Catholic and Enjoying It!
It’s not the stupid airport gaffe. It’s not even the massive historical illiteracy. It’s the pagan Mars worship.
As Trump retold the story of the Pacific War, he said this: “Nobody could beat us. Nobody could come close.” When he paid tribute to the Air Force, he said this: “As President Roosevelt said, the Nazis built a fortress around Europe, ‘but forgot to put a roof on it.’ So we crushed them all from the air.” He added: “No enemy has attacked our people without being met by a roar of thunder, and the awesome might of those who bid farewell to Earth, and soar into the wild blue yonder.” Bringing the story to more recent times: “The Army brought America’s righteous fury down to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and cleared the bloodthirsty killers from their caves.”
Were these wars right or just? Why were they fought? What were their outcomes? Except for the mentions of “freedoms” sprinkled randomly through the text, those questions went unconsidered. Instead, Trump would periodically ad-lib “What a great country!” after this or that mention of power and violence. America is great because it crushes all before it. Altering for circumstances, it was a speech that could have been given by Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib. A great country is one that is feared by its enemies, that can inflict more devastating destruction than any other.
How did the United States get so strong and fearsome? Trump revealed some assumptions about that, too. He said of America’s “warriors”:
They guard our birthright with vigilance and fierce devotion to the flag and to our great country. Now we must go forward as a nation with that same unity of purpose. As long as we stay true to our cause, as long as we remember our great history, as long as we never ever stop fighting for a better future, then there will be nothing that America cannot do.
Devotion. Unity. History. Fighting.
But not: Democracy. Justice. Individuality. Peace.
From time to time, one of Trump’s more devout speechwriters will try to insert references to God into the president’s mouth. Those references never sound natural from the least spiritual president in the nation’s history. They were, fascinatingly, all but absent from this speech commemorating the independence of a nation, in the apt phrase of G. K. Chesterton, with the soul of a church. Instead, there was only vainglorious boasting: See our wealth, see our power, see our glorious triumphs over the mounded corpses of our enemies. We will always win, because we always fight.
It was as if the whole ceremony fulfilled Rudyard Kipling’s foreboding of how empires end:
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe …
That was how the American president spoke on this 243rd commemoration of a nation that began its independence with a solemn acknowledgement of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” No non-American could watch that spectacle at the Lincoln Memorial and feel that America stood for anything good or right or universal. Power worshipped power, for its own sake.
Christianity does not exist to make America a Christian country and the fate of America is ultimately a matter of indifference except insofar as the country can help or hurt the work of the Holy Spirit in turning human beings into saints. For a long time, many Americans had a healthy sense of civic piety which surrendered the good of their country to the higher good of the Christian ideal of love of God and love of neighbor. They could praise, without irony or sarcasm, the idea that “as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”. They could, without sarcasm, say “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” They saw America as good under God and believed that the mere exercise of raw power without reference to the Good was dangerous.
There are still people who think that, of course. But they are emphatically not the one-third of Americans who parrot and defend the sociopathic Mob Boss whose speech celebrated lawless raw power as his sole definition of American greatness. And the most immense tragedy of that is that those people, in overwhelming majorities, self-identify not merely as Christian, but as the very best Christians in the world, fit to sit in judgment of all the rest of their fellow Christians (including the pope and the bishops) and kick them all out of the Church.
This transformation of white conservative Christianist Trump supporters into passionate Mars worshippers, cheering the mere raw exercise of force and power for their own sake, is part of the ongoing demonstration of the fact that the gravest danger that has always faced the Church is not persecution, but seduction.
Do not fear him who can kill the body. Fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell. – Jesus of Nazareth
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