'The ‘Religion’ of Donald J Trump' by John Midgley

An address delivered at a worship service on Zoom
for Ipswich Unitarians, March 7th 2021 by John Midgley

Love is the doctrine of this church.
The quest for Truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine -
Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.

Griswold Williams

The last few years of the world’s history have been, to a large extent dominated by the presence of the now
former President of the United States, Donald J Trump.

One way of viewing Donald Trump’s rise to become President, and his subsequent decline and fall and trial in the Senate, is to look at his ‘religion’, which I have put in inverted commas for reasons which will become clear.

The first phase of his religion was based on the preaching of Norman Vincent Peale (1898 - 1993) and his book The Power of Positive Thinking. It is a book that has sold in millions. There may be some among you who have read it and found it helpful.

According to an extremely revealing documentary which I watched some months ago (PBS America: The Choice 2016, Clinton v. Trump. Alas, no longer available), Trump did not simply discover Peale’s book and find it helpful. The book, and the ideas it contained were thrust into him when he was a boy, by his very domineering father Fred, who was intensely ambitious, both for himself and son Donald.

Trump senior held the ‘racehorse theory’ of life and work. “There are winners and losers. Never be a loser.” He dinned this in to Donald: “There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who succeed and those who fail. You, my boy, must NEVER, EVER be a failure!”

Donald’s father took him to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, in New York, where Rev. Norman Vincent Peale was the highly successful minister, preaching what is usually described as the Gospel of Success. The theology of this claims that God wants people to “be 100% alive! Be a success! You can solve all problems. Be a winner!” Donald Trump’s first marriage and the funerals of both his parents were held at this church, and he has in the past called Norman Vincent Peale his mentor. Was this, then, his religion?

Initially, it seems it was. What we have here is an approach to living that has some truth in it but becomes dangerous if taken to excess. This is what Donald Trump has done. It begins with, ‘Take a positive view of things and you are much more likely to succeed in what you want to do.’ True enough. All the signs are that the approach that Trump, both father and son took was to follow Peale’s method and imprint the idea of success on their minds, absolutely, at every turn.

Next stage: Never allow the thought of failure to enter your mind, only success. Never admit to the possibility of failure; never admit to anything going wrong, which came to mean - never admit to doing wrong.  To the young Trump, this soon began to mean, everything you do is right, because it is what you want to do, in order to succeed.

As an adult, Donald Trump’s business track-record became in fact a mixture, both of successes and situations that failed. For example.  As a property owner, he was sued for racism in selecting tenants, but, with help from a hard-hitting lawyer he denied any wrong doing. After losing a court battle, he settled and paid compensation, then simply denied that he had done wrong, claimed it as a success and walked away. Morality and truth had got lost along the way. Right and wrong did not come into it. All he wanted was success, supposedly God’s will for him, in the name of positive thinking. 

In his time as President, we watched this put into operation. We saw him dismissing any reports that made him look bad, weak, in the wrong or unsuccessful as “fake news”.  Reports of low numbers attending his inauguration, for example, and, in time negative poll ratings were “fake news”. To his mind, they must be fake because they imply failure, and failure is never admissible, only success. And when his November 2020 election campaign failed, we saw how he behaved. He conjured up the fantasy that it had all been rigged and stolen from him and led the insurrection that tried to take it back. He has faced a trial in Congress, albeit in his absence.  The truth will out, we often say. And so it has. The damage, including the deaths of those killed during the insurrection, has been enormous.

I find great difficulty in calling this a religion.  I see it as a state of such unreality as to be something close to a serious personality disorder. But anyone openly critical of him becomes a victim of Trump’s vindictiveness.

This is certainly a long way away from Christian moral teaching or any other moral teaching.  Trump discards any ideas of humility, repentance, asking forgiveness, ‘turning the other cheek’ and being forgiving.  Lost, too, are the words of the apostle Paul, “I say to every man and woman among you, not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think.” (Rom. 12 v3.)  And it shows a total distain for the concept of Truth. The Washington Post, a highly respected newspaper, kept track of Trump’s lies during his Presidency, and they numbered thousands.

