"If Biden Becomes President God Is in BIG Trouble". . . So Saith Donald J. Trump
After nearly 1,300 days in office, hardly anything DJT says is surprising. Or so I thought until this past Thursday, August 6, when Boss Tweet, speaking before a group in Ohio, accused former Vice President Joe Biden of “following the radical left agenda,” and claimed that were he to be elected in 2020, he - Biden that is - would “hurt the Bible [and] hurt God.” Furthermore, ‘45 flatly accused the gentleman from Delaware of being “against God.” This from the man who, in 2015, could not name a single Biblical verse when asked which was his favorite, instead claiming it was “very personal.” Could this be the filthiest presidential election in all American history? Actually not . . . and by a long shot. In order to take first place, a presidential election would have to have perfidious untruths spewing forth from both sides . . . not just one. To the best of my recollection, Joe Biden has never been very been terribly skilled at “דוחף שטויות” (Hebrew for “the shoveling of b.s.”) No, if you’re looking for the nastiest, most underhanded of all presidential elections, you would likely have to go back 220 years . . . to the election of 1800, which pitted incumbent President John Adams versus incumbent Vice President Thomas Jefferson.
By 1798 - two years before the next presidential election, Adams and Jefferson - who at one point had been rather close and greatly admiring of one another - were the worst of enemies. Precisely why is a long story. If you are interested in knowing more, I heartily recommend reading Gordon Woods’ Friends Divided. As different in tone, appetite, and personality as any two highly literate gentlemen could be, Adams, Jefferson and their surrogates befouled the political air with the most lethally noxious fabrications and exaggerations in that long-ago presidential election.
At one point Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was "one of the most detestable of mankind.”
On July 4, 1798, a revered congregational minister who was also president of Yale, delivered a ringing condemnation of Jefferson's supposed atheism. In a widely-reprinted sermon, Yale President Timothy Dwight, whom critics sarcastically called "His Holiness Pope Timothy," prophesied the likely consequence of a Jefferson victory: "[T]he Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed in a dance of Jacobin phrensy [sic], our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat." According to Dwight, "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes.".
The fact of the matter was that Jefferson, far from being an “atheist,” was a Deist who could easily read the Bible in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, and even wrote and published a work still in print in 2020 known as The Jefferson Bible. (Deism by the way, holds that God does not intervene with the functioning of the natural world in any way, allowing it to run according to the laws of nature that co* ([he/she] configured when co* created all things.)
Ironically, it was one of Jefferson’s closest friends - James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution - who, repulsed by the religious attack on the Sage of Monticello, created within Article VI which, after requiring all federal and state legislators and officers to swear or affirm to support the federal Constitution, specified that “no Religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In a sense, it is this article - the “No religious test” text, that the current POTUS has so obviously, vulgarly and nastily ignored in attacking his political opponent. Unlike Adams, who was a self-confessed “church-going animal,” Mr. Trump is, without question, a religious illiterate. On the other hand, former Vice President Biden is a lifelong practicing Catholic who regularly attends Mass at St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware. He wears a rosary on his left wrist, a gift his younger son Hunter gave to his older son, the late Beau Biden, after a visit to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. ‘45, on the other hand, has rarely been known to enter a church of any denomination. That ‘45 should aver that Biden is anti-religious and a threat to both the Bible and God is a clear indication that once again, Trump and his advisors are blithely speaking about that which they know nothing. By definition, God, who is both omnipotent and omniscient to those who believe, cannot be susceptible to “BIG trouble.” To place a heavy religious yoke astride the shoulders of his political opponent, POTUS is attempting to keep his Evangelical base firmly in his corner. For reasons not easily understood, Trump has been able to maintain a goodly percentage of that holier-than-thou base despite being a serial liar, an immoralist and a potty-mouthed boor. And although Article VI only bans religious tests for those holding - and not merely running for - high office, one gets the overarching sense that politics must be confined to the temporal - not spiritual or sectarian - realm; otherwise it makes of faith, morality and godlike acts little more than a sordid chapter from Elmer Gantry. As POTUS, ‘45 has surrounded himself with a tight-knit group of pastors and evangelical leaders who heap praise upon him for his socially conservative stances, his judicial appointments and his support for Israel’s government. Trump often invites these pastors to pray and seems to enjoy hearing their protestations of faith. Many of the pastors insist that Trump is a Christian believer. But they - and a vast percentage of their flock - seem not to care a fig that this man they call “a Christian believer” has a track record which falls far, far short of what the Bible preaches and teaches. It has never troubled them that the president has flat out disparaged two of the most religious politicians of our time . . . neither of whom are Evangelical Protestants: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who is a fascinating admixture of ardent Catholic and yiddishe bubbe) and Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who is a devote Mormon. Neither has ever put their individual faith on public display. Many recent presidents, once in office, put together an “ecumenical faith council.” I have, over the years, known several rabbis who served on various presidential councils. When it came Trump’s turn, his council was absolutely 100% devoid members from Catholic, mainline Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or other traditions. Although raised a mainline Presbyterian and married (the 3rd time around) in an Episcopalian Church to Melania, (who is a Catholic), Trump has no time for anyone who is not a born-again Evangelical. Why? Because Evangelicals are as good for his political campaigns as billionaires are for his political fundraising. And by the way, once Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), Chair of the Powerful House Appropriations Committee retires from Congress in January 2021, guess who will once again presume the title of grandmother of the most Jewish grandchildren in the Congress of the United States?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi . . . the only Speaker who also has a soccer field named after her in the State of Israel.
Dear God: may it be your will that all of your children - whether Evangelical Christian, traditional Jew, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, or Jeffersonian Deist, come to recognize that one’s religious faith has nothing to do with secular politics. It is by real deeds - not our verbal creeds - that our real selves come to be known and trusted in the public square.
84 days until November 3, 2020
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone