New Article: “The Bible is Not a Prop, a Church is Not a Photo-Op”: John Hagee and Donald Trump Promote the Muscular Phallic Jesus
David Shasha
“The Bible is Not a Prop, a Church is Not a Photo-Op”: John Hagee and Donald Trump Promote the Muscular Phallic Jesus
I don't want no peace,
I man need equal rights and justice.
I've got to get it! Equal rights and justice.
I really need it! Equal rights and justice.
Just give me my share! Equal rights and justice.
I recently wrote an article on the Snake Oil salesman Jim Bakker and his obscene love for the man he endearingly calls Cyrus Trump:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/ELg2MhGfBZo
Watching what is now going on with the Trump Bible Church stunt, it appears that many Liberal Christians who are speaking out against the Murderer-in-Chief’s Reality TV ham-fisted tactics would do well to read my article. They do not seem to have correctly processed the highly erotic feelings that their Evangelical Christian brethren have for the New Cyrus.
Here is what I said in that article:
When we watch Christian TV today, we see how this literalist reading, rooted in Paul’s abrogation of the Jewish Law, which is replaced with a Faith without Works doctrine, is taken as a precise referent to current events. God is speaking directly to these new “prophets” and they spend a good deal of time linking Trump and the Alt-Right to the Bible.
Whatever Trump says is taken on “faith” as a sign of Jesus Christ’s approbation. Trump is protecting the Church and fighting the Anti-Christ in an eschatological battle.
I also referred to the ways in which Jews have traditionally read the Bible, and contrasted it with Christian eschatological hermeneutics:
It does seem, both in academic and Evangelical circles, that there is a great deal of shapeshifting and hypocrisy when it comes to how Torah is actually dealt with. Certain parts of the Torah are expeditiously deployed or ignored whenever the specific situation seems to require.
What is consistent, however, is the way in which theology and doctrine, especially as it applies to the messianic and the eschatological, are utilized by both groups to undermine Jewish continuity and the integrity of its scriptural heritage.
One of the most important questions to ask in this regard relates to the actual real-time status of Prophecy and Divine Revelation after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE. Does God continue to speak to us directly as the Christians insist, or have the ancient prophetic calls ceased to apply? This would naturally lead us into discussions of theodicy and the perpetual problem of the suffering of innocent people.
Our answer to these thorny questions is rooted in how we read the Hebrew Bible, and whether or not it is a Closed Text that is fixed and unchanging.
The Christians believe that the Christ event ended ongoing hermeneutical investigation and elaboration of the text, while the traditional Jewish view of an Open Text embodied by the Midrashic tradition, is that we must continue to expand on biblical narrative independently of the literal, as I have written in my article “Understanding Midrash”:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/understanding-midrash_b_535249
It is ultimately a question of whether we can continue to increase our knowledge and learn new things through reason and science, as Maimonides believed, or whether we are locked in a temporal prophetic prison that refuses figurative or metaphorical reading.
How we read is as important, if not more important, than what we believe.
But for traditional Christianity doctrine supplants wisdom, faith replaces works.
We continue to see how a literalist understanding of Christian doctrine functions for Evangelicals when it comes to the State of Israel and the purported Second Coming of Jesus Christ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism#Restorationism,_Dispensationalism_and_its_detractors
There has been a lot of blather about Dispensationalism and Supersessionism in Christian Zionist circles:
https://www.globalministries.org/mee_resources_christian_zionism_koshy
That article refers explicitly to John Hagee, one of the leaders in the Christian Zionist movement:
Christian Zionism is grounded on an interpretation of the
Bible that supports the ingathering of all Jews to Israel and their exclusive
claim to the whole land of Palestine based on the gift of the Land to Abraham
and the Jewish people as the “chosen people”. As Don Wagner points out
“Christian Zionists and pre-millennial dispensationalists have a pessimistic
view of history and wait in eager anticipation for the unfolding of a series of
wars and tragedies pointing to the return of Jesus. The establishment of the
state of Israel, the rebuilding of the Third Temple, the rise of the Antichrist
and the buildup of armies poised to attack Israel, are among the signs leading
to the final battle and Jesus’ return. Leading Christian Zionists in Bible
prophecy seek to interpret political developments according to the prophetic
schedule of events that should uphold accordingly”.
Dispensationalist Christianity, an interpretative or narrative framework for
understanding the overall flow of the Bible, teaches that Christianity did not
replace Judaism, but that it restored elements of it. In their view
Christianity did not come into existence to replace Judaism, but to restore it.
