Watch:
A few quick thoughts:
On the Lee Greenwood Bible, check out Jay Green’s piece, “Lee Greenwood Christianity.”
Is Trump doing this to raise money to help pay his bond in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case? If so, he is using, of all things, the Bible to make money during the holiest week on the Christian calendar. This is sacrilegious. I wonder if Trump remembers that shortly after Jesus arrived in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he went to the temple courts and overturned the tables of the money changers. Once again, Trump shows his narcissism. Easter, he believes, is about him.
Is Trump doing this to win evangelical votes in November? If so, I don’t see how this is an effective political strategy. The people who buy the God Bless the USA Bible are Trump voters. This is not going to win over many anti-Trump or fence-sitting evangelicals.
Of course there are also the usual criticisms, which I have been writing about for years, about the blending of the Bible with American documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill Rights. The God Bless the USA Bible sees no tension between Biblical values and American ideals. For a fuller development of these thoughts check out Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.
Trump clains the Bible is his “favorite book.” Has he ever read it?
John, I share your concern about blending founding American documents with scripture (or aligning those documents with “divine inspiration” in their own right)–although I am a big fan of the Constitution generally and the bill of rights in particular. But I was especially disheartened to see in Jay G.’s piece that this Bible also includes the Pledge of Allegiance.
I’ll admit that my roots in the counterculture might give my theological reflections about the pledge a head start in the wrong direction. Still, I think we need to think seriously about how Christians, as resident aliens in the nations of the world, view our allegiance to those nations–including how and to what degree we promise it. I’ve held off on pushing my reflections ahead publicly, in part because it may only deepen divides within the church among faithful believers along political lines. But we have to make loving space somehow to discuss the limits of faithfulness and the borders of encroaching spirits of deception. (I don’t think is one, but it would be an interesting discussion point.)
Meanwhile, I’m grateful to live in the USA and eager to do my duty as a citizen and for my neighbors, but I’m not pledging allegiance to this kingdom.
Storm, does it soften your attitude towards the Pledge to know that the Baptist minister that wrote it in the 1890s, Francis Bellamy, espoused Christian socialism, was opposed to any mingling of church and state (the “under God” was added later), and considered the commitment to “liberty and justice for all” essential to the republic ih were it to be worthy of our allegiance? He was reportedly “forced from his Boston pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism.” Edward Bellamy, author of the novel Looking Backward, was his cousin, btw.