Among the acting president’s most faithful constituencies are evangelical Christians. Some believe Donald Trump was sent by God to be president. A people raised from youth to worship Jesus as king were already primed to accept an earthly one. For some reason unearthly reason, they chose Trump.
After an Atlantic article — confirmed by reports from the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and Fox News — reported that Trump considers those willing to sacrifice their lives for their country “losers” and “suckers,” evangelicals must consider the likelihood that Trump sees their Savior the same way. Their base narrative is that Jesus sacrificed his life in atonement for their sins. The Romans simply carried out the crucifixion. Giving his life on a cross was the culmination of Christ’s mission on Earth.
What a loser. “I don’t get it. What was in it for him?” Trump might say.
Perhaps when Trump tells evangelicals he is one of them he is acting that too. Trump does not believe in sacrifice.
“He who dies with the most toys, wins.”
American Boomers rejected their parents’ notions of sacrifice, Sara Robinson writes on Facebook. Considering the “greed is good” 1980s followed on the heels of the “Me Decade” 1970s and the “do your own thing” 1960s, she might be right. The once ubiquitous “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” bumper stickers certainly suggest so, as does spread of the aberrant theology of the prosperity gospel among Christian megachurches. (Donald surely approves.)
But the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (and Trump’s assessment that military service is for “dopes and babies“) forces us to reconsider our relationship with sacrifice, Robinson posted on Saturday:
All of us have been forced to make massive sacrifices. Beyond nearly 200,000 dead and a million more who will likely never be the same again, we’ve halted careers, shuttered businesses, taken over the education of our kids, masked up, stayed home, canceled trips and parties and weddings, scrounged office space in our basements and closets, taken back household tasks — it seems like every day demands another damn sacrifice. And we’re doing it for each other — so our neighbors live, the numbers in our county and state stay low, the hospitals don’t get swamped, and all the people we newly realize we’re so dependent on — or who are dependent on us — can continue to stay well.
We aren’t using the word yet, but we all sure as hell know in our hearts now what sacrifice means. We are, for the first time in about 60 years, remembering that there are circumstances where the rights of the community can and should override the rights of individuals. (And we are increasingly furious at the selfish individualist stragglers who refuse to get with the program of communal safety.) We’re not happy about it, but this is what the moment demands. So we do it. Not because it makes us richer or raises our status or wins us love. But because it’s necessary. And because it’s the right thing to do.
As we adjust to this new ethic, it’s natural that we’d put some extra focus on the institution that’s been keeping the flame of sacrifice alive all this time. My feed today is full of friends remembering their family members who served. With each story, I hear them saying to themselves: “I come from people whose lives had meaning because they sacrificed for the good of this nation. I am made of that same stuff, and I am capable of the same sacrifices. And on the strength of their example, I will rise to this moment, too.”
We’re obviously furious with Trump because we can’t ignore it: he’s spent four years continually demeaning the sacrifices of this country’s many generations of heroes. But, perhaps less consciously, we’re also enraged because if he can’t see those very publicly-recognized sacrifices — the monuments to which dot every block of Washington, DC — there’s no way he even registers the hard sacrifices every one of us has been making this year. If he can’t understand why your dad left his family to go to war — or why we all hush with reverence at that memory — it’s damn certain that the sacrifices you make this week to scrape up the September rent and keep the kids fed do not register with him at all. If he can’t understand the meaning of the 209,000 who died in the aftermath of the Normandy invasion, the thousand deaths we’ll sustain today will be completely beyond him.
We are entering an era when much more will be asked of us as a country. This pandemic has exposed weaknesses in every aspect of our economy and culture that will require drastic efforts over the next decade to fix. We are on the cusp of a national re-making on a scale not seen since the 1940s. I have zero doubt that we will be better and stronger for it in the long run; but the years ahead are going to require more adaptation, more irrevocable loss, and yes — a great deal more sacrifice for the greater good, which is rapidly becoming the thrumming bass line that underscores every beat of this New Normal we’re learning to dance to.
Sacrifice, doing for others, not military strength, is at the heart of the gospel evangelicals will again speak of with reverence this morning.
At the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami in January, Trump boasted about the drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad. Michael David Layne, 62, an Army veteran who attends King Jesus church, equated Trump’s death-from-above assassination with “strong leadership” and “solid Christian values.”
“He might be a little rough around the edges for some people,” Layne said, “but he says it like it is, and if some of the things he says or the actions he takes upset some people it doesn’t make him less of a man of God.”
Considering that Trump considers risking one’s life for one’s country for losers, Christian veterans might ask themselves whether their earthly king thinks their heavenly one is a loser too.
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