Best of 2025 - Muted response to Trump's appropriation of Christianity |
“…and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be on the alert…” ( Acts 20:29–31).
A repost from 23 October 2025
Before the cock crows, I’m happy to admit I was educated in the Roman Catholic tradition under the largely effective tutelage of the Dominican Fathers. Like the Jesuits, the Dominicans placed special emphasis on study, critical thinking and the pursuit of truth. As I slouch into my winter years, I’m still trying to think critically and pursue truth whatever that is and wherever it might take me.
For those of us still grappling with the problem of evil and the extent to which Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument might still hold in the context of quantum mechanics, the Trump/MAGA shameless appropriation of Christianity sits uneasily.
I accept Christianity is a broad church encompassing a range of traditions from Catholicism through to Pentecostalism. However, I don’t remember ever being taught that the commandment to love our neighbour excluded Mexicans, Muslims and Hispanics.
In the US, a nation founded in part on resistance to established churches, we are treated to the unedifying spectacle of a six-times-failed real estate speculator invoking God at every turn but scarcely able to quote a single verse from the Bible. Meanwhile, the MAGA faithful — faces upturned, mouths open, hands raised — perform a beautifully synchronised genuflection whenever Trump approaches a microphone. Unlike Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was gunned down at the altar in 1980 after denouncing human rights abuses, Trump’s........