President Donald J. Trump attended the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, February 6, 2025. Some reports and social media post said that he was pretending to be Christian. His address to the dutifully assembled was described by The Daily Beast as “careening.” No surprise! That is what he does best. And one of the leading quotable lines emanating from the time of prayer was:
We have to bring religion back. We have to bring it back much stronger. It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time. We have to bring it back.
Inartful to say the least! And for those of us who live by faith daily, I confess that I did not know that religion was missing. Admittedly, in some circles it may be weakened but certainly not absent.
At the same Prayer Breakfast, he also announced that he signed an executive order bringing back his proposal to build a new federal park called the “National Garden of American Heroes.”
I have signed an Executive Order to resume the process of creating a new national park full of statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived. We are going to be honoring our heroes, honoring the greatest people from our country. We're not gonna be tearing down, we're gonna be building up.
Seeing that the subject at hand is religion, that’s another OMG! We might have a strikingly different opinion about who our national heroes should be.
Finally, at this same breakfast, he announced yet another executive order. He directed the Attorney General and the DOJ to create a task force and commission to protect Christians from being targeted and discriminated against within the federal government, schools, the military, workplaces, hospitals, and public squares. That is rich! In fact, I am finding reassurance in his order, given the fact that I fully expect a knock on this blog’s digital door someday by someone who intends to silence Christian opposition! Of course, were that to happen, I would be honored!
As we all know, the list of Trump’s egregious offenses, both in public policy and personal behavior, to the universal mission of religion and the specific purpose of the Christian faith is lengthy and easily listed.
- We can start with his cruel and illegal treatment of documented and undocumented immigrants and migrants, some of whom now reside at the military base at Guantanamo Bay. Just this morning in Chicago, residents witnessed in fear the return of the old and horrifying policy of family separation.
- There is the assault on wokeness and all policies and plans that encourage us as a society to be more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible. This is fundamentally racist and discriminatory in all its expressions. No Black History Month this year, at least on the federal level!
- Most egregious of all is what is happening at USAID. I read the following:
The headline of Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column on what's happening to USAID crystallizes the issue in his view: "The World's Richest Men Take On the World's Poorest Children." Elon Musk has been gloating about gutting the US Agency for International Aid Development, (putting it in the woodchipper) which Kristof finds particularly "callous" given that "Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth.”
To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it's about children's lives and our own security, and what's unfolding is sickening. (Kristof, NYT, February 5, 2025)
‘Sickening” is an apt description. What we have here is the Golden Age of Shame, and President Trump, Elon Musk, and others like them are the core architects and advocates for such a shameful policy, backed and justified by attack of repulsive disinformation.
In an insightful and inspiring article for Sojourner’s Magazine, Adam Russell Taylor writes about the strong economic and national security arguments for foreign aid, but more importantly, he states unambiguously that the moral and humanitarian argument is most compelling for Christians:
A rebuke from the prophet Isaiah has been ringing in my ears the past few weeks: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). (I trust that we remember that Musk, in fact, said of the USAID’s mission, that it was “evil” and a “criminal organization” and that it “needs to die.”)
Taylor writes further:
As the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, the United States has a moral imperative to protect human dignity and make things better for as many people as possible based on Jesus’ principle that “to whom much has been given, much is required” (Luke 12:48). For those of us who are motivated by our Christian faith, foreign assistance is also an important way we can encourage our society to act according to the moral priorities Jesus taught us in Matthew 25, when he explained that the way we treat people in the most vulnerable situations is how we treat Jesus himself. Just as Jesus never confined the boundaries of that commitment to Judea or Israel, neither should we confine our moral commitment to only fifty states. We are not powerless. We can reject Trump’s immoral vision of “America First…”
Please let me close with a much needed, even urgent, appeal. David Leonhardt, a senior writer for the New York Times and in charge of THE MORNING, a daily newsletter, reported recently in an article titled: The Economy is Racing Ahead, Almost Everything Else Is Falling Behind ( Feb. 4, 2025) that the gap between American’s prosperity and our quality of life has grown since the 1990’s. He writes:
A politically diverse group of scholars — who together have advised every president since Bill Clinton and who work at many of the country’s top think tanks — released a report card yesterday on American well-being. The scholars spent months debating which metrics best captured the state of the nation and ultimately agreed on thirty-seven. They then tracked those measures since the 1990s and compared the United States with dozens of other countries on economic performance, physical health, mental health, social trust and more.
The group’s central finding is: We are so wealthy but so unhappy,” said Bradley Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan. “It seems like the central question of modernity.
“If there is one overarching theme, it’s that we’re pulling apart — economically, socially and politically,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University economist who came up with the idea for the report card. Frederick Hess, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said that he thought the disconnect between G.D.P. and other outcomes was related to “the weakening bonds of community and the degree to which Americans feel less rooted in close-knit bonds of faith and family.
At the top of this post I mentioned that President Trump’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast was characterized as “careening.” One of his many caroms/ricochets was reported as follows:
President Donald Trump claimed Democrats “oppose God” during a prayer breakfast speech — just moments before he said he’d like to be remembered as “a unifier.”
OMG! Yet again!
There can be little doubt that in our highly polarized and partisan society we have been ‘pulling apart,’ and the one who occupies the Oval Office today is sadly, contrary to what he hopes for his legacy, known pejoratively as the Divider-in-Chief. We Christians, however, have an extraordinarily high calling to root our lives in faith and family and an enduring sense of community and its purpose. The other day, I read a daily devotional about a wonderful passage from the Book of Romans, chapter twelve. We all should memorize these words and live out their truth.
I love this very heartfelt plea from Paul, commonly referred to as the “Marks of the True Christian.”
9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; 10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality to strangers.
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly;[a] do not claim to be wiser than you are. 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. (Romans 12: 9-18; NRSVU)
My favorite lines? “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good;” and “…as far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” ( I would add, “No matter hard it may be!)
Indeed, ‘as far as it depends’ upon each of us as individuals and as a community, love needs to be genuine. We must confront evil and embrace the good but try our best to live peaceably with all, white and all people of color, men, women and children, the able and the challenged, the aging and the young, the rich and the poor, the neighbor and the stranger, conservative and liberal, documented and undocumented, the powerful and the vulnerable.
An extraordinarily high calling, yes, but that’s what true Christians do!