Donald Trump's 2017 Value Voters Summit Speech: Juxtaposition Replaces Proof

Pres. Trump at 2017 Value Voters Summit

In the first of two important speeches that he gave yesterday, President Donald Trump talked to the Values Voters Summit in Washington DC. This group gathers members of the Christian Right; their goal is. He has become one of the conference’s favorites; last year, Mr. Trump gave his campaign a big boost when he talked to the conference about his presidential campaign and promised to protect them against secular forces. White conservative Christian voters were instrumental in Mr. Trump’s campaign victory, giving him more than 80% of their votes. Mr. Trump’s triumphant return to the Values Voters Summit linked conservative religious and non-religious issues into a seamless whole. The key to Trump’s speech was the rhetorical method called juxtaposition. A speaker can make two different things seem related just by putting them side by side.

Mr. Trump’s speech began with a link between religion and patriotism: as Mr. Trump took the stage, the audience began to chant: “USA!  USA!  USA!” Many people, of course, equate patriotism, a word that means “love of country,” with conservative political positions. Other people believe that liberals and moderates can also love their country. Mr. Trump continued to link America and faith in his introduction: “America is a nation of believers, and together we are strengthened and sustained by the power of prayer.  (Applause.) “That was perfectly fine, and many earlier presidents would have said something similar. He expressed sympathy for the victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, which he called “an act of pure evil.” The shooting obviously was an act of evil but Mr. Trump’s phrasing would appeal to a religious audience. He also praised the courage of the people during the Las Vegas shooting: “Americans defied evil and hatred with courage and love.” He talked about the prayers lifted for the Las Vegas victims.

As Mr. Trump began to review the United States of America’s values, he mingled traditional Christian values with his own political views: “Everyone here today is brought together by the same shared and timeless values.” But which of these values were religious, and which were purely political? Some of Trump’s points praised traditional religious values, but he cleverly mixed them with political matters. Look at this passage:

We love our families.  We love our neighbors.  We love our country.  Everyone here today is brought together by the same shared and timeless values.  We cherish the sacred dignity of every human life.  (Applause.)  

Loving your families, your neighbors, and respecting human life are obviously religious values. But is love of country a religious value? That is an interesting and complex question, but the Bible nowhere clearly affirms love of country to be a major value. Yet, by mixing these values into a single paragraph, Trump gave the impression that they were all conservative religious values.

Or consider this passage:

We believe in strong families and safe communities.  We honor the dignity of work.  (Applause.)  We defend our Constitution.  We protect religious liberty.  (Applause.)  We treasure our freedom.  We are proud of our history.  We support the rule of law and the incredible men and women of law enforcement.  (Applause.)  We celebrate our heroes, and we salute every American who wears the uniform.  (Applause.) 
We respect our great American flag.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you. 

The apostle Paul does briefly affirm the dignity of work and obedience to legal authorities, so we can count those as biblical values. But saluting Americans in military service? I agree that they are to be commended, but I do not see a biblical foundation for that. Similarly, although respecting the flag is good, it is not a biblical value. Supporting law enforcement officers seems like a good thing, although Mr. Trump raised controversy when he seemed to advocate police brutality a while back. Was he hinting at that issue again? Or not? That was not very clear, was it?

Ironically, after praising the American governmental system, he then criticized it on value grounds:

For too long, politicians have tried to centralize the authority among the hands of a small few in our nation’s capital.  Bureaucrats think they can run your lives, overrule your values, meddle in your faith, and tell you how to live, what to say, and how to pray.  But we know that parents, not bureaucrats, know best how to raise their children and create a thriving society.  (Applause.)  

In that passage, Trump affirmed a libertarian philosophy of government that has no biblical foundation at all, although the phrase “meddle in your faith” makes government action sound anti-religious. This is largely, again, juxtaposition. By combining religious and non-religious matters, Trump made them sound like the same substance. (A person can, of course, support law enforcement and love the flag and also be religious – my point is that those policies are not specifically religious, and religion is not their foundation.) One cannot help but to think about parents who abuse or even murder their children. Could the government know better than the parents in those cases? What about parents who cite religious reasons when they deny medical care to their children? Do they know better than the government? Juxtaposition and platitudes enabled Mr. Trump to side-slip such difficult issues. Instead of proving his points, he tried to establish his conservative political positions simply by linking them to religion.

In my next post, I will talk about how this speech linked faith issues to non-religious conservative governmental policies.