Norman Vincent Peale attracted a massive following in his day, but was in the end condemned by theologians and psychologists as promoting a dangerous form of little more than self-hypnosis. Eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr criticised him, as did eminent Unitarian minister Rev. A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington.

  Dipping into politics in the 1950s, Peale took a very right-wing stance and famously clashed with the Unitarian Adlai Stevenson, a 1952 candidate for the Presidency, up against Eisenhower. Peale stated that Adlai Stevenson was not fit to be President because he had been divorced. He later said that John F Kennedy was not fit to be President because he was Roman Catholic.  Adlai Stevenson’s riposte was to say, “I find St. Paul appealing but St. Peale appalling!”

  Yes, I can agree, there is no value in habitual pessimism, always taking a negative view, constantly putting oneself down, imagining the worst, ‘beating yourself up’ as the common phrase has it.  But there is virtue in admitting one’s mistakes and shortcomings (sins, if you like) and coming to terms with them. Not easy, but it is truthful, and in the words of John’s gospel, “the truth shall make you free.”    The philosopher Rousseau called it the search for amour propre, appropriate love, an uplifting self-respect, balanced with realistic self-appraisal.

   But there is more. Once he was in office as President, Trump appointed a chaplain, in fact several of them. They are all on the conservative evangelical wing of the Christian church, and one of them at least, Paula White, is a Pentecostalist preacher. Pentecostalists are those who take a literal view of the bible and believe, not only in the Holy Spirit that appeared to the disciples on the day of Pentecost, but some of them also believe that the world is populated by spirits, lots of them, some good and some evil. During a Presidential election campaign rally, Paula White was filmed calling down the angels to come and attack the evil spirits that were prompting people to vote against Trump. Paula White’s preaching is not really bible based. She believes she has special revelations directly from God. During this near hysterical incantation, she indulged in glossolalia, ‘speaking in tongues’ an outpouring of meaningless words, gobbledegook, that only she understood – or claimed to understand (available via Google – Paula White speaking in tongues. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/05/paula-white-trumps-spiritual-adviser-african-south-american-angels/6173576002/  ).

  That is the most recent manifestation of the religion of Donald J Trump.

 There is a sense, I think, in which as Unitarians we could be grateful to Donald Trump. He shows us what a Unitarian is, by showing us the very opposite of a Unitarian. His way of life is devoid of truthfulness, whereas we sing and pray and talk of Truth, a great deal. We do this so often we hardly know we are doing it! It seems so natural and obvious. And we speak of Reason and Tolerance.

  His religion is devoid of Reason. He has no reason to think he won the 2020 election.

   Speaking in tongues is a non-rational form of religion.

   I have never heard the word Tolerance cross his lips.

   He has no notion of the idea that the Truth will set you free.

 I can understand someone reading The Power of Positive Thinking and finding it helpful. But to take it to extremes…? No. 

 Rather, positive thinking balanced with honesty. No-one can quarrel with that.  To repeat the point: Trump has focused on a truth, taken it to excess and killed the Truth.  Hardly a religion.

 For us, Love is the doctrine of this church, and the quest for Truth is its sacrament.

Amen.

'Interesting Times' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

In the prayer we just had, Dwight Brown quotes the “ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’” Well, I suppose you could say that we live in “interesting times.” When we say that times are or were   “interesting”, we generally mean that they are “interesting” to look back on from a safe distance. True, some times are both interesting and good to look back on – I can think of some – but more often than not, what makes times “interesting” to look back on was not at all pleasant to live through, hence the Chinese curse. 

Although social historians try to convince us that people’s everyday lives in the past are the most “interesting” aspects of it, in the main those lives appear to us have been as uneventful and unremarkable as ours mostly are. Sadly, therefore they are often neglected and overlooked. But what usually makes history “interesting” – even exciting, fascinating and compelling – are the times when humdrum, everyday life was interrupted by social upheaval, natural disaster, war, revolution, plague and pestilence.  

