Did God Vote for Trump?

On January 5, 2021, one day before Donald Trump’s insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, an obscure Louisiana two-term congressman named Mike Johnson met behind closed doors with fellow Republicans to decide whether to oppose the results of the 2020 presidential election.

By that time, the evidence was overwhelming that, despite Trump’s braying insistence, there had been no widespread fraud in any state and Joe Biden had been fairly elected.  Nonetheless, Johnson became and remained one of the leaders of the movement to try to keep Trump in power by manipulating the electoral votes in pivotal states.

Johnson, now, of course, the newly elected Speaker of the House, justified his decision to deny the truth and support a lie not on political grounds, but by evoking a higher authority.  “This is a very weighty decision,” he told his colleagues, as reported in Politico.  “All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually.”  

In other words, God told Johnson that Donald Trump should remain in the presidency.

It is an odd concept indeed to think of God as a political consultant, and even odder to consider why God would have chosen the man who lost the election rather than the man who won.  If God agreed with Johnson that the election was stolen, why didn’t He simply change the results Himself?  After all, He did part the Red Sea and it would seem a much less arduous task to alter vote counts in five or six states and thus keep His chosen candidate in the White House.

Mike Johnson’s earthly justification for opposing the results was that voting rules had been altered to allow more people to safely go to the polls in the midst of a pandemic.  Again, none of these changes were found to have resulted in more than a handful of votes being cast incorrectly, mostly by Republicans, far short of the number that would have even begun to impact the results.  So, in theory, even if Johnson were correct, God would have been more interested in legal technicalities than in the principle that Americans should have a voice in their own government without being forced to risk horrible death to do so.

None of these seeming inconsistencies in any way affected Mike Johnson.  Rather, with God on his shoulder, he became one of the guiding…spirits…in the effort to destroy the American electoral system and likely democracy along with it.  (Now that Johnson is Speaker, it is fair to wonder if God has also instructed him to withhold aid from Ukrainians fighting to avoid Russian genocide or to impeach Joe Biden.)

The problem of Mike Johnson and other politicians—these days mostly Republicans—evoking God to justify decisions or points of view that they would or should have been embarrassed to express solely on their own authority goes beyond George Carlinesque absurdity.  (It should be borne in mind that Southern planters used similar biblical arguments to justify the institution of slavery.)

Far worse is that all this faux sanctimony has institutionalized hypocrisy as a linchpin of American government.

To be clear, everyone has a right to hold any religious beliefs they so choose and adhere to its dictates.  When, however, God is evoked by politicians to justify inequality or to intrude on the rights or the freedom of others, their actions based on those beliefs must come under scrutiny.

To do that, it is necessary to take a step back and ask some basic questions.  The first is how the evangelical community, of which Mike Johnson is a proud member, can possibly support, promote, and make excuses for Trump, a man who would seem to have violated just about every tenet of their faith, over Biden, a man who, whatever else can be said about him, has spent his life genuinely adhering to the tenets of his?  Does God really favor a man who mocks the handicapped, sneers at parents who have lost a hero son in battle, derides a prisoner of war who endured years of torture without betraying his country, is a serial adulterer and sex offender, encourages violence against detractors, and is almost surely a fraudster and white-collar criminal?

Then there are the additional questions of whether God, or God as defined by these supposed religious zealots, favors policies that discriminate against gay and transgender Americans.  Did not God, again in theory, create even those who are different in His own image?  If God genuinely wished everyone to be the same, why did He not merely make them that way?

If the answers to these questions seem obvious, they are clearly not so for those who would use God as a means of political gain.  For them, faith has become either a tool or a contrivance, very effective in either case because anyone attacking their behavior can be accused, with the appropriate aghast self-righteousness, of belittling religious beliefs.

But who is really belittling God, religion, and faith, the person who keeps his or her own beliefs personal and attempts to genuinely live by them, or the one who contorts those beliefs to achieve and then hold on to political power?