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In 2016 the Donald Trump’s retrograde positions had electoral support to bring him to power. At the beginning of his campaign to win the presidential candidacy, the businessman was considered by the main American media to be almost a lunatic with no chance of reaching the White House.
Eight years ago, Trump failed to win a majority of votes among those who voted, but the convoluted way in which the presidential election is decided in the United States (where the winner in a given state takes all the electoral votes and the opponent is left empty-handed) resulted in the rise to power of a white supremacist who captivated millions of people with speeches in which he placed the blame for the country’s economic decline on the backs of undesirables who, according to him, misappropriated the jobs that should have gone to Americans.
In the US, the religious views of candidates for elected office are very important to a large part of voters. In 2016, 81 percent of white evangelicals who went to the polls voted for Trump. Four years later, the percentage decreased, but the majority supported the re-election of the figure.
Trump’s messianism continues to captivate those who see in him a supposed return to the origins of American greatness. Trump’s messianic discourse rests on reiterating that it is governed by the Bible, which he sporadically cites to support his political positions. It is precisely in the field of biblical interpretation that Trump’s opponents are disputing the validity of the elementary discourse he spouts everywhere.
Anti-Trump Protestant/Evangelical African-American activists stress that the Bible has been a tool of emancipation throughout the history of their people. It is no coincidence that white slaveholders banned reading the Bible or expurgated the work of dangerous passages, such as those that speak of equality of the human race, workers’ rights, denunciations by the prophets of structural sin turned into a system, and that there will only be peace if justice reigns. So now the struggle is semantic and if we want to dismantle Trump’s colonialism, we must necessarily put an anti-colonial reading of the Bible before it.
The above has been well explained by Allen Dwigth Callahan in The Talking Book. African Americans and the Biblewhere it initially states: African Americans are the children of slavery in America. And the Bible, like no other book, is the book of the children of slavery.
in which they found liberating texts. Another African-American theologian, Esau MacCaulley, argues that The slaveholders’ arrangement of the biblical material bore false witness about God. This remains a truth in our day that challenges our commitment to refugees, the poor, and the disinherited.
( Reading While Black. African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope ).
One of the traditions of African-American churches is the sermon that engages its listeners, includes them, and challenges them to make different commitments and take certain actions. The above characteristics were present in the preaching and political speeches of the Baptist pastor Martin Luther King. Toni Morrison uses this expository heritage and notably includes it in two of her best-known novels: Song of Solomon and Beloved.
On the opposing front to unmask Trump’s vociferous religiosity and his instrumentalization of the Bible are also sectors of white Protestants/evangelicals, who also direct their efforts to dismantle the religious arguments of what they call nationalist and supremacist Christianity. This is the direction of the research of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history at Calvin University, author of a book translated into Spanish in which she deconstructs the fallacies of Trump and his fervent followers: Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nationIn his most recent book, veteran writer and activist Jim Wallis uncompromisingly affirms the falsity of the whitewashed Gospel and calls for its outright rejection.
Evangelical opponents of Trump are in line with the prophet Isaiah (58:6-10), who denounced hollow religiosity: “The fast that I have chosen, is it not to break the chains of injustice and undo the straps of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every bond? Is it not fasting to share your bread with the hungry and to shelter the homeless and poor, to clothe the naked and not to neglect your neighbor? If you do this, your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will come quickly; your righteousness will open the way for you, and the glory of the Lord will follow you. You will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry out, and he will say, ‘Here I am. ’” If you cast aside the yoke of oppression, the pointing finger, and the malicious tongue, if you devote yourself to helping the hungry and satisfying the need of the destitute, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will be like noonday.”
