President Trump at the Values Voters Summit: Impeachment, a Threat to Religion?

Donald Trump speaking to Values Voters Summit

During his speech last week to the Values Voters Summit in Washington DC, President Donald Trump promised the leaders of the Christian Right that he would fight for the causes they believed in. However, he spent about half of the speech ranting about the Democrats’ efforts to impeach him over his controversial call to the president of Ukraine. During that call, according to the official transcript, he asked the Ukrainian government as a favor to investigate Hunter Biden, son of his likely 2020 election opponent Joe Biden. By any reasonable reading, the call represented, at the least, a campaign-finance law violation.

Now, people might ask: what does impeachment over a corrupt phone call have to do with religious values? In an obvious sense, nothing! Corruption runs against Christian values. Christians should want to root out corruption. In another sense, however, impeachment has everything to do with values – once we understand how Trump appeals to the Christian Right. It’s not that impeachment is in and of itself a religious question; rather, the Christian Right characterizes any attacks against President Trump as spiritual warfare. If we think about the world as a battleground between the forces of Heaven and Hell, with Trump being God’s warrior, the Democrats’ efforts to impeach him represent their pursuit of evil and their rejection of God. I know that mainstream Christians find that incomprehensible, but bear with me and I’ll show you what Trump did in this speech.

Trump's impeachment diatribe started about halfway through the speech. Trump castigated impeachment as an incomprehensible, “ugly” smear:

“And now it is the outrageous impeachment — look, impeachment.  I never thought I’d see or hear that word with regard to me — ‘impeachment.’  I said, the other day, ‘It’s an ugly word.’  To me, it’s an ugly word — a very ugly word.  It means so much.  It means horrible, horrible crimes and things.  I can’t even believe it.”

He continued with his favorite defense:

“It’s a witch hunt.  It’s based on a single phone call of congratulations to the President of Ukraine, which they fraudulently mischaracterized to sound absolutely horrible.  This crooked Adam Schiff —"

And, hearing Schiff’s name, the crowd booed!

Trump wasn’t done with his personal attacks. Moving from Schiff, he pounced on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump said that she was “Not a good person.  I think she hates our country.  Because if she didn’t hate our country, she wouldn’t be doing this to our country.  It’s a fraud.  It’s a fraud.  (Applause.)”

Do you see the spiritual warfare? If we look at the call transcript, Trump clearly did wrong. No question. But spiritual warfare elevated the debate to the idea that Trump stands for God and goodness while Pelosi is trying to remove him so she can pursue evil. Trump continued this line of argument:

“But they’re using that call to impeach your President who won, in 2016, perhaps the greatest election of our time.  (Applause.)  And I won it for you; I didn’t win it for me.  I won it for you and others, I won it for you.  They are coming — I won it for you and others, but I won it for you.”

A little bit of paranoia – “They are coming” – didn’t hurt his persuasive message. In one sense, of course, the Democrats really are coming for him. After all, the Democrats are holding impeachment hearings, are they not? And Trump next tied the paranoia to spiritual values: to the idea that Democrats are trying to impeach him because they hate Christian values:

“They’re coming after me because I’m fighting for you.  It’s a big part of it.  (Applause.)  And I’m fighting for all Americans and our way of life, but I’m fighting for you.  And they don’t like you.  They don’t like you.  And you explain why.  You explain why.  Your values are so incredible.  They don’t like you.” 

“Your values are so incredible,” he said. And so, presumably, the reason Democrats don’t like the values voters is that Democrats don’t share their values. Yet Trump claimed the support of the people:

“And, you know, I am at 94 percent approval rating, but still you have people out there — they don’t get it.” No one can imagine where he got that 94% figure, since approval polls are far lower than that, but the guy was on a roll by then, seeing no reason to let little details like reality slow down his narrative.

Trump ended this remarkable, rambling, angry speech by tying religion and politics together into one nice multi-colored bow:

“And above all else, we know this: In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.  (Applause.)  Thank you. Forever and always, Americans will believe in the cause of freedom, the power of prayer, and the eternal glory of God.  Thank you.  God bless you.  And God bless America.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)”

Trump didn’t distinguish between support for him and support for God, which, since he leads the government, might seem to contradict his concluding comment. But if that’s what people think, they are missing the point. On the contrary, here’s what Trump meant: values are good, and Donald Trump supports Christian values. He fights for what his audience thinks are Christian values. He is a spiritual warrior. The Democrats are fighting against him, which means they are fighting against values. Trump’s factual guilt or innocence of impeachable offenses becomes completely irrelevant to his audience once we understand that Trump is neither a role model nor a saint, but a fighter and defender, like a crusader prepared to visit the Holy Land to massacre “infidels” by the thousands.

And that, dear reader, is what, in Trump’s rhetoric, impeachment has to do with Christian values.

Here's my earlier post about this speech, in which I showed how Trump pictured himself as defender of the faith.

Image: White House YouTube Channel