents surrounding him resemble the community of Christ’s close followers and supporters who lovingly tend his body in paintings like Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, or Caravaggio’s The Entombment in the Vatican. Uncannily, there is even a female agent passionately holding on to Trump like the Virgin Mary in such Biblical masterpieces.”
[You can, and I think really should, read the whole of Jones’ article at the following link:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/15/trump-presidency-shooting-image-assassination-attempt-art-critic]
So this picture, this occurrence, is utterly saturated with meaning, and no amount of European Enlightenment-style, rational thinking will ever be able to desaturate it to the point where we can safely dismiss it as an illustration of “mere chance,” and then go on to ignore it because we think that, ultimately, in some cosmic sense, it is meaningless. Please trust me on this one, this occurrence, and this iconic image, is not meaningless and must not be ignored by us.
And, although from our own European Enlightenment perspective, we need to continue to insist that this occurrence contains no tailor-made message from God being sent to Trump, the Republican Party, the millions of MAGA footsoldiers, or to anyone else accross the world, we also need to be keenly alert to the ways in which this picture IS profoundly meaningful, and meaningful in a profoundly religious way.
It may be that, as one of the historic dissenting English churches, with deep connections to liberal religion in the US, in Vucci’s photograph we now have here before us an iconic image of the kind of theology from which we will have no choice but profoundly and vigorously to dissent, and then, bravely, to resist by finding ways to present to the world a very different kind of liberal, creative, inquiring and free religious and spiritual vision and iconography.
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