"Reading's not that important."

We're now about a month into the Donald Trump presidency I never believed would happen. And I'd like to think I've come to terms with a few things things. The electoral college, for example, isn't going anywhere. And liberals like myself have a tendency to project a certain smugness and intellectual superiority that may be off-putting to conservative voters. We need to work on that. But here's the thing that I still cannot understand about this election: the way in which Christians in this country tripped over themselves to support someone who, lunacy aside, was so completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. So. Completely. Antithetical. Like, in a different era, I don't doubt the political opposition would have employed the term "antichrist".

Many people have already highlighted the manifold biblical condemnations of Trump (policies and person), underscoring, for example, the bold-faced hypocrisy of a demographic foaming at the mouth over marriage equality, while ardently supporting a thrice-married adulterer who sees nothing untoward in boasting of sexual assault. Or contrasting Jesus' very literal and particular concern for the poor with Trump's recasting of greed as supreme virtue. Or even the way in which Trump's constant feuds, violent rhetoric, and histrionic xenophobia are not what Jesus had in mind when he instructed us to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and give extra to the people who sue you (!). And why should we have expected any different? Trump couldn't name a Bible verse to save his life, and proudly declared he has never asked for God's forgiveness. Yet, blinded by its tryst with Empire and rapacity for political power, none of that mattered to the religious right. Trump "lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the Great Commandment," lauded Jerry Falwell. James Dobson took a different tack, excusing him as a "baby Christian" in need of our prayers. And our vote.

The majority of my family are religious conservatives, and have been steadfast Trump supporters. They take their cue from people like Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson. If you ask them, they will say they voted to guard against a perceived threat to their religious liberty, or because they wanted to see a conservative justice in the Supreme Court seat denied to Trump's predecessor. I don't believe any of these approach reasonable excuses. But the one I literally cannot comprehend, is that God chose Trump to be president. Yes, I have a family member who believes this. And she is not alone.

How to respond to that. How do you stop yourself from immediately spiraling into self-righteous judgment of the other person's hypocrisy? How can you believe that? How can you call yourself a Christian and believe that? It defied coherence. It made my chest tighten in disbelief and exasperation. It was the text-book self-fulfilling prophecy, to declare God's anointing of Trump and then realize it by voting him into office. And it was so clearly, excruciatingly at odds with the Bible which this family member, and fundamentalists like her, hold in many respects to be more germane than God Himself. Then someone pointed out to her that Trump doesn't read (which would presumably make him a poor candidate in any executive capacity). And she, far from becoming defensive or arguing the point, simply shrugged and remarked that "Reading is not that important".

And there it was.

The easy point to make here is that this person demonstrated, beyond a doubt, that they lack the intellectual curiosity and critical thinking necessary to make an informed decision at the polls, and therefore defaulted to the narrative which resonated most with them (in this case, Donald Trump's campaign promises to roll back America to the racism, wife-beating, and sock hops of the 1950s). I don't have a problem extrapolating that this is probably true for a significant number of Trump voters. But I do think there's another point here which merits closer examination. How do you believe, as a Christian, that reading is not important?

I'm the first to admit that the Bible is a difficult text. Composed over a period of millennia, with its most recent book finding final form more than two thousand years ago, in the milieu of a desert culture half a world away which even today we still find alien and averse: written, redacted, translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into German, and from there, catapulted by the printing press and breakneck progression of technology, infinitely synthesized into an inexhaustible number of renditions and paraphrases. Honesty demands we approach the Bible from the humble recognition that, whatever enlightenment we purport to draw from it, we've probably missed half the point. But that's depressing. The path of least resistance, however, is both clear and affirmative: Just take the thing at face value. Take as your starting point not the text itself, but the assumption that anyone who reads it can understand it, as is befitting the infallible word of God.

I recognize I've risked portraying a flirtation with gnosticism here. My intention is not to declare that the Bible is reserved for academics in an ivory tower, but I think it's fair to say that a little effort is required if we're really interested in the intentions of the authors. The very premise of biblical literalism, however, is that the intentions of the authors are secondary, if they matter at all. It's the product (the received text, the words you hold in your hands), which matters over the process (how it was written, why, and for whom). It's a neat solution to a complex problem, and by that assessment alone we should we wary of it.

But what are the practical implications? Well for one, if we perceive the Bible as completely clear, harmonized, and straightforward, we can safely assume that when other people read it, they will draw the same conclusions as us. And if we run up against counter-narratives, we can base our objections to them not on textual analysis, which is irrelevant, but on how we feel. Or, should we choose to phrase it so, how we have been guided to feel. This goes a long way towards reconciling the two seemingly opposite evangelical emphases on reading and memorizing the Bible on the one hand, versus containing its discernment to the sphere of the strictly literal on the other. In other words, once we've removed an objective rubric for interpreting meaning, we are left to float about unmoored within the vast and unexamined spaces of our own own ego, projecting "meaning" through the distorted prism of our own aggrandized consciousness. It doesn't matter that said family member and I enjoy the abounding privileges of wealth, whiteness, and all that life in the first world of the 21st century has to offer; our experiences are just as relevant to interpreting the Bible as those of the occupied Middle Eastern peasants, living in squalor and without the benefit of germ theory, who actually wrote it. Because at it's heart, the Bible is really a book about you and me. (And as I re-read that last sentence, it strikes me that this has been the basis of more than a few sermons I've heard.)

Which brings me back to my relative's particular devaluation of reading. Leaving aside the profound importance of the massive volume of literature comprising what other people have read in the Bible for two thousand years, we are left with the even greater importance of how we read the Bible itself. Not just memorizing it, or recognizing the words strung together on the page, but interacting with the text: considering the different books in dialogue with each other, in dialogue with the world in which they were written and those in which they were redacted. When we fail to acknowledge these dimensions, we are left with a perilous reliance on our own instinct and sentiment, and the text is eviscerated into nothing more than a self-reflexive framework within which we assign meaning to our individual experiences and reinforce our own centrality. This, then, is the manner in which I believe my relative became convinced (or more precisely, convinced herself) that Trump was God's choice to lead the country. The fact that his behavior and policies were completely detached from the teachings of Jesus didn't matter. The fact that he failed to demonstrate adherence to anything resembling a Judeo-Christian moral code didn't matter. All that mattered was that what he said resonated with her experiences, which she then could project back onto the Bible. Actually reading it would have been derivative.

How many people in this country feel the same? I know it's not a small number. In the dark recesses of the Internet, YouTube videos abound announcing "prophecies" and "words" of the eerily messianic leader God will raise up in the person of Donald Trump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many correlate this with great economic success for the United States (because you can always quantify God's favor with material gain). And then there's the question of degrees. It's the easiest thing in the world to project your personal views onto Scripture. I would venture it's probably unavoidable (paging Reza Aslan). But, and this is important, that doesn't mean we should resign ourselves to it. The boundaries of orthodoxy have always been maintained by leaning on tradition, by pausing to follow the elegant concatenation of inherited belief back to the earliest Apostles. It is within this nexus of narrations and commentaries, this communion if you will, which we discover the context and dialogue that can keep our faith grounded. The further we move away from this, the more confusion we risk in enacting the complex constellation of ancient voices that is the Bible. The closer we stay, the surer our footing in consideration of history, genre, language, and canon. The more secure we are, in other words, in our quest to live as faithful Christians, both inside and outside the political sphere.

All of this, however, requires reading.