Trump and Isaiah 45

 

The Roman Catholic Lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary, service of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, cite Isaiah 45:1-7 as a reading for Sunday liturgies today.

Making a King?

After curating comments on the texts today, I found a NY Times article on “Why Trump (45th President) Reigns as King Cyrus” (Isaiah 45) by Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.” She comments that today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king.

 “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump. Ralph Drollinger, who has led weekly Bible study groups in the White House attended by Vice President Mike Pence and many other cabinet members, likes the word “king” so much that he frequently turns it into a verb. “Get ready to king in our future lives,” he tells his followers. “Christian believers will — soon, I hope — become the consummate, perfect governing authorities!” The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.1

 1(2018, December 31). Opinion | Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus - The New York .... Retrieved October 18, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/trump-evangelicals-cyrus-king.html