This view has surpassed replacement theology as the dominant form of Christian
thought regarding Israel in America. The dispensationalist view of the
Bible is that the Old Testament is foreshadowing for what will occur in the New
Testament and, at the end, Jesus returns to reign on Earth after an epic battle
between good and evil. Israel plays a central role in the dispensationalist
view of the end of the world. That is why 1948 and 1967 mark milestones in
Christian Zionist history.
Pastor John Hagee, a longtime supporter of Israel, heads “Christians United for
Israel” (CUFI), a pro-Israel group established in 2006. Hagee has denounced
replacement theology, and says of Israel: “We believe in the promise of Genesis
12:3 regarding the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. We believe that this
is an eternal covenant between God and the seed of Abraham to which God is
faithful”. Evangelical leader Pat Robertson echoed this statement while on his
tour of Israel during the Israel-Lebanon war, saying, “The Jews are God’s
chosen people. Israel is a special nation that has a special place in God’s
heart. He will defend this nation. So Evangelical Christians stand with Israel.
That is one of the reasons I am here.”
Indeed, it is critically important for them to keep up the “We Love the Jewish People” pretense, otherwise it would make Christian Zionism that much more untenable.
But we know better than to trust the Evangelical okey-doke, as Christian Zionism continues to inexorably expand and go global, at the expense of actual Jews and our religious heritage:
We should keep this in mind when we read the following article from Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom, which is an excellent exposé of John Hagee, written by Hagee himself!
https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/05/31/who-owns-the-land-of-israel/
“Who Owns the Land of Israel?”
Well, for those who read the Hebrew Bible, it is actually quite clear:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/this-land-is-gods-land/
Leviticus 25:23 states it explicitly:
But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.
For those of us who actually believe in God – and apparently Hagee is not one of them – the Holy Land is God’s possession and he has deeded it to the Jewish people.
That land, sadly, has been taken from us on many occasions.
It behooves us all to respect God’s ownership, as we should also respect the people who have lived on that land for centuries – whatever race or religion they happen to be.
Hagee and Adelson are heretics who do not accept the sacred values of Religious Humanism.
It is Hagee’s aggressive messianic eschatology with its apocalyptic distortions of classical rabbinic doctrine on Exile and Restoration that is behind Trump’s Reality TV cartoon version of religion.
We have seen the DC protests in all their vigor, and learned that the Secret Service escorted Lysol to the bunker in the White House basement:
https://apnews.com/a2326518da6b25b4509bef1ec85f5d7f
As time passed and the Murderer-in-Chief felt increasingly emasculated, he worked up a plan:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-st-johns-church-bible.html
Here is how it was engineered and carried out:
People who gathered outside the White House to protest police brutality spent Monday waving signs and screaming for justice. They watched as police officers and National Guard units flooded Lafayette Square, delivering on a threat made by President Trump. And just before the city’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect, they were hit with flash-bang explosions and doused with tear gas.
It was because the president, who spent part of the weekend in a secure bunker as protests roiled, wanted to have his picture taken holding a Bible at a battered church just beyond the gates.
That church, St. John’s — the so-called Church of the Presidents because every one since James Madison has attended — had been briefly set ablaze as the protests devolved on Sunday evening. After Mr. Trump’s aides spent much of Monday expressing outrage over the burning of a place of worship, Hope Hicks, a presidential adviser, eventually hatched a plan with others at the White House to have the president walk over to the building, according to an official familiar with the events.
As Mr. Trump delivered a speech in the Rose Garden vowing to send the military to states where governors could not bring rioting under control but calling himself “an ally of all peaceful protesters,” the sound of explosions and the yells of demonstrators could be heard. After receiving repeated warnings to disperse before the city’s curfew, the crowd was tear-gassed.
Mr. Trump began his walk to the church at 7:01 p.m. for a photo session that lasted about 17 minutes. On his way over, after protesters had been driven from the park, he was trailed by a group of aides, including Attorney General William P. Barr. Mr. Barr had strolled to the edge of the police line to observe the crowd in the minutes before the tear-gassing began.
He walked alongside Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and Ivanka Trump, his eldest daughter and senior adviser. Ms. Trump was wearing a mask, one of the few visible reminders on Monday that the administration was in the middle of battling a public health crisis. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, Ms. Hicks and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, were also among the cadre of aides.
As police sirens blared in the background, Mr. Trump, his lips set in a thin line, stood with his back to the boarded-up, graffiti-laden facade of the buttermilk yellow church.
He cradled a Bible, bouncing it in his hands as if testing its weight.
“Is that your Bible?” a reporter yelled.
“It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump responded, and hoisted up the book so reporters could see.
Perhaps more than anything else we have seen since Inauguration Day 2017, the parade of lawlessness en route to the St. John’s Church was the most naked display of Banana Republicanism yet.
We would expect nothing less from the modern-day Roy Cohn Posse:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/cohn/davidshasha/B9jIsA-FH4U/-ksETW8mCQAJ
We now live in a country whose leaders, with a nihilistic Attorney General at the very head of the pack, actively hate its citizens, and who have no fidelity to our Constitution:
Shoot at them like dogs:
Even the St John’s Church clergy:
And threaten to illegally call in the military against your own citizens:
Trump during the hastily announced address Monday evening said he would mobilize “all available resources, civilian and military” in order to crack down on protests that have popped up nationwide over the death of Floyd, an unarmed black man who was killed in police custody one week ago after a white police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes. Trump threatened to dispatch troops to states and cities if local leaders do not sufficiently crack down on the demonstrations.
It was a display that Americans usually see in other countries; countries living under tin-horn dictators:
Indeed, this is how very low we have sunk:
Numerous scholars have long said that Trump has authoritarian tendencies, and have been alarmed by the ways in which the president has sought to exploit the coronavirus pandemic, and the nationwide protests over the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of police, for his own political benefit.
The tear-gassing of peaceful protesters and threat to use the military against US citizens is "frightening behavior," Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College with expertise in democracy, populism, and fascism, told Insider. But it's also not out of line with Trump's previous antics, Berman added, which appear to be motivated "by a belief that the world is divided into 'friends and foes,' rather than people with legitimate differences over policy."
"Once someone is considered a 'foe' rather than merely a political opponent, it becomes easy to anathematize and use methods of questionable legality and even violence against them," Berman said.
Echoing these sentiments, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton told Insider that Trump's "current language seems to me to constitute more of the same bluster and aggressivity that we have seen all along."
"But the tense circumstances of the present moment give Trump's current bluster greater resonance. He seems to fear most of all being considered weak or conciliatory, so he is taking an aggressive line that he thinks will make him look strong to his base. He is putting his image ahead of any effort to provide constructive leadership," Paxton, author of "The Anatomy of Fascism," added.
Trump in recent days has likened the protesters with terrorists and called on governors to "dominate" them. Last week, the president echoed an infamous segregationist, George Wallace, in tweeting that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
The president was virtually absent as a leader in response to the unrest as it reached disturbing heights over the weekend, hiding in a White House bunker and tweeting away. When he finally emerged to make his first national address on the disarray on Monday, Trump threatened US citizens with a type of force rarely seen in democratic countries, prompting allusions to Tiananmen Square from Democratic senators.
In an otherwise desultory column “Crisis in the Liberal City”, which allows him to repeat his very tired Left-Right moral equivalence nonsense, Ross Douthat does characterize Trump in a crisply trenchant fashion:
Trump’s administration is Washington-based performance art for Americans who know the capital primarily as a television backdrop, a festival of lib-owning and deep-state bashing — and as of last night, bizarre tear-gas-and-the-Bible photo ops — that doesn’t even try to master the government it notionally runs. His reeling, staggering style of governance — once blackly comic, now deadly serious and disastrous — reflects not just the incapacity of its leader but also the insularity of his coalition, which doesn’t encompass enough of America’s diversity to claim a real democratic mandate or include enough of the administrative talent that it would need to competently rule.
As we should all agree, the Bible Church stunt encapsulates all the deceitful and immoral traits of a man without character and without any religious reverence; a man at war with the country he was sworn to serve and protect.
We could not think of a more appropriate image than the following picture, which shows Lysol, shoulders drooping, being escorted by a Secret Service goon, as he walks past a wall whose graffiti exclaims “Fuck Trump”:
https://twitter.com/sbg1/status/1267618166366142470/photo/1
That is some real Reality TV!
As The New York Times reported, the Lysol team sees the unrest not as a problem to be solved, or as part of the chaos that they have purposely sowed, but as a political opportunity:
Some in the president’s circle see the escalations as a political boon, much in the way Richard M. Nixon won the presidency on a law-and-order platform after the 1968 riots. One adviser to Mr. Trump, who insisted on anonymity to describe private conversations, said images of widespread destruction could be helpful to the law-and-order message that Mr. Trump has projected since his 2016 campaign.
