Yes, I read the RNC Christmas Greeting.
I read the line everybody’s up in arms about:
Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King.
I’m just not 100% sure that line deliberately puts forth Donald Trump as a Christ figure. I think it’s sillier than that.
I am a person who has listened to many bad sermons, and this statement reads like the quintessential bad sermon to me. The kind where the priest or deacon is up in the pulpit desperately trying to say something clever that links the Bible text to their everyday lives, but they’re just not up to the task and they end up with either heresy or gibberish. Usually it’s a function of the cleric presuming that his congregation is stupider than he is, while not being the smartest tack himself. I’ve already mentioned that I sat through a sermon where the priest finished with something along the lines of, “And, you know, when you go out to eat, and you go to pray? You know? And the person you’re with doesn’t like it, he doesn’t like it, they don’t like that we’re doing that, and they roll their eyes? Well, that’s persecution. That’s a persecution we have to endure. And our reward will be great in Heaven.”
Another time, at the school I went to for undergrad, I heard a Protestant preacher explain that the beginning of the Book of Esther can be likened to the current president of the college, a stodgy-looking older man named Brent, ordering his wife to dance naked for all the faculty and then beheading her when she refused.
And once I had the aesthetics of a perfectly sumptuous Extraordinary Form Mass spoiled by a priest stammering a homily that started with “So, today we celebrate a Solemn High Mass for Christ the King. Now, in this country, it might be hard of you to think of Christ the King. Maybe you could think of Him as Christ the President, or Christ the General, or Christ the Household Coordinator.” No one sitting in the back could keep from giggling. And before you ask, yes, that priest was employed as head of student households at the time.
That statement about Christ the President and Household Coordinator brings me quite smoothly back to what I was trying to say about the RNC statement: I don’t think that Mr. Priebus was actually, consciously, deliberately proclaiming to all the world that Donald Trump was Jesus and a king. He was trying to compare the Gospel to our everyday lives and it just came out like a Fruedian slip, because Mr. Priebus privately thinks about everyday life and politics that way– and a bad sermon always tells you more about the preacher than about God.
Still, it leaves us with a question that I’ve heard going around, lately: Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?
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