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during the sixty-eighth National Prayer Breakfast, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, gave a moving tribute to Jesus’s entreaty to “love your enemies” in the midst of the current “crises of contempt and polarization.” Trump, speaking after Brooks, began his incendiary remarks by saying, “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you. But I don’t know if Arthur’s going to like what I’m going to say.”7 As some cheered and whistled, he proceeded to lambaste, defame, and threaten his enemies with retribution for supporting the impeachment procedures. Vengeance is mine, saith Trump. Not surprisingly, some of his most sycophantic allies, like the Reverend Robert Jeffress, embraced Trump’s tantrum. Rather than offering a humbled response on the difficulties of keeping Jesus’s command to love your enemies (something all of us can relate to), Trump went on to repudiate the central teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. So, when 89 percent of white Christians believe the Bible should influence the laws of this country,8 they are not referring to the Bible read by the disenfranchised, where the command to “love your enemies” is not up for negotiation. White Christian exegesis is instead based on a white, cisgender male perspective that constructs a religion ready and able to defend their unearned profit, privilege, and power. The domestication and domination of white Christianity by the Trump presidency did not come about ex nihilo. There is a history to how this country arrived at this juncture. Likewise, ignoring this history only ensures the eventual rise of some future Trumpish president. The triumph of white, conservative, so-called family-values Christianity did not come about coincidentally. We can trace the current Trump Christian Age back to the 1940s movement that developed as a response to the New Deal and Social Gospel. The white Christianity of the mid-twentieth century sought to move the needle from the Social Gospel (Christianizing a savage capitalism that was crushing humanity) to the prosperity gospel (blessed are the faithful because they will be given health and wealth).
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Miguel A. de la Torre (Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers)