President Trump, hunkered down in the White House as protests swell against police brutality, turned this week to a familiar page in his playbook. While the president rarely attends church to humble himself in worship, Trump is no stranger to culture-war posturing that crudely reduces religion to a political prop.
On Monday, police drove away groups of peaceful protesters with tear gas to allow Trump, Bible in hand, to stand silent and grim-faced in front of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street from the White House. The president awkwardly held the Bible in what he imagined to be a sign of strength as TV cameras captured the surreal moment. It was a brazen, heretical display for a president who is better known for demeaning women, attacking his political enemies and energizing white supremacists than embodying the messages of justice and solidarity with the poor at the heart of the Gospels. The Rev. Mariann Budde, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, called the visit “an abuse of the spiritual tools and symbols of our traditions and of our sacred space.” Advisers later told the media Trump came up with the stunt because he “wanted the visual.”
The next day, Trump continued his roadshow of religious appropriation. At the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, the president, again silent, posed in front of a statue of St. John Paul II and visited a chapel. A president who has stoked racial division and manipulated the politics of white resentment as part of his nationalist agenda likely didn’t know that the former Pope once called racism “a plague which is one of the most persistent and destructive evils.” Wilton Gregory, the first black Catholic archbishop of Washington, issued a blistering statement after 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,” Gregory said, adding that the late Pope John Paul II “certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrence to silence, scatter or intimidate for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace.”
Trump’s shameless religious posturing is intended to rally his most loyal base of conservative white evangelicals and Catholics. These voters will be critical in battleground swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump’s razor-thin margins of victory were decisive in his election. The president’s actions this week come after Trump hosted a phone call in April with hundreds of Catholic educators and several bishops, including Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, that turned into a de-facto campaign event. Trump boasted that he was the “best president in the history of the Catholic Church,” urged the Catholic leaders to mobilize voters for him, and touted his record of appointing anti-abortion judges and defense of religious liberty. Dolan, appearing on Fox News after the call, praised the president for his sensitivity to “the feelings of the religious community.”
But many people of faith are challenging the president, and religious leaders giving him moral cover. More than 4,000 Catholics, including priests, nuns and Catholic justice leaders, have now signed an open letter to Dolan, released by my organization, making it clear that there is nothing “pro-life” about a president whose policies hurt immigrants, worsen the impact of climate change and disproportionately affect communities of color.
Nor does Trump get a free pass on religious liberty, a bedrock value he has distorted with policies that target Muslims and LGBTQ people. Religious liberty isn’t a brand owned by Trump or the Republican Party. Respect for this core principle also includes protecting immigrants, dismantling systemic racism and defending the right to protest brutal police violence.
I’m grateful for religious leaders such as Mark Seitz, the Catholic bishop of El Paso, Tex., who earlier this week knelt in peaceful protest against police brutality while holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign. The bishop released a powerful pastoral letter last fall that urged Christians to reject what he called “the false god of white supremacy.”
Trump may continue to show up at houses of worship to distract from his deeply immoral policies. The good news is many people of faith — and a growing number of religious leaders — are refusing to let him get away with this charade.
Gehring is Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life and author of “The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church.”
