Friend and colleague John Carlson at Arizona State has published an op-ed piece arguing that President Trump is spurning the United States’s civil religion in promoting his own cult of personality — a quest to be God? He concludes:
Trump’s inaugural and presidency have deepened fissures over what it means to be, as our national motto affirms, one nation made up of many diverse peoples.
Do we embrace “American Exceptionalism” or “America First”? Should we lead the international order, or compete with Russia to be a craven superpower? Will we open our doors to the world’s “tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to be free,” or send them back to the “s***hole countries” they come from? Put starkly, are we a nation “under God” or under Trump? We must choose.
Civil religion, grounded in “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” provides strength for resisting Trump’s noxious cult of personality. As high priests of civil religion, presidents usually use the authority of their bully pulpit to summon the nation to noble purposes. But without the sermon, a president no longer commands a pulpit. And all that is left is the bully.
We now must look to other leaders and citizens to restore the civil religion that Trump has renounced.
Read the whole thing and see his other interesting work on religion and politics and, most recently, global citizenship, here.