Trump and Biden as Anti-Popes
The schism in the American Civic Religion
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
Modernity — that is, the way of thinking and living that began in the XVIth Century, rose to power by the end of the XVIIIth Century, and reached its zenith in the middle of the last Century — is visibly crumbling down. The recent FBI raid on Trump’s Palm Beach palace is just a very visible sign of the same process, in which a force created to protect an institution is used against its very core. The greatest showcase of Modernity, after all, has been the United States of America. Modernity’s apogee was made manifest as American success, and the American success story has been the greatest triumph of Modernity.
As Chesterton observed, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” Its creed is Modernity, and its governmental institutions are its church and its religion. No other country comes close to the American reverence for its officials, from the lowliest policeman to the almost-divine President of The United States, the High Priest of America. The only possible comparison would be the Japanese worship of their Emperor. The Emperor, though, does not rule. He is a living symbol of the country, nothing more than that, more often than not kept under lock and key by those who held the reins of real power.
America, though, is its own symbol. While all old crowns have their jewels and ceremonial swords, the United States has its Bill of Rights, its Constitution, and its Declaration of Independence. In short, its creed. Ideas, not things; a project for the future and the present, not a continuation of something very old (the French point to the Gauls, the German to the Goth, and the Japanese believe their Emperor is a literal descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu).
As with all of Modernity, it is in a sense an open project. So open it does not even have a proper name, only a description. “America” was and still is the name of the New World: North and South Americas, plus that tiny strip of land we call Central America. The Western Hemisphere. American lands, spread from the Artic to the Antarctic, are much vaster than the present USA, which in turn is so much bigger than the original rebel colonies. Now, in a small corner of this territory, there are — or there would have been, according to the original project — several countries, or states. Each of them would be the equivalent of a European nation-state. That union of tiny states in the American Continent forms the United States of America It is a description, not a name, for a group of independent states united to one another somewhere in the New World, also known as America.
(The importance of the constituting states is so great in the American project that — flabbergastingly for everybody else — when one asks an American where he is from, instead of answering “the United States”, he’ll always state the names of the town and the state while omitting the country.)
However, those states were not like the European self-governing territories, which at least theoretically would be the present form of a very old cultural group: the French, Italian or Spanish people or nation. Neither were they the governments of Modern nations built on the ruins of destroyed local cultures by the Modern imposition of a single language and a centralized ruling body. They were the territories of dreams.
Different dreams, for sure; a New Englander dream would be a Stephen-King-worthy nightmare for a Southerner, and vice versa. Freed from national roots, though, the archetypical American citizen would be able to literally follow his dream, by voting with his feet and moving into a different state, in which his values would be treasured. Lacking that state, he could, for quite a long time, move West and build himself a new reality, a homestead on a virtual tabula rasa, or blank slate, a land “cleared” of its original inhabitants and open to all settlers’ dreams.
Curiously, even if by accident, a failsafe appeared for those occasions when none of the states could grant the freedom one asked for. Within North America, but out of the United States, there is Canada, the Disunited State. And that is the full width of that dream territory, the land Arlo Guthrie sang as yours and his. The Modern dream, forever alien to the old loves and hatreds that in a large measure still shape the rest of the world. Outside that small bubble of Modernity, across from the Rio Grande, the rump state of Mexico would always offer the peril and temptation of chaos, of otherness, of un-americanization. There be dragons.
Within the United States proper, the Civic Religion would provide comfort with its liturgies — one’s day in court, freedom of speech, town meetings, elections, soldiers, and so forth —, its officials officiating as priests of civic liturgies, and its seriousness. Not even the Cartesian French could ever match the seriousness of American official business.
But all creeds are open to reinterpretation, and when two interpretations diverge too widely schisms and heresies appear. Usually, both sides of a creedal dispute believe they are the ones following the old creed, in the old sense, while those on the other side would be trying to change things, to impose their own newfangled errors.
That is what happened, and is happening, in the United States.
Since the beginning of the Modern project, there was a strong tension between the collective and the individual, the universal and the personal. The solution for this problem, in the American project’s version, would be the freedom of each individual state to impose on its citizens its own version of the perfect society, a social and political system that agreed with their leanings. For instance, a Puritan state would be much more collectivist than a state established to provide Nonconformists room to live and worship as they pleased, like Pennsylvania. At the same time, the Union would always ensure the liberty to change state allegiance without renouncing the American dream.
