Last week, Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States. While it was his second inauguration, it was his first as a Florida resident.
Evangelical Christian voters, including those here in Florida, overwhelmingly voted to reelect Trump.
During the campaign, he intertwined his policy positions with evangelical themes and invoked his faith in his inauguration address.
“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump said to applause.
Less than 24 hours later, the president was sitting in a front pew at the National Cathedral in Washington.
A bishop speaks out in defense of those who are scared
“As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God,” said the Right Reverend Marianna Edgar Budde, an Episcopal bishop of Washington during her sermon, which included a direct request to Trump.
”In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. “
She mentioned gay, lesbian and transgender children, as well as immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal status.
“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land."
Afterward, the president was asked what he thought of the service.
“Not too exciting, was it. I didn’t think it was a good service, no.”
On Wednesday, Trump took to social media. He said she owed the public an apology, calling her tone “nasty.” Trump wrote, “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way.”
Faith and politics
The bishop's comments, and Trump’s response, raised questions about the relationship between faith and politics.
“It's a preacher's job, a pastor's job to sort of speak truth to power, to also challenge their parishioners,” said Sarah McCammon, a national political correspondent for NPR and author of “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church."
“But I think this sort of was very stark in the sense that she was speaking directly to the president. You know, it's not unusual for clergy across the political spectrum to invoke political themes and messages, but this was, I think, unusually kind of intimate and that she was sitting standing right there and he was sitting right there in her church.”
Among Trump’s executive orders and policy changes was a federal recognition of only two genders, one that declared a national emergency at the country's southern border and issued several others related to immigration, including one attempting to do away with birthright citizenship.
Trump also said immigration officials can question and arrest people in places like churches, hospitals, and schools, which was previously not allowed.
McCammon, who spoke Friday on The Florida Roundup, noted that immigration and refugee re-settlement work is largely conducted by religious groups, many of which are Christian.
"I don't imagine that Trump's staunch Christian Right supporters, the people that have been with him for years and years, will be moved much by that, if you look at past history," McCammon said. "But I think there will be criticism from the religious left … there already has been for some of these kinds of actions, and there may be churches that choose to defy those orders.”
The Christian information highway
McCammon, in her book, wrote that even long before social media, there was a really robust infrastructure of religious broadcasting and religious media that had been built up starting in the 1960s by people like Pat Robertson.
She said social media has only added to that.
“I think the advent of social media has only added to that in a really profound way," McCammon said. "I think conservatives would say that much of the ‘mainstream media’ from, in their view, is dominated by left-wing perspectives. And so that's part of why this right-wing infrastructure has exploded in the way that it has on multiple platforms, but it certainly helps Trump and other conservatives Republicans get their message out quite effectively.”
And for some evangelicals, many of whom say they don’t necessarily like everything about Trump, McCammon said, “they believe he has an important role to play in history, and that perhaps God has some design on his life or some intention for him. And I think for people who already believe that kind of narrative, or hold that kind of theology, his brush with literal brush with a bullet reinforce that belief for them.”
This story was compiled off an interview conducted by Tom Hudson for “The Florida Roundup.”
