June 3rd 2020

By Bill Berkowitz 

When Trump staged at photo-op in from of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Monday, he did not pray. he did not mention George Floyd, and he didn’t go inside the church. Rather he stood outside and clumsily held the Bible over his head. During a 2015 interview, when asked to name his favorite Bible passage, he hemmed and hawed, finally saying that he didn’t want to single out any one passage. Apparently, he couldn’t name one. He was then asked if he was an Old or New Testament guy. Both, he replied. It is no secret that Donald Trump is not a religious man. It is also no secret that he doesn’t know much about what is in The Bible. Trump may not know much about The Bible, but he is quite conversant with taking sacred symbols and defiling them. Will using the Bible as a convenient prop play to his base?

 “I thought it was completely appropriate for the president to stand in front of that church,” Robert Jeffress, the Dallas megachurch pastor and big-time supporter of Trump, told The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. “And by holding up the Bible, he was showing us that it teaches that, yes, God hates racism, it’s despicable—but God also hates lawlessness.”

“I don’t know about you but I’ll take a president with a Bible in his hand in front of a church over far left violent radicals setting a church on fire any day of the week,” wrote David Brody, a news anchor at the Christian Broadcasting Network. And, in an email to Coppins, Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said: “His presence sent the twin message that our streets and cities do not belong to rioters and domestic terrorists, and that the ultimate answer to what ails our country can be found in the repentance, redemption, and forgiveness of the Christian faith.”

On Monday, June 1, after authorities – many on horseback and others using teargas and rubber bullets -- cleared the streets of peaceful protesters, Trump went to St. John's Episcopal Church -- the so-called Church of the Presidents because every one since James Madison has attended -- and used the Church and the Bible as props.

The Rev. Mariann Budde, who presides over the diocese St. John's is part of, said she was “outraged” by Trump's visit. "The president also did not acknowledge the agony and sacred worth of people of color in our nation who rightfully demand an end to 400 years of systemic racism and white supremacy in our country," Budde said in a statement posted to the diocese's Facebook account after Trump's televised visit.

“He took the symbols sacred to our tradition and stood in front of a house of prayer in full expectation that would be a celebratory moment,” Bishop Budde said in an interview. “There was nothing I could do but speak out against that,” she added. Trump’s visit “did not serve the spiritual aspirations or the needed moral leadership that we need,” she told NBC’s “Today” on Tuesday. “It did not address the grievous wounds that we are dealing with and the agony of our country.”

 The following day, Trump visited the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington. That visit prompted “criticism from Catholics who demonstrated near the Catholic University of America, which is adjacent to the shrine, with some praying the rosary while holding signs reading, ‘Our Church is Not a Photo Op’ and ‘Black Lives Matter,’” American Magazine’s Michael J. O’Loughlin reported.

O’Loughlin pointed out that “Archbishop Wilton Gregory, who has led the Archdiocese of Washington for just over a year, condemned the visit in a statement … on Tuesday morning before Mr. Trump’s visit.

“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree,” said the nation’s highest-ranking African-American bishop.

Other religious leaders also criticized Trump: 

“As Trump visits the St John Paul II National Shrine today, I hope someone proclaims today's Gospel (Mark 12:13-17) where Herodians and Pharisees are called out for their hypocrisy,” Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Ky., tweeted Tuesday morning.

Sister Simone Campbell, who heads the social justice lobbying group Network, said in a statement: “President Trump is now using the Catholic faith in another photo op to defend his appalling refusal to address racism and police violence in the United States. He is trying to create a false dichotomy of peaceful protestors versus the Church. That could not be further from the truth, and any Christian who believes it does not understand Jesus’s message.”

The purpose of Trump’s visit was to highlight his impending signing of an executive order relating to religious liberty, shore up his base, and continue to court Catholic voters. Trump’s visit was made on the anniversary that coincides with the anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to his native Poland, making him the first pope to visit a communist nation.

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