But even more importantly, it also exposes the Trump Evangelical Right as they aid and abet the most corrupt and immoral American political leader in our lifetime:
https://www.facebook.com/FranklinGraham/posts/3343290875727070?__tn__=-R
Franklin, the son of Billy Graham, a true Cyrus Trump racist in good Confederate Charlottesville standing, cited the following Christian Scripture in praise of his hero:
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
Indeed, Hebrews, a pseudo-Pauline epistle, is itself an evangelical document directed at the Jews:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Hebrews#Purpose_for_writing
It is another ominous warning sign to the Jewish people:
Those to whom Hebrews is written seem to have begun to doubt whether Jesus could really be the Messiah for whom they were waiting, because they believed the Messiah prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures was to come as a militant king and destroy the enemies of his people. Jesus, however, came as a mere man who was arrested by the Jewish leaders and who suffered and was crucified by the Romans. And although he was seen resurrected, he still left the earth and his people, who now face persecution rather than victory. The Book of Hebrews solves this problem by arguing that the Hebrew Scriptures also foretold that the Messiah would be a priest (although of a different sort than the traditional Levitical priests) and Jesus came to fulfill this role, as a sacrificial offering to God, to atone for sins. His role of a king is yet to come, and so those who follow him should be patient and not be surprised that they suffer for now.[13:12–14]
Some scholars today believe the document was written to prevent apostasy.[33] Some have interpreted apostasy to mean a number of different things, such as a group of Christians in one sect leaving for another more conservative sect, one of which the author disapproves. Some have seen apostasy as a move from the Christian assembly to pagan ritual. In light of a possibly Jewish-Christian audience, the apostasy in this sense may be in regard to Jewish-Christians leaving the Christian assembly to return to the Jewish synagogue. The author writes, "Let us hold fast to our confession".[4:14] The epistle has been viewed as a long, rhetorical argument for having confidence in the new way to God revealed in Jesus Christ.[34]
The book could be argued to affirm special creation. It affirms that God by His Son, Jesus Christ, made the worlds. "God... hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son... by whom also he made the worlds". [1:1–2] The epistle also emphasizes the importance of faith. "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear".[11:3]
Christians believe that Jesus is the mediator of the New Covenant. [8:6] His famous sermon from a hill representing Mount Zion is considered by many Christian scholars to be the antitype[35] of the proclamation of the Old Covenant by Moses from Mount Sinai.
...the Epistle opens with the solemn announcement of the superiority of the New Testament Revelation by the Son over Old Testament Revelation by the prophets. [1:1–4] It then proves and explains from the Scriptures the superiority of this New Covenant over the Old by the comparison of the Son with the angels as mediators of the Old Covenant, [1:5–2:18] with Moses and Joshua as the founders of the Old Covenant, [3:1–4:16] and finally, by opposing the high-priesthood of Christ after the order of Melchisedech to the Levitical priesthood after the order of Aaron. [5:1–10:18] (Leopold Fonck, The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910)[19]
But perhaps even more importantly than the conversionist aspect of the text, is its militant ethos, referring to a piercing sword which can discern the thoughts of the heart.
The Hebrews text is a perfect complement to the barbaric Trump stunt in front of St. John’s Church. It provides the necessary Evangelical scaffolding for a Christianity that has lost its moral compass, as it seeks to oppress the weak and exploit the poor:
https://www.insidesources.com/dont-pray-for-a-leader-who-preys-on-the-poor/
Again, we see Christian frauds like Graham and his Trumpist allies undermining the humane vision of social justice that can be found in Jesus’ ministry:
Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham quote the Bible to call for submission to earthly authorities. Paula White-Cain blesses U.S. military domination of the globe as godly. Robert Jeffress claims the Bible is about building up walls and tearing families apart.
It is all part of a larger Reality TV moment in American history, which gives us Christian Snake Oil Salesmen propping up a criminal psychopath who serves their perceived interests. It is about naked aggression, power, and wealth.
It remains to be seen which version of Christianity will come out victorious.
We can take comfort in the fact that there has been some forceful pushback from mainstream Christian leaders:
It is appropriate that we leave the last word in the discussion for Bishop Michael Curry of St. John’s Church, the holy site that Trump desecrated with his execrable Lysol actions:
This evening, the President of the United States stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, lifted up a bible, and had pictures of himself taken. In so doing, he used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes. This was done in a time of deep hurt and pain in our country, and his action did nothing to help us or to heal us.
The bible teaches us that “God is love.” Jesus of Nazareth taught, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The prophet Micah taught that the Lord requires us to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.”
The bible the President held up and the church that he stood in front of represent the values of love, of justice, of compassion, and of a way to heal our hurts.
We need our President, and all who hold office, to be moral leaders who help us to be a people and nation living these values. For the sake of George Floyd, for all who have wrongly suffered, and for the sake of us all, we need leaders to help us to be “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
Amen!
Ken yehi Ratzon.
David Shasha