Trump's God is not only unbiblical, he is also basically white, ethnocentric and specifically American.

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Last Sunday (July 19^th), the far-right Christian Post published an article by John Wesley Reid entitled "5 Reasons why Christians should feel comfortable voting for Trump in 2020." Two days later, the same publication reported an international survey implicitly lamenting the fact that "most Americans don't believe they need God to be good."

In this time of Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings across the country and across the world, the two articles take on particular importance. Together, they not only highlight stark differences between right and left-wing understandings of Christianity. They also point up differences between the faiths of white evangelicals and their black counterparts in the street.

Additionally, both articles' identification of Christianity exclusively with far right Caucasian politics goes a long way towards explaining the disconnect between morality and belief in a God. The explanation is found in the Christian right's severely limited understanding of God, of goodness, and of the connection between morality and politics in this polarizing era of Donald Trump.

In tandem, the two articles also invite readers to be more thoughtful about their faith (or lack of same) and the ballot they'll cast come November 3^rd.

God & Goodness

Begin with the survey. According to Pew Researchers, 54% of Americans hold that you don't need God to be good. Meanwhile 44% (a large majority of them on the ideological right) hold the opposite opinion. Only 24% on the ideological left believe God and morality are necessarily connected. (Left respondents in the survey typically had more years of formal education.)

The Reid article shed light both on the identity of the sidelined God and on survey respondents' likely understanding of "goodness" closely connected with that supposed deity. As will become clear below, Reid's God is primarily concerned with specifically Christian welfare and with unborn life. Goodness is overwhelmingly connected with what the author referenced as "non-carnality." Consequently, Christian political concern focuses on matters of specifically Christian liberty, on sexuality and reproduction - especially on abortion (which btw is not even mentioned in the Bible as a moral concern).

Such limited understanding reflects the huge gap between white evangelicals and their black counterparts - for instance, the ones demonstrating against police brutality in our city streets. Their actions, of course, cannot be adequately explained without reference to the religiously based history of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the light of that history, BLM demonstrators have inherited an understanding of God biblically founded on God's very first revelation, viz. in the liberation of slaves from captivity in Egypt. It is linked besides to concern for widows, orphans and resident immigrants and refugees frequently reiterated in both the Jewish and Christian Testaments. In other words, goodness for black evangelicals is inseparably connected with social justice. Meanwhile, Reid's article suggests ignorance of, and even hostility towards such linkage.

Morality & Voting for Trump

Setting all of that aside, Reid admits that he had doubts about Trump in 2016. But now, he says, those reservations have completely disappeared. Instead, he recommends that all Christians should confidently vote for 45's reelection in November. He advances 5 reasons for doing so:

1. You're not voting for Donald Trump; you're voting for the Trump Administration.
2. You're not voting simply for a person; you're voting for an agenda.
3. Policy outweighs character because policy outlasts character.
4. If for no other reason than abortion, vote for Donald Trump.
5. Voting for Trump is a tangible way of keeping Biden out.

Closely read, those reasons indicate that the author is still holding his nose. They all end up distancing themselves from a morally challenged candidate while cozying up to supposed paragons of Christian virtue such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to Trump's agenda favoring "religious liberty," "life of the unborn," and resistance to volatile attacks on America (standard dog whistle for African Americans).

More specifically, Reid's 5 reasons claim that:

1. Trump may be carnally questionable, but people like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are "committed non-carnal Christ-followers."
2. Doubts about the president's moral character should be "trumped" by his agenda which the author finds favoring "religious liberty," "life of the unborn," and resistance to those explosive attacks on America.
3. Sure, Trump's character is highly debatable. However, appointments of "constitutional originalists" to the judiciary are more important. So are "our children's futures," religious liberty, the lives of the unborn, and the economic advancement of low-income communities.
4. Christians can conscientiously identify as single-issue voters, because the abortion issue is powerful enough to overwhelm all other policy considerations.
5. Joe Biden is no Donald Trump.

Voting against Trump

But what if being Christian is far more complicated and challenging than Reid lets on? What if black evangelicals and others are correct in holding it's more than avoiding "carnality" even in the sense of Trump's legendarily deviant sexuality (now involving expressed support for his friend, accused child rapist and sex trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell)? Such complexity might lead Christians to decline voting for Mr. Trump for at least the following 5 specific reasons roughly mirroring Reid's own:

