Power and Exploitation

Faith, hypocrisy, and the dangers of following a false prophet

Donald has been even more erratic than usual this week, which is saying something, launching us into an illegal, unconstitutional, and unauthorized conflict with Iran and leaving everyone, including his own allies, waiting for his next move. But now he's invoking a new power in order to excuse his behavior — a God he does not believe in. Donald shocked the world by dropping bombs on Iran on Saturday after claiming two days earlier that he'd take two weeks to think about how to proceed. In his speech after launching the unprovoked attack, he invoked God multiple times:

“I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God. I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel. And God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

The backlash was swift. First of all, invoking religion to justify any bombing is offensive, but in the context of bombing a Middle Eastern country it smacks of the Crusades. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, took it one step further when, at the end of his remarks, he said “We give glory to God for His providence and continue to ask for His protection.” Whether Hegseth is a genuinely religious person I do not know, and I would prefer government officials not to speak in such terms about missile strikes. But Donald, despite his occasional attempts to pretend otherwise, is not religious at all.

When he was a kid in the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale was hugely popular. Peale was pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in midtown Manhattan and his shallow message of self-sufficiency appealed enormously to my grandfather, Fred. Peale was a charlatan, but he was a charlatan who headed up a rich and powerful church in New York City and he had a message to sell. My grandfather was not a reader, but it was impossible not to know about Peale’s bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. The title alone was enough for Fred, and he decided to join Marble Collegiate Church. He and his family rarely attended, but Fred already had a positive attitude and unbounded faith in his abilities to succeed. He didn't really need to read “the power of positive thinking” in order to co-opt, for his own purposes, the most superficial and self-serving aspect of Peale’s message.

Peale anticipated the prosperity gospel and his doctrine proclaimed that one need only have self-confidence in order to prosper in the way God wants one to. He wrote, “Obstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and well-being. You need to be defeated only if you are willing to be.”

Peale’s view neatly confirmed what my grandfather already thought: he was rich because he deserved to be. Self-doubt was not part of my grandfather's makeup, and he never considered the possibility of his own defeat. Peale also wrote, “It is appalling to realize the number of pathetic people who were hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex.”

Peale’s proto-prosperity preaching actually complimented the scarcity mentality Fred continued to cling to. For him, it was not, “the more you have, the more you can give,” which sounds like an actual tenet of Christianity. No, in my family, the belief was, “the more you have, the more you have.” Financial worth was the same as self-worth. Monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was than everybody else.

If he gave something to somebody else, that person would be worth more and he would be worth less. This is an attitude he would pass on to Donald. What does that say about religion in my family? Starting with my grandfather, the only thing that mattered, the only thing they believed in was money. God did not enter into the equation and never once did I see any sincere professions of faith in God.

Donald has been presented an opportunity by white evangelicals and extremist Catholics in this country to use religion as a prop and to exploit the faith of his followers.

In his own way, he understands that mouthing platitudes about the Bible, a book he has never read, is enough to convince people who are already predisposed to be convinced, that he shares their beliefs and is God’s messenger—if an imperfect vessel for the message.

In 2020 Donald ordered peaceful protestors to be forcibly removed from Lafayette Park just so he could stage a photo op at St. John's Episcopal Church. That's where he held a Bible upside down. Donald and his allies use religion to justify everything they do, no matter how diabolical. It is cynical, it is hypocritical, and quite frankly, it is a grotesque exploitation of the sincere faith of millions of Americans.

Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist who is the U.S. ambassador to Israel, recently posted a bizarre message claiming the decision to attack Iran came down to a conversation between Donald and the God he does not believe in. Huckabee said, “You have many voices speaking to you, sir, but there was only one voice that matters. His voice.” What concerns me is not that God is in direct conversation with Donald because that is nonsense. It is that there are a lot of voices speaking to him and they're all in his head.

As for the strikes on Iran, it was Benjamin Netanyahu Donald was listening to, not God. And anybody who thinks that a Christian or the Jesus Christ depicted in the New Testament would urge any one individual to carry out an unprovoked bombing of another nation is as delusional as the people who continue to think Donald Trump is some kind of holy man.

I have no problem whatsoever with people who don't believe in a higher power, who don't believe in a god, or who don’t subscribe to a religion. I don't. This is America. People are supposed to be able to believe whatever they want. I have a huge problem, however, when somebody as godless as Donald Trump pretends to believe what his followers want him to believe for reasons of political expedience. I have a problem when a heathen like him exploits the belief systems of those who are willing quite literally to lay down their lives for him while he uses their religion as cover so he can continue to go about bombing another country with impunity.

The problem is not that Donald doesn’t believe in God; it's that he's a hypocrite and he is a user. He believes in one higher power only and, in his head, that's him.