Honest Americans need a shorthand way of challenging President Donald Trump and his MAGA followers, says Eddie Glaude Jr. of Princeton University. He suggests a simple phrase: “You’re lying.”
“Within the context of faith, the Christian tradition, those who claim the mantle of Christianity as a justification for Trump’s descendants, they must be met with a forceful refutation … on Christian grounds,” he said at an Oct. 22 conference in New York City. “That this is idol ideology. That there is a way in which we can begin to respond to seven mountains theology. There’s a way in which we can respond to prosperity gospel. …
Eddie Glaude Jr.
“And we can do so on Christian grounds. And in the context of that, sometimes you need an aggressive shorthand: ‘You’re lying.’”
Glaude, who serves as James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton, was interviewed by NPR’s Rachel Martin at a conference presented by Religion News Service at Trinity Commons on Wall Street.
When Trump and his supporters make false claims about their morality or “biblical” values, Christians should be the ones asking, “Where is that in the book?” he said.
Glaude quoted Frederick Douglass, who pointed out the church was right next to the slave block in the American South.
“He was criticizing the idolatry of white Christianity on its own terms. And white Christian nationalism in this current iteration is just simply a legacy of that tragic choice to reconcile Christian faith with the self and the human being,” Glaude said. “So I think the people who are lifting up Donald Trump, using him for a variety of reasons, scaffolding it with theological rationale, must be called out for who and what they are.”
It is dizzying, he said, to think about how quickly things have changed for the worse in America.
“The people who are lifting up Donald Trump, using him for a variety of reasons, scaffolding it with theological rationale, must be called out for who and what they are.”
“Think five years ago we were in the midst of racial reckoning. Five years ago, we were talking about that we had to grapple with what was at the heart of the country. Folk were in D.C. renaming squares and folks on Wall Street were dedicating resources, and churches were trying to figure it out, right? In just five years, in the blink of an eye, look what we are.
“And the only thing I can conclude: Folks were lying, they weren’t telling that behind the crack of eye tears were smirks.”
Real truth-tellers today are prophets, said the scholar of African American studies. “What I try to do in my own work is democratize the prophetic. I don’t want to see the prophetic as something that’s a unique, distinctive feature of a person who’s been tapped or touched by some external force.”
Instead, prophets possess an ability “to assess the otherness of the present over and against the way the world could be. To think of the world as it is in light of the as-yet and the as-yet becomes the basis for our criticism of our current arrangements.”
Prophets, he asserted, offer “a crucial feature of the imagination as we run ahead of the evidence … in order to imagine a different way of being in the world. So in my view, we all have that prophetic capacity.”
Martin said it is difficult to engage in conversation with people on the Right who say empathy and charity are not Christian values. She asked Glaude how he responds to that, “when even the terms of what faith means have changed.”
Even those who preach a false gospel can be redeemed, the professor said. He quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “The image of God is not done with you yet.”
“The image of God is not done with you yet.”
When someone tells him empathy is a sin, they need to be confronted on “Christian grounds,” he said. “We just need to go to the Cross. … We have to live our values with courage and conviction.”
Martin asked: Is it a worthy effort to spend time trying to change a Trump supporter’s mind?
“I have no interest whatsoever in spending my time, my precious breath, trying to convince someone that I am,” he replied. “I have no interest whatsoever in trying to convince people that I belong at Princeton, that I am not a DEI hire. I have no interest in trying to tell folk or to show folk that I’ve earned my position. I have no interest in proving that I love America. I have no concern with that.
“I am sick and tired of the presumption that white folk possess freedom to give and to take away. I don’t have any interest in that. We spend all our energy trying to convince folk to do X, Y and Z, and then we don’t have enough interest to build a kingdom. We don’t have enough energy left. I’m spending all my time trying to convince MAGA folk, trying to convince these folk that the way in which they conceive of the world, it doesn’t lend itself to affording dignity and standing to everyone.”
After toiling away to change someone’s mind, “then I look up and I have no more energy left to build the world that would affirm the dignity and standing of everyday ordinary folk,” he said. “I would rather spend my energy trying to build the world where that kind of stuff” is real.
He concluded: “If we have a vision of the world that affirms the dignity and standing of every human being, no matter what color of your skin, no matter your ZIP Code, no matter who you love, no matter what your gender, no matter what you believe in …, let’s build that world and they have to adjust.”
Martin asked Glaude how he keeps despair at bay in these times of MAGA ascendancy.
“It’s been hard over the last few years,” he admitted. “I’m not OK. Millions of people are dead or disappeared. Kitchen tables have empty chairs. … So the first thing I think I have to do is admit that I’m not OK, that the country’s not OK. Our politics feel the way they feel because we’re off kilter.”