This is a thing that Eric Trump actually said: “We’re saving God.”
Eric Trump: "We're saving Christianity. We've saving God. We've saving the family unit. We're saving this nation. I mean, DEI is out of the window, Benny. You no longer have Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem. You no longer have Budweiser going woke as hell. All of this is dead."
The idea that Christianity is being saved from diversity, equality, and inclusion is bizarre. Saving America from these three virtues is also strange because virtues are not things one usually needs “saving” from. Eric also seems to be saying that they’re “saving this nation” from the Constitution.
But those claims pale in comparison to the audacious absurdity of “We’re saving God.”
God is not saving us. We do not need saving. God needs saving. By us. And so “we” — the Trump administration — are “saving God.”
Every soteriology — every doctrine of salvation — is wrong, but some are more wrong than others. This one is more wrong than any other I’ve ever heard of.
“We are saving God”? God is in need of salvation, but fortunately for God, we are on the case. We can save God. Without us, God is damned and doomed, but thanks to us, God might just survive.
Or something.
We. Are saving God. We are saving God from what? From God’s sins — God’s sins of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are saving Dei from DEI? Agnus DEI qui tollis peccata mundi?
MAGA-world is riddled with ultra-Calvinists who will attack anyone they perceive as having deviated in any way from a strict Calvinist soteriology. These are the kind of people who refused to sing “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” and who denounced George Beverly Shea as an Arminian heretic for singing “Just As I Am” because it suggests an unseemly degree of human agency in salvation. All of those people — Doug Wilson, Al Mohler, Joel Webbon, etc. — should be asked about this.
But it’s not just Grand Inquisitor types who think of themselves as the guardians of doctrinal correctness who would be offended and bewildered by Trump’s claim here. Tell any normal Christian anywhere that “We are saving God” and they’ll struggle to enumerate, let alone articulate, all of the ways this contradicts everything they believe.
The creeds would have to be completely rewritten to be compatible with the Trumpian theology of “We’re saving God.” Think of all the arguments among different branches of Christianity, every doctrinal dispute about the nature of God, the relationship between God and humanity, eschatology, sin, salvation, sacrament, whatever. Every Christian in every era on every side of every one of those disputes would recoil at the blasphemous nonsense of “We are saving God.”
The most woo-woo UU you can imagine will still step back, suspicious and a little frightened, if you say this to them. I mean, yeah, if you search hard enough, you could probably find some esoteric Neo-post-process-theology speculator who might argue, somehow, that God’s relationship with humanity is, in some fuzzy cosmic sense, mutually salvific, and so just as God is saving all of creation, so too all of creation is participating in “saving God,” or some such goo goo like that. But even that guy would start to sound like Athanasius condemning heretics once he realized that the “we” of “We are saving God” referred specifically to the Trump administration.
Trump recently signed a vague, sweeping, dictatorial “National Security Presidential Memo” directing federal law enforcement to target alleged “domestic terrorists” — a category it described as anyone involved in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” Hemant Mehta summed up one implication of this memorandum as “Trump’s NSPM-7 memo casts critics of Christianity as enemies of the state” and notes how it might be used to target atheists and the non-religious as well as members of every minority religion and sect.
This memo is Very Bad for everyone because in the MAGA mind-set, every other religion is regarded as “anti-Christianity.” Adherents of those religions are not considered people who were raised in their tradition, or who chose their beliefs because they believe them. They are, instead, considered people who rejected Christianity and then glommed onto whatever it is they disingenuously claim to believe solely as an expression of that rejection. Every other religion is viewed, essentially, as unreal and, thus, as the same, with all of the differences between them being treated as meaningless apart from their single shared characteristic of being something deliberately and specifically chosen as a mask for adherents’ explicit, willful rejection of “Christianity.” This includes, of course, not just atheists but every strain of Christianity that is not MAGA Christianity — mainline Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Orthodox, Coptic, the Black church, etc.
And of course it includes Judaism. This entire framework of viewing every other religion as nothing more than a rejection of “Christianity” is, at its core, an antisemitic ideology. The expansion of this “Messiah-rejecting Christ-killers” trope to encompass how MAGA Christians regard every religion means this same hateful exclusion and enemy language is also applied beyond Judaism, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also still applied to Judaism.
So the Friendly Atheist is right that Trump’s memo lumps almost everyone in the category of “anti-Christianity” and therefore in the category of “outlaw terrorist.”
And but still it’s hard for me to imagine anyone expressing anything more extravagantly “anti-Christianity” than someone coming out and saying “We are saving God.”
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