(s.m.) Unthinkable in Europe but not in the United States, the photo here shows an inspired Donald Trump in the White House surrounded by a host of Evangelical preachers who are laying hands and invoking divine blessings upon him.
They are the religious leaders who make up the “Faith Office,” the department of faith established by Trump on February 7 with an executive order effective immediately. The lady in white on the right is the one to whom he has entrusted the leadership of the office, Paula White, a leading exponent of that “prosperity theology” which was the subject of severe criticism in an editorial in “La Civiltà Cattolica” on July 21, 2018.
But more than “prosperity” as a sign of divine predilection, the controversy that today sees Trump in conflict with the historic Protestant Churches and with the Catholic Church has as its object the immigrants he has begun to expel from the United States.
Already at the religious inauguration ceremony of his presidency, at the Washington National Cathedral, Trump did not hide his irritation at the reproaches leveled at him by Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Church.
Then protests rained down on him from many Catholic bishops, led by the president of the episcopal conference, Timothy P. Broglio, also in conflict with what Trump’s vice president, the Catholic convert JD Vance, had said against them.
But above all, on Tuesday, February 11, Pope Francis intervened personally, with a letter to the bishops of the United States in harsh condemnation of the “program of mass deportations” launched by the Trump presidency.
The letter is divided into ten points, and in the sixth, without naming him, the pope contests precisely what Vance said in an interview with Fox News on January 29, in support of the primacy to be granted, in love of neighbor, “to those in your own home,” and then to those further away and then to the rest of the world, as taught by St. Thomas, St. Augustine, and even before him by the apostle Paul in the first letter to Timothy chapter 5, verse 8. An “ordo amoris” – this outlined by Vance – that Francis instead reverses, assigning primacy to the poor, even the most distant, and choosing as model the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Trump is certainly not the type to be spellbound with the pope’s taking to the field in this way. But however this conflict develops, it confirms that in the United States religion has a very strong role in the political arena, today as in the past, with each president interpreting this role in his own way, in ways unthinkable in other countries of the secularized West.
This is what is brought to light, in the engaging reconstruction that follows, by Giovanni Maria Vian, historian and professor of ancient Christian literature at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and former director of “L’Osservatore Romano” from 2007 to 2018.
The text was published in the newspaper “Domani” on February 9, 2025, and is reproduced here with the author’s consent.
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Trump between King David and Cyrus
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Trump, like King David? The juxtaposition seems bizarre, but not to many of the president’s Evangelical supporters, and the similarity expresses well the important role of religion – and at the same time the political use of the Bible – in the United States. Confirming a profound component that dates back to the nation’s prehistory, since the arrival in 1620 of the “Pilgrim Fathers,” and one that after more than four centuries remains relevant.
“I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the depravations of Europe, to the American strand,” reads the “Magnalia Christi Americana,” published in 1702 by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather to celebrate them. “There is no nation in the world in which the Christian religion retains a greater hold on souls than in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831 in a judgment that has become famous, and added that “religion is the principal organism of the country.”
The comparison between the Republican candidate and David dates back to the first electoral campaign that put Trump at the helm of the world’s greatest power. The pairing with the king of Judah was made in 2016 by two important exponents of American Protestantism: Jerry Falwell Jr., the head of a leading university in the fundamentalist Christian galaxy, and Franklin Graham, son of the famous Billy, the preacher friend of presidents, from Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to Reagan and Obama.
Even the flashy hairstyle that the president boasts about “is anything but anodyne,” as the historian Christian-Georges Schwentzel commented in a January 25 interview with Virginie Larousse in “Le Monde.” It veers toward yellow, although the color is not as bright as that of the Simpsons, which in an episode way back in 2000 had incredibly predicted Trump’s election.
This unmistakable characteristic too would recall the description of David that one reads in the first book of Samuel, in the Latin of the Vulgate: “rufus et pulcher adspectu decoraque facie”. A few words that Dante transforms into the wonderful verse “Blond was he, beautiful, and of noble aspect” with which in the third canto of the Purgatorio he describes the hapless king Manfred.
One can certainly doubt the biblical reminiscences of the president, who in 2019 dodged a journalistic question about his religious faith – of the Protestant Presbyterian type – and replied that it was a “personal” matter. But four years earlier, during a rally in South Carolina, The Donald had invited someone to touch his flowing blond hair, like a medieval thaumaturge king, but simply to verify that it was real.
