President Trump’s Inaugural Address and the death of America’s God

George F. Will of The Washington Post dubbed President Trump’s inaugural speech “A most dreadful inaugural address,” which also bears the title of his opinion piece.  He also makes this important observation about President’s Trump’s inevitable encounter with this historic moment in the American experience, “Oblivious to the moment and the setting, the always remarkable Trump proved that something dystopian can be strangely exhilarating: In what should have been a civic liturgy serving national unity and confidence, he vindicated his severest critics by serving up reheated campaign rhetoric about “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape” and an education system producing students “deprived of all knowledge.”  Mr. Will’s criticism of our new President’s arrogant speech is arguably an expression of Mr. Trump’s cynicism and xenophobia. The underlying problem of the inaugural address lies in the fact that the  new American President has pushed grace and national unity, and the imperative of reconciliation and friendship aside to promote a narrative of retaliation, fear, and alienation.  It is a speech devoid of enduring human hope, sustaining love, effective human interdependence, and a politics of relationality.

President Trump could have delivered a more humane, sympathetic, cosmopolitan, and elegant inaugural address. But, he chose not to do so. In his speech, President Trump implied that it is going to be a war between the “civilized world” and the “non-civilized world,” the West (America) and the Other (Radical Islam?). He besought the blessing of the “American God” to lead the way.

It is very refreshing to know that America’s God is a different deity and not the God of all people and nations.

We must reject this idol. America’s God is not the true God. He is a deity fashioned and manipulated according to the image, desires, and the sovereign will of America’s political elite class, bourgeois Christianity, and charlatan preachers and theologians.

This God must die. We must kill him!