“GOD IS NOT YOUR SCAPEGOAT.”
—Father Brown (Mark Williams) in BBC’s Father Brown “The Hammer of God”
Father Brown’s voice has been ringing in my head the last few days as I have tried to process what happened Monday evening when armed security forces routed peaceful protesters in the national capital so that our president could stand in front of St. John’s Episcopal church holding a Bible for a photo-op.
The second commandment given to Moses says, “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God (Ex 20:7, NRS).” We often minimalize this commandment by assuming this is a prohibition on three of the Internet’s favorite letters: OMG. Certainly, the commandment teaches us not to cheapen God’s name, but God didn’t need to waste one of ten commandments on a three-word phrase. Wrongful use of God’s name is any time we use it for our own personal gain rather than for God’s praise.
On Monday evening, the president violated the second commandment on national TV. Protesters demanding basic standards of human dignity for all cleared away by armed security forces. For what? A political photo op—that was then turned into cheap campaign ads. The message seemed to be that responding to peaceful protests for justice with forceful suppression is not just President Trump’s work, but the Lord’s work. As a Christian, I found this deeply offensive.
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington said that had she been informed, she would not have allowed this to occur: “My major outrage was the abuse of sacred symbols and sacred texts. There was no acknowledgment of grief, no acknowledgment of wounds. There was no attempt to heal. The Bible calls us to our highest aspirations, and he used it as a prop.”
But this piece is titled, “America, God is not our scapegoat,” not, “President Trump, God is not your scapegoat.” In one sense we can be grateful to the president for this moment of clarity. If there has been one biblical verse that has defined the president’s political career, it is Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:27: “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” The president, it has been said, has a habit of “saying the quiet part out loud,” and this holds true for his actions on Monday. They were not simply sui generis; instead, they were the perfect distillation of a theme in our shared political life of which all American Christians should be sore ashamed.
Too often we have listened to political leaders who drape the cross, Bible, and Gospel under the flag of the country or party or cause. This has been a dominant theme on the right going back at least to the Moral Majority of the 1970s and was on display again in 2016 when conservative Christians rationalized voting Republican after the Access Hollywood tape by talking about abortion and the Supreme Court.
Before Christian Democrats point the finger, though, it’s worth saying that the only reason that abuses of the second commandment are more common in the Republican Party is because the GOP base is more religiously affiliated. If there was one predictable pattern in the 2020 Democratic nomination presidential debates, it was that the contestants would spend hours assassinating the other party’s and one another’s character before wheelbarrowing out a social justice biblical citation (usually Micah 6:8 or Matthew 25, almost always in the KJV; apparently 1611-English is God’s chosen language). I always wait to see if a candidate will cut through the rancor with an appeal to the humbler James 3. I’m still waiting.
Christian Americans have long suffered our team’s deploying the Bible to fight partisan political skirmishes. And so the Bible is gelded into one voice among many, along with Carrie from Iowa who’s worried about losing her health insurance and Tim from Ohio who is a proud gun-owner.
The results of our American theopolitical blasphemy are deadly. If there’s one thing the Bible is clear on, it is the God-given dignity of human life, from the beginning of the book when male and female are created in the image of God (Gen 1:27), through the stark admonition on Sinai “Do not murder (Ex 20:13),” all the way until the end when people “beyond count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, stand before the throne of the Lamb (Rev 7:9).” And yet, here we are as a country trying to divine whether those people from every tribe really include Republicans or Democrats. And with our abacuses out, trying to calculate if black people’s lives matter as much as white people’s do.
America, God is not our scapegoat. God did not create these problems; we did. And whether you are holding up the Bible as a magical talisman or whether you think the president is the Antichrist, God wants no part of our partisan fiddling as the nation literally is burning. In another time of national crisis, President Lincoln once said, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.” He who delivered the theologically profound Second Inaugural Address knew that discerning “God’s side” is a mammoth task for mortals, one that requires vigilant prayer and repentance. But it’s time we Christians left, right, and center get started. We owe it to the Christ we follow and to the world that God so loves.
James E. Smith is a pastor serving at Trinity Episcopal and St. John’s Lutheran Churches. For comments, questions, or rebuttals, fire off an e-mail at [email protected]. Prosit!
Any views or opinions expressed in “Gutenberg” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
