When The Machine Stops

Morning Joe's face turns red with laughter watching Trump struggle to talk religionhttps://t.co/bgSWG2e1Gs

— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 4, 2024

The former president was interviewed over the weekend by "Fox & Friends," where co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy read a question from a viewer in Alabama who asked about his relationship with God and asked how he prayed as he faced "so much adversity and persecution," and the "Morning Joe" host cracked up as Trump turned an expression of faith into one of his infamous "sir" stories.

"Okay, I think it is good," Trump said. "I do very well with the evangelicals, I love the evangelicals, and I have more people saying they pray for me – I can't even believe it. They are so committed and so believing. They say, 'Sir, you're going to be okay, I pray for you every day.' I mean, everybody, almost – I can't say everybody, but almost everybody that sees me, they say it."

The answer to the question clearly is: he doesn’t pray.  Doesn’t see any reason to, doesn’t know how or why to, doesn’t have any relationship to God whatsoever.  The question is also pretty much the same question you could have heard forty years ago, when TV evangelists were having their heyday, and Jim and Tammye Faye seemed set to own the world simply by asking people to buy it for them, and Jerry Falwell thought he was poised to rule the world, and Pat Robertson thought his TeeVee show would springboard him to the White House (but he was only on cable TeeVee, so maybe that made the difference). Arguably those “religious leaders” had no relationship with God, either; but just as arguably they were personally convinced God had a winning relationship with them.  Winning for them, that is. And if you’d asked it then of their audience, you’d have gotten the same answer.

Nothing has changed, except what seemed vibrant and fresh then, is now old and tottering. A blush on the cheek of a dying age, as the Romantics used to say.

American Christianity and charlatans have always gone hand in hand, and while the latter usually pretended to be religious, even that isn’t necessary anymore. Joe Scarborough is not wrong to find it laughable:

Um, I'm sorry," Scarborough said, still laughing. "I mean, seriously. Just go to church once, right? Just get the crib notes, right? I can write it out for you in an index card, okay? I'll just write it out for you on an index card. When somebody asks you what your relationship with is with God, don't go, 'Well, evangelicals vote for me and say, 'Sir, we pray for you.' Not sure where on the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said that. It certainly wasn't the Beatitudes. He was asked in 2016, do you ask for forgiveness. He said, 'I've never done anything that I needed to ask God for forgiveness.'" 

"I find it fascinating," Scarborough added, "he won't answer that question, he won't answer that question about a relationship with God, and he still, as as far as his prayer life goes, again, he still -- you know, he says he has no need to pray because he's perfect. He's asked about both of those things, and he goes, 'Well, you know, evangelicals like me, they say, Sir, sir.' It is just a parody for people to go, 'Oh, he is a man of God, he is Jesus, he is Jesus in flesh,' it is really -- again, I mean, comparing him to Jesus Christ on the cross, which some evangelical so-called leaders did, it's just – it's just beyond parody. It's sad."

"Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all.” What Scarborough is laughing at is the latter: religion as nothing at all. It is the characters in Forster’s story “The Machine Stops,” praying to the machine that provides their every need, because they think that’s what a god does. And yet, in classical Judeo-Christian teachings, they are praying to a false idol. And when the machine stops: what then?

Well, the machine, for these “evangelicals,” has stopped. Trump is facing three more criminal trials which he won’t be able to make go away, and he’ll eventually run out of money to pay for them  (Engoron is still monitoring the business of the Trump Organization, and Trump still has three pending judgments costing him millions to avoid, and the money he’s raising for his campaign is going to lawyers, not campaigning. And that tap turns off irrevocably when it becomes clear he can’t possibly win; probably around the time of the second (in the fall) debate. If Trump hasn’t chickened out of it by then.). Trump is already running on his personal grievances and little more.  “If they can do it to me, they can do it to you,” is not the flex he thinks it is. It’s really just the guilty man’s version of “No one is above the law.” Which is the way the legal system is supposed to work: without fear of favor (and if it favored Trump for so long that’s only because it favors violent crime over business crimes, and because Trump’s crimes finally became so egregious they could not be ignored).  So the evangelicals are not going to save him at the ballot box.

I’m not sure they can save themselves, at this point. And I do feel sorry for them, in the most honest and sincere way. But you really can’t get in the way of someone determined to keep punching themselves in the face.

And what does this mean for the broader issue of religion in America? Not a damned thing. These people have always been the religious fringe, getting the most attention because they are freakish and provide such easy stereotypes (news thrives in ready-made narratives. True for pop culture, too. Movies/TeeVee shows about “evil” almost always rely on video game versions of Roman Catholicism.). They’ll always be with us. But they’ll always be a fringe, too.

I'd help them, if I could. But even God doesn’t force people to do what they don’t want to do (and doesn’t punish them, either. Not in my theology. They punish themselves by their errors and refusal to listen to the law and the prophets, as Jesus would have put it. Which is not the answer to life in a nutshell that evangelicals trade in. That’s the other problem for them: wanting simple answers to complex matters of living with others. Again, they don’t want responsibility; so they end up with nothing at all.).