Book Review: The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump

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Review of Ronald J. Sider, ed., The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was arrested by four policemen on a minor fraud charge in Minneapolis. He was handcuffed and pinned to the ground face down. One of the officers knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes—whereupon, unable to breathe, he died. Protests immediately erupted throughout the country and have continued unabatedly. These have been met with an amazing—at times appalling—show of armed force by various law enforcement agencies and by threats from the President to send in the military. Two days after Mr. Floyd’s death, I learned that The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump was hot off the press. Shocked and infuriated by recent events, I immediately ordered a review copy. But before I had even finished reading the book, which documents and analyzes the mendacity and immorality of Trump’s first three years in office, Trump had committed two new offenses. On June 1, peaceful protestors in Lafayette Park in Washington DC were dispersed with pepper spray and a barrage of rubber bullets so that Trump and several senior officials could walk unimpeded from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church for a photo op. After arriving at the scene, Trump waved a Bible for the cameras. When asked whether it was his own copy, he responded that it was just “a Bible,” i.e., a stage prop. In his subsequent comments, he said nothing about the church or the Scriptures, but only that America was “the greatest country in the world. And we’re going to keep it safe.” On June 5, while boasting about his administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, and the protests, Trump stated, “Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires, and it’s what our country is all about.” 

In the space of four days, Trump had profaned the Scriptures in a clumsy and shameless display of hypocritical piety, had invoked the moral authority of the Constitution whose dictates he flouts daily, and had exploited the memory of a man who had been murdered by the police—all in order to legitimize his campaign to keep the country “safe” by “dominating the streets.” These crass, cynical displays of civil religion in the service of his increasingly autocratic rule occurred only weeks after the publication of Spiritual Danger. They reinforce everything the book says about his character and conduct, and further justify its central objective, which is to encourage American evangelicals to withdraw their support for him in the 2020 elections.

Before proceeding, let me insert another item into the sequence of personal and public events just narrated. My copy of Spiritual Danger arrived in the mail on Saturday, May 30, and I dove right in. The next morning, I read the Sunday installment of Gary Trudeau’s comic strip, Doonesbury, which lampooned the right-wing rallies that had been taking place in the weeks before Mr. Floyd’s murder. The protestors at these earlier rallies had objected to the pandemic lockdowns. Trudeau shows them chanting “Liberty or death!”, sporting MAGA caps, waving Confederate flags, decrying the virus as a “Democrat hoax,” calling for the dismissal of Dr. Fauci, and demeaning the “swamp scientists.” Now, I’ve been a fan of Doonesbury for forty years, and I am usually both amused by its wit and in agreement with its politics. And I might well have chuckled over this strip, too, but for two facts. First, even though COVID continues to rage, the satirical treatment of protestors on the political right demanding “liberty”—people for whom “liberty” seemed to mean little more than free access to beaches and bars—seemed ill-timed, as our streets were just then filling with indignant crowds demanding racial justice. (Then again, perhaps that jarring juxtaposition was precisely Trudeau’s point.) But second, and far more problematically, the satire was directed at the pettiness, selfishness, and ignorance of Trump’s base—when I had just been reading a book directed at American evangelicals, many of whom do support Trump, but who usually comport themselves in a sober, sensible, and upright manner. One reason Trump continues to enjoy support from evangelicals may be their understandable resentment at such portrayals of themselves from the left. 

To be fair, Trudeau does not mock the religious right in this strip. I’m sure he is well aware that not all people on the political right are evangelicals, that not all evangelicals occupy the political right, and that most people who are both politically conservative and sincere in their evangelical faith never act like the selfish bigots shown in Doonesbury. Furthermore, some people who would self-identify both as political conservatives and as evangelical Christians are staunchly opposed to Donald Trump, precisely because so much of his behavior and so many of his policies contradict the ethical teachings of Christian scripture and/or the longstanding and deeply cherished convictions of the GOP. Some of the individual contributors to Spiritual Danger belong to this latter group, and the book as a whole pleads with those politically conservative evangelicals who have supported Trump in the past to face the fact that he is manifestly not what they think. But these nuanced distinctions between different portions of the American electorate and the American church often get lost in the polarized and overheated public discourse of our time. Indeed, one of the merits of Spiritual Danger is its appeal to the best impulses of American political and religious conservatism. But it also shows—though more implicitly than explicitly—why caricatures by the political and/or religious left against all those who have hitherto supported Trump are not only simplistic but self-defeating, for they tend to alienate the very people they should be persuading with sweet reasonableness and hard facts. 

That is just what makes Spiritual Danger such a timely and important contribution to our current religious and political debates: it abounds in sweet reasonableness and hard facts, while breathing the warm, gracious spirit of American evangelical piety at its best. The book’s epigraph is telling: “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ says the Lord” (Isaiah 1:18, NKJV). As the subtitle indicates, thirty evangelical thought leaders have been assembled to offer a multi-disciplinary assessment of Donald Trump’s spiritual and moral failings and the devastation wrought by his policies and style of politics. They include theologians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, civil servants, popular speakers and authors, a pastor, a musician, etc. Twenty-six are men, four are women. Most are white Americans, but several other ethnic groups and nationalities are also represented. The diversity of this group and the wide array of disciplinary specializations among them gives heft to their analysis. And it is important to underscore that what they offer is truly that: carefully argued, richly illustrated, and thoroughly documented analysis. To be sure, lamentation and indignation are evident throughout, but the essays never stoop to invective. They take the moral and rhetorical high road, while bringing to bear a comprehensive and incisive examination of what has happened to the political and religious life of this nation during Trump’s presidency. 

The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump leaves me with three questions. First, will its intended readers be persuaded? Many now tolerate his personal failings because they relish his narrative of what America once was and could once again become. Works such as Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter (Vintage, 1966) and The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll (Eerdmans, 1994) have chronicled the unwillingness of many on the religious right to allow their convictions to be shaken by contrary arguments and evidence. If there is cause for optimism in the present case, it is that Sider and his colleagues are not challenging the theological convictions of evangelicalism but appealing to them. They show why Trump’s history of immoral personal conduct, his perpetual deceitfulness, his pugnacious leadership style, and his draconian policies on race, class, immigration, and law enforcement are ultimately inimical to the kind of society that evangelicals professedly wish to establish (or return to). But will those evangelicals who have hitherto supported Trump because of his stands on abortion, low taxes, and business deregulation ever disavow him, when so many of those who oppose Trump also seem to oppose or ridicule what evangelicals hold dear? We shall see.

Second, can the removal of Donald Trump from office truly achieve what the authors of Spiritual Danger hope for? Is he the cause of the erosion of Christian morals and civic virtue in America or simply a product of the social forces that put him in power and that will outlast his tenure? As James Davison Hunter argues in To Change the World (Oxford, 2010), American evangelicals often exaggerate the significance of individuals in shaping culture and underestimate the impact of socio-economic factors, political institutions and entrenched power structures. Racism is more than bigotry and race-baiting; sexism is more than lechery and misogyny; and the solution to these evils will take far more than the defeat of one powerful individual who happens to embody them. Yet these last three years have shown how a personality cult can normalize, and thus help to perpetuate, these evils. This is what makes the current street protests such a significant test of the health of our society. Do they reflect spontaneous outrage over a single egregious crime or a growing determination to end the institutionalized racism that causes it? Do they reflect disgust with a bombastic tyrant or disgust with the system he represents? And supposing that enough evangelicals withdraw their support from Trump to unseat him, will they go on to support radical social change? We shall see.

Third, how should Wesleyan-Holiness folks read and respond to Spiritual Danger—supposing us to be, in some sense, “evangelicals,” and therefore among its target audience? Distinctively Wesleyan concerns are only tangentially addressed here, and greater attention to those concerns might have strengthened its case. Two ways in which Donald Trump has secured his power are his relentless attacks on voices and channels of public communication that challenge his distorted narrative of the American predicament and the American project, and his exploitation of the fears and disappointments of the white lower middle class in the wake of the huge demographic changes that have been taking place in America over the past several decades. Trump’s opponents usually counter these strategies by emphasizing the importance of a free press and the social and economic advantages of ethnic diversity. Wesleyans can certainly agree with these counterarguments, but we cannot rest content with them theologically. They fixate on the outward circumstances of American society but ignore the significance of people’s inward dispositions and virtues—or what Wesley called the “religious affections” and “holy tempers”—for the common good. It is “truth in the inward being” (Psalm 51:6) that immunizes us against fearmongering propaganda and vapid civil religion. It is “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23) that motivates us to do the hard work of reforming our public institutions and rescuing our tottering democracy. Can we ward off “the spiritual danger of Donald Trump” by a revival of scriptural holiness? Let us try.

Richard B. Steele is Professor of Moral and Historical Theology at Seattle Pacific University and former Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the SPU School of Theology.