Trump is a God—Just Not the One That Christians Believe, by David Eller

Loki, the Norseman Trickster Chaos god

Beginning today, and every Monday morning that follows, I'll be posting submitted essays, excerpts from my books, and some of the best posts of the past. Today is a post by Professor David Eller. He's no stranger to readers of my books. He's one of our best and important scholars on religion. 

So as the author of an excellent book on Donald Trump, I asked him to write something for us all to ponder, especially in light of being a twice impeached one-term multiple indicted president. Dr. Eller sent me this:

 

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Trump’s greatest trick is convincing Christians he is not a trickster.

 

The slavish and really obscene worship of Donald Trump by his misguided acolytes is incomprehensible from a purely political or personal perspective: Americans do not typically grovel at the feet of politicians or erect golden-calf images of them, and Trump is obviously a more despicable person than most would-be leaders. 

 

However, as others have commented, Trump’s Svengali hold on his “base” makes more sense from a religious viewpoint: Christians and conservatives, who have been programmed to genuflect to power and who see him as a perfectly-flawed suffering servant display the same unquestioning commitment to him and his untruths as they do to their god and its untruth.

It goes without saying that Trump has the most un-Christ-like persona we can imagine, conspicuously guilty of the sins of lying, adultery, gluttony, and covetousness and who has bragged about the sin of murder, which he knows his devotees would forgive or even celebrate, as they forgive and celebrate their god’s murder of his own son and of nearly the entire human population in the mythical flood. But he does resemble a different, older, and darker supernatural character, one with a paradoxical appeal across culture and history. This figure is the trickster, who appears in various guises in the world’s mythologies, as a god, a human culture hero, or even an animal. What unifies the fractal face of the trickster, as I write in Trump and Political Theology, is his (for tricksters are usually, at least initially, male) thrilled and thrilling violation of norms and boundaries. He is the personification, not of good and order, but of transgression.

 

Trickster tales abound in African, Native American, and ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse cultures among others. Hermes was a trickster god, whose first act after birth was to steal from his brother; Prometheus was the trickster who fooled the gods into giving fire to humans. In Native American stories, the trickster is sometimes an animal like the coyote, who plays tricks on other beings as he gets tricks played on him. Throughout religions, tricksters are commonly messengers, mediators, and conduits of knowledge, often forbidden knowledge; in any such role, they are the source of much of humans’ way of life. They are changelings (sometimes shifting form between human and animal or male and female), frequently associated with crossroads, thresholds, marketplaces, and other anomalous or anomic spaces. They are not ultimate creator-gods like Yahweh (not even gods at all in many instances), but they come along to alter or distort the creations of those gods, either intentionally or unintentionally, with their clever/buffoonish selfishness and often unlimited appetites.

Scholars of mythology Scott Leonard and Michael McClure summarized the trickster thusly:

 

He possesses a funny, absurd, iconoclastic sort of playfulness, yet the Trickster’s playfulness can carry with it serious, even tragic or transcendent, overtones. Tricksters provide the comic relief in the world’s mythologies, but they do so by embodying all the infinite ambiguities of what it is to be alive in the world. Tricksters are characters with attention deficit disorder, sacred clowns, carefree as children, obscene lechers, and generous companions. No single character type embodies so many, often contradictory, qualities. The Trickster is as likely to betray a friend as he is to set the stars in heaven or to become the victim of his own pranks. (Myth and Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology 2004, p. 250)

 

This brief portrait should sound familiar, and other observers have noticed the trickster quality of Trump’s rule, over his business empire, his media presence (as the master of apprentices), and our United States of America. If Trump is anything, in one word, he is iconoclastic (the word “unprecedented” applies to too many of his utterances and actions), a violator of tradition, norm, decency, and—as is finally catching up with him—law. He can be funny, at least to his target audience, but his humor is serious and tragic, often cruel. He is definitely carefree, not caring what critics, opponents, journalists, scientists, or rational people think of him; he also suffers from an infamously short attention span. He is overtly absurd, obscene, and contradictory, and he has a long track record of betraying friends and allies, just as he repeatedly demonstrates—and his disciples seem to believe and applaud—that he sets the stars in the sky. 

Trump is not the only trickster on the global political stage. Indeed, it is fair to say that the contemporary crop of right-wing populists are all tricksters after a fashion. The description certainly fits Putin, Trump’s pal and role model. Putin too is iconoclastic, mercurial, obscene, cruel, and quick to turn on his former friends and allies, most recently Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, but before that any individual who would dare to challenge his authority or even compete with him in Russia’s (sham) democracy. More than anything else, Putin lies; he lies promiscuously, and he lies not only to misinform us but to portray his power over truth itself. Masha Gessen labeled it “the Putin paradigm,” this readiness to “use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it’s not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.” What others have called the firehose of falsities is a strategic trickster maneuver, which not only overwhelms listeners with untruth and bullshit but announces to the world that he is, in Gessen’s words, “able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is the president of the country and king of reality.”

This is the ultimate power of the modern trickster. A trickster like Trump or Putin replaces law with will, political process with personality, institutions with instincts. Such a trickster is a destroyer (“burn it all down”) but also a creator: if he succeeds, tomorrow the country, the world, reality itself will be his reflection. (American society, and especially the Republican party, is already too much in Trump’s image.) In his populist costume, he speaks for, represents, even embodies “the people,” and anyone who stands against him is not “the people” but rather the enemy of the people, to be shouted down if not gunned down. Tricksters in myth are agents of creative destruction, but they are seldom if ever leaders. It is difficult follow leaders who are so unpredictable, self-absorbed, inattentive, disrespectful, vengeful, and plain dangerous—bringers of chaos and promoters of self.

Throughout history, Christianity has actually vilified the trickster-figure. Christianity, lacking almost entirely a sense of humor—and definitely any sense of humor about its god and his vicars on earth—has tended to demonize disorder and willfulness (after all, messing with the god’s perfect creation can only make it imperfect). The devil acquired all the attributes of the trickster, becoming the master of lies and the prince of trickery. It is not hard to say, then, that Trump-the-trickster more closely resembles Satan than Yahweh or Christ. So what is the appeal to Christians?

I think, deep in their psyche, certain kinds of persons in America (and in other countries, where their own demagogues prowl the society) perceive the archetypal power of trickster-Trump. He is, to them, power incarnate, but they have a very limited vocabulary and conceptual toolkit to understand him. “Trickster” is not a term that Christians are fluent with or that they would endorse if they recognized it. All they have in their restricted language for that kind of overbearing stalking power, that kind of aspiring leviathan, is “god” or “savior,” and so they immediately default to that interpretation. And a trickster, without conscience or commitments of his own, is happy enough to let the masses wallow in their delusion, so long as they follow him, obey him, and ideally adore him. Christians, a few of whom are finally waking to the truth of the matter, have so far been disastrously willing to fall into step behind and pledge their fealty to a leader and savior who in fact is Loki in red, white, and blue garb.