Dear Friend,
As we’ve been reminded in recent days, life under a Trump Administration operates at warp speed — each headline more disorienting than the last and with not enough time between to collect one’s thoughts or, crucially, for the collective to organize a response. But one story unfolded this week that’s helpful in summarizing all that’s happened and yet to come.
First, on Monday, there was Reverend Lorenzo Sewell, whose benediction has been variously described as “spirited” and “cringeworthy.” Sewell, a born-again adherent of charismatic Christianity and a favorite of the religious far-right, appropriated the tone and cadence of revivalists and plagiarized entire sections of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Afterward, he received a hug from Trump and announced the launch of his cryptocurrency memecoin, $LORENZO: “I need you to do me a favor to go and get that coin for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on earth.”
The next morning, there was Bishop Mariann E. Budde, the leader of the Episocopal Diocese of Washington who asked the president to “have mercy” for immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Later, Trump rebuked Budde, calling her a “so-called Bishop,” a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” and demanding she apologize. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia went further, saying Budde “should be added to the deportation list.” Even Sewell stepped away from his budding crypto venture to accuse Budde of “theological malpractice.”
The president’s embrace of Sewell and excoriation of Budde is illustrative of the narrowness of the “Christian” in Christian Nationalism. Both are Protestant faith leaders, but only one’s doctrine was deemed “inappropriate.” As we learned the first time around, even the Pope is not beyond Trump’s reproach.
According to Pew Research Center, atheists, agnostics, and other nonreligious Americans know more about religion than Christians do. So, it isn’t you who needs reminding what the Bible has to say about all this. Had the Christian Nationalists bothered reading King James before using it to indoctrinate students, they would have seen the word “mercy” appear nearly 300 times and read clearly their savior’s view of money changers and his stance toward immigrants.
Budde’s sermon, which, again, was very biblical, absolutely outraged the Christian Nationalists. The entire situation — from those first uncomfortable squirms in the church pews to the full-blown tantrums that came later — has laid bare this movement’s hypocrisy and histrionics.
In the span of hours, Trump signed an order supposedly “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” another dictating the federal government only hire certain kinds of Americans, and publicly censured a prominent faith leader for her speech. This is only the start of this administration’s story.
The Christian Nationalist powers-that-be are already denying things we see with our own two eyes, distorting facts we know because of science, and destroying our shared sense of reality. They’ll say something, do the opposite, vice versa, ad nauseum. That it’s dizzying is deliberate. That the oppressive agenda they’re pursuing is not popular, democratic, or even particularly Christian are not things they want us to notice. Quick, look over there instead.
In 1859, Charles Dickens opened his Tale of Two Cities with, “… it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…” If the events of this week are any indication, the days ahead of us will likewise be rife with paradox. Was this inauguration a celebration of our “enduring democracy” or the ushering-in of a “new dynasty”? Are we entering a Golden Age or a Gilded one? Will this new administration “not forget our Constitution” or reinterpret it beyond recognition?
Two years after Dickens published his Tale of Two Cities, abolitionists wrote an ode to John Brown that would later become what we know today as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That same year, Abraham Lincoln took the presidential oath on the very same bible Melania held Monday, though her husband didn’t touch it. (A significant oversight, one would think, for a man who claims he “was saved by God to make America great again.”) Only months after Lincoln’s inaugural address, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired.
Moments after Trump’s swearing-in, the first discordant notes of the “Battle Hymn” rang through the Rotunda. To some watching, it was a triumphant anthem, and to many others, a far more foreboding march. In either case, it was a score befitting the inauguration of a Godman and the start of an administration so marked by dissonance — cognitive and otherwise.
I watched the entire ordeal — from bitter political rivals awkwardly grimacing their way through a gauntlet of niceties and polite rituals to the flurry of unconstitutional executive actions that soon followed — and I can say President Trump was right about this: November 2024 will indeed be regarded as one of the “most consequential” elections in our nation’s history, though not in a “glory hallelujah” kind of way.
In solidarity,
Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement
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