It was an interesting experience, but one that was doomed to fail, as the tension remained and would remain while there was at once a Union and individual states. Modernity is a form of universalism, after all, and universalism will always want to have a universal reach. Not only will the Union tend to impose on the States, but the culture of each state will see itself as superior to its next-door neighbor and tend to impose it. As a favor. Even if the Constitution — and the Bill of Rights — tried to prevent the Union from imposing its will on both the states and their citizens, the very fact that the latter should be accepted as citizens in any other American state they chose to live in made the Union greater then the sum of the states. Its failure came rather explosively, in the War of Secession (or Civil War, or War Between the States, or however one may want to call that horrible event).
Just as the extermination of a heresy increases the power of (winner) religious authorities, the conquest of the South focused American Civic Religion on the Presidency. The Union became America, in a very real sense, as allegiance to the central government became so much more important than the previous ideal of making one’s own Paradise in the state that suited best one’s convictions and way of living.
The first Presidents were seen as founding prophets, as literal Founding Fathers. Patriarchs of old. Their hagiography is vast, from the tales of young George Washington refusing to lie about his sins to the revered writings of his successors. In a very real and serious sense, American Civic Religion had already been established on a bedrock of godlike Presidents. Scriptural texts about the Church had already been quite liberally applied to America, but since Lincoln the Union became America, and America became the Union.
The Presidential priesthood nourished the sacral aura of individual Presidents, who in turn became historic figures as soon as they made their formal vows, touching the Bible, in what effectively became the liturgy of enthronement. The previous legend of the President as a regular citizen who did his time in office to help the country and later returned to his own business, personified in George Washington, was turned upside-down.
Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, was the personification of the strong bi-coastal USA, whose wildernesses he had visited and hunted in before making national parks out of them, whose military strength he threw around against any poor Catholic country that had the misfortune to be useful for American interests, and so on. His fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt became so identified with his presidential throne only death could do them part. Little could people know then, but it was the very peak of Modernity. From there, it could only go down.
And that is what happened. While the post-WWII USA was doubtlessly the most powerful country in the world, the internal tensions in the system were changing the Civic Religion into a two-tiered Gnostic sect. Eisenhower would warn about the rising power of a dark collusion being then formed between the industry, the military, and Congress. Kennedy would be assassinated, according to many, by that same dark power. Nixon would be impeached for fighting fire with fire. A second, and hidden, power structure was establishing itself in the dark, feeding from the almost boundless powers amassed by the Union since the Civil War, powers that would, in theory, be vested on the high priest of the Civic Religion, the President of the United States.
The sacrality of the presidential office, though, somehow survived all of it. One could even say Kennedy was killed because his position prevented his internal enemies from dealing with him in any other way. Mutatis mutandis, the same happened to several Popes; some would even venture to say that is what happened to John Paul I. Just as one cannot confront a Pope, a President of the United States was so highly above reproach it would be safer to assassinate him than to butt heads against him.
After those birthing pains of what would later be called the Deep State, the theatrical elements of the President’s role in Civic Religion were given new life when Hollywood contributed. Actors are professional liars, after all, and nothing could work better for the restoration of the presidential image than having an actor president. Someone who would say the right thing with the right face at the right time. Someone who would respect the cues. And that was what happened during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, probably the last in the XXth-Century model. He gathered together whatever remained of the sacredness of the Presidency through the age-old expedient of going back to the roots, and selling himself as a champion of small government (while keeping it growing), individual liberties (while doubling down on the War on Drugs), in a renewed worship of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and so on.
It worked so well, that although all the next presidents would come straight out of the Deep State their sacredness was beyond reproach. So much so, that even the lack of psychosexual maturity of teenager-like Bill Clinton failed to grant him (and his wife) that sacred aura only the White House can, or could, grant. Before him and after him, of course, there were the ex-CIA guy and the ex-CIA guy’s son. The one who started the War to Fund the Deep State, also known as the War on Terrorism. All of them were perfectly able to follow and preside over the liturgies, keeping alive the Civic Religion while working on emptying its coffers of real power.
It was only with the next in line that the schism within the Civic Religion really started to show on its façade. After all, Obama has never been more than a façade, unless one counts a cipher known only within the deep corridors of background power. He came out of nowhere: a boy born and raised in the midst of scions of the White élite, although blessed with the skin color of the oppressed Black nation by his African-élite deadbeat dad’s genes. A tremendously elegant and suave young man, with such a wonderful curriculum one would never imagine it to be a typical spy-trade legend unless one realized nobody remembered him from any of the prestigious Ivy League institutions he supposedly attended.