Beyond the unlikely but repeatedly evoked similarity with King David, the fact remains that the president – in the footsteps of his predecessors, both Republican and Democratic – has always made broad use of powerfully religious rhetoric. As he did right after the attack of July 13, 2024, when the controversial candidate who escaped death by a hair’s breadth attributed his deliverance to God himself.
It was in this context pervaded by biblical references that many fundamentalist Evangelical Christians – unconditional supporters of the Israeli state – also perceived the transfer in 2017, during Trump’s first term, of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The presidential decision was entirely in keeping with their expectations, although only 16 percent of American Jews supported it, as the Spanish theologian Rafael Aguirre recalled.
In his second inaugural address, last January 20, the president pledged that “the golden age of America” has begun, which he had indeed promised during the electoral campaign, using positive apocalyptic imagery. According to the medievalist Joël Schnapp, in fact, the reference would be to the millennial reign of the righteous described at the end of the last book of the Bible.
These allusions appear “totally anachronistic in France and Western Europe, where secularization dominates,” the historian told “Le Monde,” but they retain “a mobilizing effect” in the United States. An effect that is much feared in Europe, as depicted in the Parisian daily newspaper in a disturbing reworking of Dürer’s well-known engraving of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse – who in the scriptural vision unleash violence, injustice, and death on earth – with the faces of Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg.
On the contrary, one of the major financiers of the American president, Peter Thiel, in the “Financial Times” of January 11–12 alluded to the biblical book of Revelation in a completely different way: if one takes into account the original meaning of its title – which means “revelation” – Trump’s return to the White House promises to reveal “the ancien regime’s secrets”: from the assassination of John Kennedy to the pandemic. Even if the president’s friend wrote that “the new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance,” because “a time for truth and reconciliation” has come.
So that appeal seems to have fallen on deaf ears which in 2019 was issued in the “Washington Post” by a group of specialists in the history of religions: to resist the temptation to assimilate politicians to biblical models. In part because the scholars did not actually take into account the history of the United States.
Still emblematic, of course, is the figure of Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery. Raised in a Baptist family, but not baptized nor a member of any denomination, Lincoln – Michael Lahey has written – more than anyone else “was a messiah for his people”: assassinated in 1865 on Good Friday, “the day for recalling the death of the Christian messiah.”
Almost all U.S. presidents have begun their terms by swearing on the Bible. Only four – Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge – did not do so, while Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination, swore on a Catholic missal that was on the Air Force One that was taking him back to Washington. Six other presidents have used two Bibles: among them, Obama and Trump also wanted to swear on the Lincoln Bible.
In the customary political use of Sacred Scripture by American presidents, a pivot in the conservative direction was set up by Ronald Reagan, who pursuant to a decision of the Senate declared 1983 “the year of the Bible.” The same year saw the speech, with apocalyptic overtones, on the need to oppose the “evil empire.” Tones that after September 11 returned in the speeches of the “born-again Christian” George W. Bush.
Obama spoke about the role of religion in 2006, before being elected president, with the aim of declaring his “Christian faith,” brought into doubt by his opponents: it is “a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives – in the lives of the American people – and I think it’s time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.”
Americans “are a religious people,” and this “is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers,” but expresses “a hunger that’s deeper than that,” Obama said. Who as president quoted the Bible often and upheld America’s Christian tradition, but reaffirmed the pluralistic and tolerant character of the nation.
In 2022, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of respondents maintained that the United States should be a “Christian nation.” But at the same time, 54 percent thought the separation of Church and state should be strengthened.
So the picture is shifting, and the French sociologist Sébastien Fath has said that in the last election campaign Trump did not only address “Christian nationalists.” And if JD Vance, now vice president, became Catholic in 2019, Musk declares himself a deist “and has nothing Christian” about him.
Ultimately, rather than David, Trump would resemble Cyrus, who in the book of Isaiah (45:1–8) is described as the pagan messiah who defeated the Babylonians, because in 539 BC he ended the exile of the Jewish people. Coined by fundamentalist Evangelicals, the comparison between the “great king” of Persia and the president was also taken up in 2017 by Netanyahu, raising criticism from many Jews and Christians.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
