“If My people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” So says the verse which President Trump read from the Bible (pre-recorded, of course, presumably because he needed several takes to get it right) for the America Reads the Bible event.
Fresh off his tantrum about the Pope, Trump is out there once again touting a passage he does not understand, from a testament which has ten commandments, at least eight of which he has broken by my reckoning. (No other gods before me, not making graven images, keeping the Sabbath holy, not killing, not committing adultery, not stealing, not bearing false witness, and not coveting his neighbor’s wife. We’ll let him slide on taking the Lord’ name in vain and honoring his father and mother.)
The irony is palpable. First, the book of second Chronicles was not written to 21st Century Americans, who, despite being wicked, lacking humility, and suffering from a blight on the land, can hardly be labeled as “God’s People.” In fact, the passage the President read wasn’t even written in this millennium, or the prior millennium – not even after the birth of Christ. It was most likely written around the middle of the first millennium BC, directed to the ancient Israelites, who at that point, weren’t even living on the land God had supposedly given to them, having been exiled after it was conquered by Persia. Modern Evangelical Christians should view the verse in its appropriate context, as part of the covenant God made with His people prior to the coming of Christ. America is not a Christian nation, despite what the President and his misguided band of cultists would want us to believe.
Secondly, if the President insists upon reading a passage about humility, seeking God and turning from wicked ways to heal the land as some kind of “gotcha” for why the country is suffering from inequality, inflation, and intolerance, he should lead by example. There is no one who needs to heed this message more than the leader of a country desperately seeking healing for a wound that has by now grown infected and gangrenous. Amputation of the head is the only cure for the body at this point. If America were a flatworm, we’d have to chop it up and burn most every piece, praying that the one segment which is untainted will somehow grow back whole again. He has no humility. He is without a doubt wicked. And there is no chance he has ever sought the face of the Almighty.
American exceptionalism is dead. American empire is over. Team America World Police is a force decimated by donuts and heart disease. None of this has anything to do with God. It has everything to do with the selfish, corrupt, greedy, indifferent and grasping fingers of 1-percenters like the President who want to shift the blame so they don’t have to suffer the inevitable consequences. We’ve let them escape punishment for too long already, and we can’t let them gaslight us into thinking its our fault for not living up to the holy expectations of the Old Testament deity.