Of course, it takes time for such things to become “interesting” – often many years, even decades and centuries. While they are happening they are frequently nothing less than disastrous, with great suffering, great misery, even great evil and cruelty. But as all personal involvement with such times fades away then we come to see them as “interesting” – the fit subject for scholarly studies, historical novels, films, plays, “historical” re-enactments and television documentaries – even comedy. Try these things when the human suffering is still fresh, though, and the cry goes up that it’s “too soon.”   

The time of pandemic that we are living through will one day be counted among those “interesting times.” The pandemic is indeed a “curse” and few would use the word “interesting” to describe it now. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, dead is not “interesting”, it is catastrophic – not to mention all the personal suffering it has caused and is causing over and above the stark statistics of the death toll alone. Our response to this may be shock and horror, depression and despair, grief and sorrow, compassion and resilience, courage and resolve, or any number of exceptional responses to exceptional circumstances – but “interest”? Few would rate that as an adequate term to describe their feelings. Today the interest lies in finding ways to halt the pandemic, to alleviate the suffering it brings, and to defeat – or, at least, suppress – the virus that is causing it. 

Much is rightly said about the pandemic’s effects on physical and mental health, but what about our spiritual health? Our sense of purpose, our confidence in who and what we are, our rootedness in something that underpins our lives in all their fragility and vulnerability? By throwing our lives into varying degrees of confusion, by blighting our plans and hopes for the future, by undermining our confidence in the structures on which we thought our lives rested: our society and we, as individuals within it, have been challenged existentially. 

We are not, after all, safe and secure in a bubble of comfortable self-confidence. Our bubble is fragile, perhaps increasingly so, and for all too many people it has burst altogether – or will. And it doesn’t take too much thought to realise how easily this could be true for all of us, even if we haven’t really suffered too much ourselves so far. We have been fortunate that vaccines were developed so fast – imagine what things would be like if they hadn’t been. But can we be sure that future viruses, or even further mutations of the Covid 19 virus, will be so easily contained – not that “easily” is the right word, of course! Even the present virus, in its various versions, is still far from ending its depredations. And this is especially so in poorer countries without the best modern medical facilities and ready access to adequate supplies of vaccine. 

Another disturbing factor is the link being made between the pandemic and the wider – indeed, greater – environmental crisis that we face on many fronts. Our upsetting of nature’s balanced systems, our tearing apart of its web of life, our reckless confusion of things best kept distinct – all this and more will bring manifold new threats to human health and wellbeing, to our ways of life around this one world. 

Of course, humanity has a way of surviving and surmounting challenges, of finding resources – including spiritual resources – with which to survive those “interesting times”, but the combination of threats we now face is unprecedented. There is certainly no guarantee that we can somehow emerge from them unscathed, even emerge from them at all in any state that could be called satisfactory. 

In the far future, historically-minded folk may find these times of ours “interesting”, but the prospect for all too many of those doomed to live through them is anything but. Which is why it is up to the present generation of earthlings to see that our “interesting times” don’t get any more “interesting”, and instead become mercifully uninteresting and humdrum: a normal succession of life and death, of everyday dramas of no great consequence, of events which make for happiness and content but which won’t detain future historians overmuch. We want stability, a future we can have some sense of certainty about, a world of peace and order, sustainability, health and simple pleasures.  Not heaven on earth, perhaps, but at least an earth beautiful, vibrant and pleasant to live on. Is that too much to ask? Not really, but achieving this modest aim requires us all in these “interesting times” to adapt our ways and lifestyles, to change our priorities and technologies, our economic systems and methods of doing business, and so make more secure the basis of our increasingly unstable existence. But, of course there can be no guarantees. 

Lent is a good time to reflect on such things. When Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness after his baptism he was forced to re-assess his life and its purpose – an existential shift portrayed mythologically as his triumph over the temptations of the devil. It was this that set him out on his ministry, and ultimately on the road to Jerusalem and the great crisis that awaited him there. It was that ministry, that crisis and what followed, that set out a new spiritual path for humankind. That path still offers us a world at peace with itself, with nature and with God, the eternal basis of our existence.  

