Christian Kayfabe: Why Does the Right Embrace Pretend Christianity?
One of the wildest things to me about the Trump presidency, along with everything else about it, was always the ways in which they tried to square his existence with Christianity.
It is a truth universally accepted that you can’t even be considered for the job of US president if you are not a Christian—a rule unwritten in any law book, but true nonetheless. That said, though, once the assertion has been made to the electorate’s satisfaction, the candidate is under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to follow any tenet of the religion.
This is true for both Democratic and Republican presidents. No Democrat who rejected Christianity could be a serious contender. If anything they have to work harder to prove their piety as their party affiliation already renders them suspect.
A Republican president, however, is essentially regarded the American Pope—head of Church and State, the same dual role granted to the monarch of the United Kingdom, head of both the nation and the Church of England.
So then you have Donald Trump, a man who has never expressed any religious belief, famously a sexual libertine who cheated on each of his wives with each subsequent wife, a man with no charitable tendency. The American right desperately wanted him to be president specifically because his demeanor was so un-Christian. They wanted a fiend, not someone who was held to self-limiting hand-wringing, not someone who would moralise to them. They knew their values, it was the moralists they wanted silenced. They wanted a human nuke.
Still the very minimum standard had to be maintained that he believed in God, specifically the version of God who manifested himself in flesh in Judea in the first century AD as a person we now call Jesus after a westernised two-millennia telephone game from an original pronunciation that also gives us the name Joshua (that’s right, Christians worship a guy named Josh).
Ideally the president, as head of the American church, is Protestant. Since JFK, Catholic is also warily acceptable, and in the desperation of 2012 the Republicans under duress were willing to take a Mormon, but the Jesus thing is absolute.
This is a non-negotiable standard. But it’s one that Trump absolutely had to be made to pass by the people who set that standard. Because it was also non-negotiable that he was to be the nominee for president, as it remains so again today. If he will not outwardly present himself as a Christian then it’s essential that they fake it.
Why?
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