The intersection of religion and politics is a sensitive realm, but the global conversation has undeniably arrived there. The recent conflict between the Pope and the US President was not a personal tiff or a celebrity feud. Fundamental principles of 21st Century authoritarianism drive explicit rejections of core Christian beliefs. Specific actions of Donald Trump that are otherwise difficult to understand fit well with these rejections. One can draw a straight line from doctrine to apostasy to behavior.
According to the philosophical godfather of 21st Century dictatorship, Carl Schmitt, politics is about the distinction of friend versus enemy, and “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism.” He maintains this is not about mere competitors, for “the antagonist intends to negate his opponent’s way of life…” Friend and enemy “refer to the real possibility of physical killing.” This enmity is present for any group involved in politics and, implicitly, lack of intent to kill makes one politically nonexistent. (p. 26-33, Concept of the Political)
Not shrinking from the implications for Christianity, Schmitt asserts that when Jesus told his followers to love and pray for their enemies (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27) he did not mean political enemies. This might pass for ordinary philosophical hairsplitting, except that the tradition includes a fairly decisive illustration of the intended meaning. Jesus is tortured to death by a foreign empire and yet, at the moment of his death, prays forgiveness for executioners who have no personal reason to kill him. Schmitt falsifies the teachings of Jesus to excuse his own concept of politics as murder delayed.
Drawing the line across to the actions of today, Mr. Trump’s sermon on hating one’s enemies was not impulsive or frivolous. At the memorial service of Charlie Kirk, one of Mr. Trump’s most valuable supporters, Erika Kirk embraced the core message of her faith by publicly forgiving her husband’s murderer. Mr. Trump essentially spit in her face, eliciting a chorus of boos from the audience by insisting that he does not forgive. He hates his enemies. Here, he gives fair warning to a key constituency. He does not need their support. Politicians need constituencies. Dictators abuse everyone.
Another core autocratic idea is that, in commanding the state, authority is all and truth nothing. In support of this Schmitt focuses on miracles as the test of sovereign power. European kings were able to perform miracles, he asserts, because they could decide what was a miracle. “Auctoritas, non Veritas. Nothing here is true: everything is command. A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subject to believe to be a miracle…Miracles cease when the state forbids them.” Further, he argues that it is a mistake for government to allow people to have freedom of thought and belief even within the confines of their own private thoughts. Enforcing outward belief is not good enough. The sovereign commands even the inner lives of its subjects. (p. 54-7 The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes)
When Mr. Trump depicts himself as Jesus Christ performing a healing, he is not delusional. He is claiming turf in people’s souls. If he shows himself miraculous, he is. If he says it is not a miracle, he is not backing down, but doubling down.
Religion is more than doctrine. Being spiritual, the spirit of the thing matters. Christianity is largely defined by divine forgiveness of sins, but has largely held at least the Ten Commandments (of all the many laws laid down in the Jewish tradition) to be enduring rules for earthly behavior. Some denominations hold that one is saved from sin, once and forever, at a single moment of conversion. It is hard to think of any sect or theologian that transposes this framework directly onto purely human relations. What Christian tradition permits mere mortals to forgive earthly criminals in advance of their crimes?
Yet Schmitt, having argued that all modern political thought is secularized theology, held that sovereign government essentially forgives itself for all crimes beforehand. It is the exception to all rules. (p. 1-10, Political Theology) Somehow, he still spoke as if government had some sort of responsibility, an obvious contradiction.
When the Trump administration tells ICE officers that they are completely immune from the law, it pretends to forgive their crimes in advance. When it trains them to violate the Constitution (as a former trainer, turned whistleblower, has revealed), it indoctrinates them to criminality paid for by their victims’ taxes, ordained and sanctioned from on high – but not genuinely all that high.
Mr. Trump’s proposal to erect a golden idol of himself in the land of Baal is, of course, somewhat different. No theory of dictatorship is needed to see him writing himself into the role of the villain in numerous Biblical stories.
Christianity rarely declares anything heretical in our times, but there is no better candidate than the teachings of Carl Schmitt and his acolytes. The politics of murder, the divinity of dictators, and the doctrine of permanent self-forgiveness, all clash with the faith, and are all illustrated by the current President. Implications for adherents to the theory of the exception are profound. The primary locus for promotion of this thinking in the United States is the Federalist Society. Six out of nine Supreme Court Justices are associated with Federalist. Six Justices are Catholic. Four members of the Court are both.
Still, as often happens, poets tell it better than priests, politicians, or lawyers. John Milton was a great advocate and defender of republicanism but, as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s administration, he had a front row seat on the degeneration of England’s “The Revolution of the Saints” into an outright dictatorship. Bitter years later, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, he describes how Satan, the fallen archangel, discovers his trade. Traveling across the void toward Earth, he lingered for a while in the company of Chaos and Night where he learns to sow contradiction and uncertainty, and so, “by confusion rule.”
Satan must learn the implements of chaos and darkness because, as a creature of heaven, he has no prior knowledge of what evils might plague mortal beings. His own fall was driven not by any sordid desire, but by rebellion against heaven. Like the new model dictators of the 21st Century, he was victim of the sin that came before sin. He envied God.
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