Reject that path, take the ways of greed and destruction, and life gets rather too “interesting”. Follow it and something more important than mere “interest” comes into play.  It is the world where, as the prophet Micah says, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4: 3-4) Not very “interesting” to historians but no bad way to live out our human existence. 

In the wilderness Jesus confronted himself and found a new path to follow for the good of humanity. As the model for Lent, that wilderness experience, that time of fasting, bids us to put aside our usual assumptions, to renounce our petty ambitions, and instead seek a deeper understanding of our life’s purpose, rooted in loving kindness and the will to be a saving and healing presence in this wounded world.

I suppose this past year of pandemic has seen us all driven into the wilderness in one way or another, and we are not out of it yet. Some have confronted their interior demons as well as external tribulations, and come through – battered but unbowed. Some, sadly, have not done so well. Others, of course, have not survived at all. We give thanks to those who have borne the brunt of this particular wilderness and its trials and temptations for the sake of us all. And let us resolve to learn from the wilderness ourselves, finding there a deeper assurance, a clearer path and a better way to be human in these troubled and all too “interesting times.”

'Future of the Past' by Ali Mercer

The Future of the Past

Part One

We are the living products of our past; walking, talking bits of history. Our bodies contain the elements blasted into being at The Big Bang; they carry the signatures of all the food we’ve eaten and the water water we’ve drunk. We have been shaped by our environment and as humans have evolved, we’ve shaped that environment in our turn, creating a different world for the next generation to grow up in.

Our homes, schools, workplaces; the streets, villages, towns and cities; the countryside we value as natural but which is 99% man-made; it all shapes us every day. We walk in the past.

It’s not just the physical realm which shapes us. By accident of birth, we are born into a human body of some shape and colour, into a family which may be stable or not, which is itself part of a wider society with all its attendant requirements and expectations. In our bid to survive, we learn to conform to the patterns of that society, but there will be many challenges.

Depending on where that baby is born, it will grow up very differently. A female child in some parts of the world can be so unwanted, she is left to die. In many places, she will grow up under the strict control of a male dominated society, never realising her potential. If she is lucky to be born into a fairer society, she may succeed in some field, despite the obstacles in her way. To be homosexual may mean living with anything from personal and institutional discrimination, to being in daily fear for your life because of the beliefs and traditions of the society you live in.

A child of colour may grow up never seeing a white person, or forever be the second-class citizen in a country where they are a minority. Other children may not even have a home to call their own, often unwelcome strangers in a world where artificial borders divide up the earth. The Roma, Kurds, Uighur and Rohingya are peoples whose names we know because of the struggles they face in trying to survive in a present shaped by a history which excludes or persecutes them for who they were.

As more people are forced to leave their homelands to find safe refuge in other parts of the world, they face the discrimination brought about by lessons others grew up with: that foreigners are stupid, unclean, untrustworthy, lazy, frightening and unwelcome. The propaganda of two World Wars, vilifying Jews, Roma and Africans amongst others, lingers long in cultural memory. The echoes of Empire keep some in a false sense of superiority over others.

In religious matters too, we live in the past. For some, religious affiliation is a given: they will grow up within the dominant religion of their country. Others may be born into a family whose traditions see them as a religious minority, such as Christians in a Muslim dominated country. Which tradition is dominant in the present day is a direct consequence of the past: who conquered who, which faction seized power when. The advent of Protestantism in Europe centuries ago, made the creation of the Church of England a possibility when Henry VIII and his cronies wanted to wrestle power and money away from the powerful established church.

As Unitarians, our traditions are part of a long history of religious dissent against past forms of religion dominant at different times. Some of that dissent was based on fundamental disagreements about theology or practice: some of the fissures which fragmented the Christian church changed the very substance of people’s beliefs. Others were ‘fake fights’ over petty subjects, perhaps a cover for personal power struggles. Disagreements and fragmentation seem inescapable where human beings are concerned!