1. The type of Christianity advocated by Mr. Reid is just that - a type of Christianity, viz. the white evangelical sort. However, there are other types of Christians - those black evangelicals, for instance. And then there are Catholics who embrace the official teaching of their Church, viz. the doctrine of the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis. Their pro-life positions go far beyond the single issue of abortion to include radical environmentalism, war resistance, rejection of capital punishment, advocacy of living wages, fair housing, and healthcare as a human right. All of these, they profess, are pro-life matters.
2. Religious liberty as understood in the Constitution is not limited to Christians of any stripe. It extends to Muslims, Jews, Hindus, agnostics, atheists and others whose pro-life concerns prioritize the already born - e.g. at the border, in Trump's baby jails, under incessant U.S.-supported bombing in places like Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, on death row, and elsewhere.
3. Donald Trump and virtually every member of the Republican Party are joined at the hip. There is absolutely no separation between policies advocated and implemented by Donald Trump and the rest of his administration - none. As for the morality of Mike Pompeo, he has specifically joked and bragged about endorsing policies of lying, cheating and stealing - all (unlike abortion) specifically prohibited not only in the Bible, but in all religious traditions. In other words, Trump's inner circle is no more virtuous than he.
4. Above all, "our children's futures" which are of such apparent concern to Mr. Reid, are intimately connected with and existentially threatened by climate change which the entire Republican Party proudly denies.
5. Joe Biden is no Donald Trump.

Conclusion

There are good reasons for Americans and better educated people around the world to consider belief in God as inessential to morality. The God of The Post's John Reid and his fellow believers, for instance, is so small in moral stature and very limited in his concern compared with the God of the Bible. Reid's God is not only unbiblical, he is also basically white, ethnocentric and specifically American. That strains the credulity of even moderately educated people whose general knowledge recognizes the goodness found in non-Christians and in so many atheists. No wonder such thinkers reject a god as tiny as Reid's.

Meanwhile, the biblical God, at least as embodied in Jesus' prophetic tradition, literally identifies with human beings like those specifically despised by the candidate Reid would have his type of Christians embrace. Remember, Jesus himself was born out of wedlock to a teenage mother; he was an immigrant in Egypt in his early years; he was working class, poor, and a member of a people imperialized by the first century equivalent of the United States.

Besides that, Jesus' "Good News" was specifically addressed to the poor (LK 4:18). He ended up being a victim of torture and capital punishment at the hands of the Roman Empire.

All of that is foreign to Reid's unbiblical notion of God.

And finally, it seems that the Jewish Jesus of the Christian Testament could well sympathize with those who feel alienated from their religious origins. After all, he was expelled from his hometown faith grouping (Luke 4: 14-30) and thought to be possessed by the devil himself (John 10:20).

That Jesus, it seems safe to say, would be appalled by Donald Trump.

Authors Website: http://mikerivageseul.wordpress.com/

Authors Bio:

Mike Rivage-Seul is a liberation theologian and former Roman Catholic priest. His undergraduate degree in philosophy was received from St. Columban's Major Seminary in Milton Massachusetts and awarded through D.C.'s Catholic University. He received his theology licentiate from the Atheneum Anselmianum and his doctorate in moral theology (magna cum laude) from the Academia Alfonsiana in Rome where Mike studied for five years. There he also played club basketball for Eurosport and a team within Rome's Stella Azzurra professional organization. In 1972 he served for a year as coordinator of volunteers in Monsignor Ralph Beiting's Christian Appalachian Project. Then for 40 years, Mike taught theology and general studies at Berea College in Kentucky receiving its Seabury Award for excellence in teaching, Berea's highest faculty award. At Berea, Mike founded its Peace and Social Justice Studies program. He and his wife, Peggy, also organized and started the Berea Interfaith Taskforce for Peace. For years, he periodically taught liberation theology in a Latin American Studies Program in Costa Rica sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. In Costa Rica Mike and Peggy were fellows at the liberation theology research institute, the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones (DEI) headed by the great Franz Hinkelammert. In Mexico, they also served as fellows and program directors in San Miguel de Allende's Center for Global Justice. Mike's studies and teaching have brought him to countries across Europe and to Cuba (on 10 occasions), Nicaragua (12 occasions), Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Israel, India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Brazil where he and Peggy were associates of Paulo Freire. Mike's languages include Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. For three years he was a monthly columnist at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Lexington Kentucky. He has contributed more than 400 articles to the online news source OpEdNews where he is a senior editor. He has also published in the DEI's Pasos Journal, in the National Catholic Reporter and Christianity Today. His scholarship has been cited in the New York Times. Mike has authored or edited 10 books including one of poetry and a novel based on his experiences in Cuba. His latest book is The Magic Glasses of Critical Thinking: seeing through alternative fact & fake news (Peter Lang publishers). He blogs at http://mikerivageseul.wordpress.com/ Attempting to appropriate his identity as an ordained exorcist (all Catholic priests are), Mike also reads Tarot cards. He is a lifelong golfer and Chicago Cubs fan.