For True Believers in the old individualist side of the Civic Religion, it was too much. Obama became the personal object of all kinds of idiotic conspiracy theories: he would be a secret Muslim (when it is so obvious his real religion is power, the kind of power that thrives in the shadows); he would have been born in Kenia (so what? Ted Cruz was born in Canada), and so on. The only important fact — that he was even more of a fruit of the Deep State than Dubya — never registered. The real reasons for the schism, that is, the total conquest of American governmental institutions by underground institutions not predicted in the oh-so-sacred Founding Fathers’ Sacred Secular Scriptures, were still hidden. With his British-butler cool, Obama managed to not only keep, but also increase the perceived sacredness of his priestly position as Pope of the American Civic Religion.
That is why the contrast provided by the crass orange-man Trump was so illuminating. Trump played the part of the anti-Obama, and that is what landed him in the White House. He was the poor man’s image of The Boss, a guy whose bathroom is covered in gold and who has the power to yell “you’re fired”. While Obama was so obviously royalty (being at the same time Black and royalty was one of his strongest points), Trump talked about “grabbing them by the p*y”. Even more: Obama was a man from the system, and Trump yelled he would “drain the swamp”.
The secret movers in the Gnostic élite could not see it coming, and that is why Trump was elected. Everything was prepared for the transmission of the priestly crown from The First Black High-Priest to The First Female High-Priestess when that crass reality-show host with his face painted orange crashed the show, grabbed the crown, and started running victory laps with it, for the delight of the deplorable great unwashed. The next four years would be spent throwing on him everything those with the hands on the levers of the real power behind the throne could get. They would not let themselves be caught unaware twice, and that is why he was not re-elected.
But by then the schism was already visible, and their failure at preventing Trump from winning the first time forced them to portray Trump as not-our-president, a counter-president. An Anti-Pope. Even worse: an Anti-Pope who could personally appeal to several of the elements of the Civic Religion they would rather see buried. It is as if there had been a Franciscan Anti-Pope in the Renaissance; a poor man who slept on the floor, an ascetic whose personal virtues could not be denied. He would have been much harder to deal with than just another rival religious prince. The American Civic Religion is in many aspects the opposite of traditional Christianity (both Western and Eastern), and that is how its incarnation in a man is the opposite of Christian sanctity, but for Trump and his followers, it makes a lot of sense.
To make things worse for them, the powerful had to deny Trump his right to take part in several important sacramental liturgies of Civic Religion; for their followers it was irrelevant, but for MAGA reformers-to-be it just proved them to be a bunch of apostates from the old true Civic Religion. Trump could not get his Day In Court when no judge (up to, and including, the highest court) would not hear his arguments about the election. He had his Right-to-Speech violated on prime live TV when his speech was interrupted and replaced by choirs of small journalist-priests preaching on why he was so mistaken (not to mention his de-platforming by social media). The MAGA 1/6th protesters — receiving punishment in odium Trumpi, as a martyr is killed in odium Christi because his oppressor hates the Christ in him — did not have their habeas corpus rights respected, not to mention the whole thing about a fair and fast trial. And now, with the violation of his personal castle by the FBI, yet another important element of the American Civic Religion is denied in deed by the present incumbents.
For Trumpists it could not be more obvious: it is not only the election that was stolen. All those denials of important liturgical and sacramental elements of the Civic Religion mean Biden is the Anti-Pope, if not the Anti-Christ (in typical MAGAish mashup with Evangelical eschatology). The True High-Priest is Trump, and he will be back at the Vatican, oops, the White House in no time.
For those in power, it is all moot. They are not that kind of true believers; America they believe in is a superpower that should rule the world, not the land of dreams. For them, the right to “pursuit of happiness” means being able to shower bombs, win wars, and vaporize people. What really matters right now is the situation with Taiwan and Ukraine, and the risks of having those pesky Europeans back on good terms with Russia just because they have no fuel for heating and winter is coming. In the domestic sphere, things are going more or less according to plans, and day by day the average American citizen’s life is closer to totalitarianism, in a much more Brave-New-World-ish than a 1984 way.
All that matters for them in the Civic Religion is what can be used to prop their power: the worship of the military, for instance, is certainly to be kept, as all the aura of sacrality that can be established around a poor old man who can barely read a teleprompter. In that view, Trump is an obvious Anti-Pope to be fought against tooth and nails, and that is why they keep trying to smear him with every- and anything.
But in the end, what we have is a schism; and schisms, once they take root, are almost impossible to undo. When two people pretend to be the High Priest, there are only three options: either one of them is a fake, or both. Who’d be a fake? The one who can barely speak by himself without provoking World War Three, but who lives in the Sacred Palace? Or the one who has fanatical devotees, but has had all his sacramental privileges revoked by the Hierarchy? Or, finally, both, and the Civic Religion shows itself to be, to only have been, an empty façade?
Only time will tell.