It’s interesting to note that the words we heard from Rev. McDonald Ladd were spoken in 2016, and yet today they seem as relevant as ever: we still hear the same responses to Black Lives Matter, still hear the same tired old excuses of “They were different times” or “You can’t judge historical figures by modern standards” or “But look at all the good things these people did”. Or the best one of all: “You can’t rewrite history”, which is ridiculous as ‘history’ has always been and will continue to be rewritten. The trope that ‘history is written by the victors’ makes the history of the downtrodden no less valid or important.

Part Two

Who knows where the time goes indeed. Time is a funny thing, sometimes stretching out interminably, while at other times it seems to go winging by ever faster! We simplify it in our minds as a single line, past at one end, present in the middle, future at the other end. But I get the feeling it’s more complex than that, as if our place on that line jumps about, or perhaps the line itself gets twisted and we live in this strange kind of past-present. What seems certain is that the tie to our past is unbreakable and that examining that past is important to our future. 

But examining history can be painful. It can dig up uncomfortable truths which rock the foundations of our present days lives. And so it should. The pain experienced by people today is a direct consequence of past decisions taken. We think of progress as a never ending trajectory towards improvement, but it’s not. It’s just change, some of it is beneficial, some is not. 

Take for instance our way of living. There’s no doubt that the Industrial Revolution, technical innovation and medical advances have given many of us us access to homes, work, transport and a longer, more healthy lifespan. But they have also brought about a decrease in environmental cleanliness, over-use of resources, a disconnect between human beings and the world they inhabit and a still-widening gap between the richest and the poorest.

In recent times, we have as a society been faced with the anger and demands for justice from those who have been wronged or believe themselves to be. When we hear of investigations into ‘historical child sex abuse’ we have to acknowledge both that it happened then and still happens now. When a terrorist commits an atrocity as their way of being heard, we are forced to examine where that level of hatred derives from and our part in creating it. When people of colour and their allies pull down statues of slavers, we have to look at the society which chose to put that statue up and the society which chose to leave it here for generations.

Admitting faults strikes at the heart of who we are, personally and at the level of wider society and national identity. How can we sing of Britannia proudly ruling the waves at the same time as acknowledging that our supremacy allowed us to profit from the use and abuse of so many others? How do we celebrate our heroes while admitting that they were terribly racist or sexist? How do we challenge the order of the society we live in without making ourselves unwanted outsiders? I’m not sure the answers are simple, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the questions and explore the possibilities.

When we hear the voices of the oppressed rise up, we must listen. We have as individuals chosen to put ourselves under the Unitarian name at a time when we are free to practice our faith as full members of society. It wasn’t always so. Unitarians and others have known the bitterness of being outsiders, of being restricted and even persecuted. Perhaps that should make us more keenly aware of the importance of examining the past and the way it shapes our present.

We have at various times made changes which were not always comfortable for everyone: even the lighting of the chalice, so central to our services and identity now, is a recent addition which some saw as a part of other religions’ traditions, not ours. We are faced with questions about what we want to bring with us to give to those who come after and what we think we should leave behind.

As a faith group we also have to recognise where we stand, where we have done well and not so well. We helped shape the changes to laws on same-sex marriage, but perhaps we haven’t always been as welcoming to strangers as we like to think we are. We pride ourselves on our liberal, inclusive values, but if our churches and meeting houses are largely full of white, middle class, heterosexual people, we perhaps need to check that we aren’t just talking the talk.

As members of a wider society too, we should take a look at ourselves, personally and as a group. Are we prepared to stand by our principles, even if it makes life hard for ourselves? Will we challenge the status quo, call out the people and structures which continue to treat people unfairly? Jesus became the enemy of the establishment, both political and religious, unwilling to change his standards even if that might have out him in a position to make positive changes. We have found ourselves a home in a liberal religious tradition which has a tradition of standing up and questioning what it sees as wrong: members have been arrested, jailed, beaten and even died as they have joined their voices with others to call for justice and change.

I don’t know in which year the Rev. Nick Teape wrote his words. I do know it was before I was born. I find it a little sad that those words are still such a challenge today, but also it gives me hope: hope that the world is still full of decent people who will Stand on the Side of Love, who will be brave enough to try answering the big questions and look to make a new, happier, more peaceful and fair history for those who come next.

May it be so.