Sometimes, it’s what you do not say that matters most. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was once a simple event where conservative pseudo-intellectuals gathered to spout ill-conceived ideologies. In 2021, it transformed into a quasi-religious celebration of Donald Trump. At the conference’s outset, an artist wheeled in a golden statue of Trump, wearing red, white and blue shorts and waving a magic wand. The Christian evangelical leaders, who supported Trump so strongly throughout his political career, still remain silent. No word of protest from them. Their silence, I think, sends a message: a message that they have sold their Christianity to a false god. They are so quick to condemn the tiniest religious slight from liberals, but not a word about the Golden Trump? How remarkable.
About 80% of white Christian evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and they continue to provide his most reliable support. Yet, we read in the Bible that, during the Exodus, while Moses was on Mount Sinai collecting the 10 Commandments, the prophet Aaron commanded the people to melt their gold jewelry to create a calf statue. They held a festival for the golden god they made, “and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.” When Moses saw the calf, he destroyed it and a murderous civil war broke out among the people. All things considered, the golden calf didn’t go well.
This wouldn’t be so striking except that political cartoonists have for years mocked white evangelical Trump supporters for worshiping the golden calf. Most famously, Los Angeles Times artist David Horsey’s 2017 cartoon shows Moses descending from the mountain, carrying two stone tablets covered with Bible verses, while the people worship a golden bull bearing Trump’s face. The people pointed to the tablets and shouted, “Fake News!” At the time, we all thought his cartoon was a bizarre exaggeration. Little did we know that it would come true at CPAC in 2021.
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Yet, Trump’s leading evangelical supporters stun us with their silence. Reverend Franklin Graham has not only offered Trump unyielding support, but once compared Barack Obama to the Christian-oppressing Roman emperor Nero. Yet, I see no sign that Graham has condemned the Golden Trump statue. He has, however, found time to condemn equal rights for LGBT persons, which he thinks would “discriminate against people of faith.” Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress has been one of Trump’s strongest supporters. Yet, even as the Golden Trump rolled out, Jeffress wrote that he would support the most anti-abortion party, while political issues like immigration were “secondary.” I find not one word from him about the Golden Trump.
Nor have Reverend Paula White’s views about the Golden Trump appeared. Not a word, indeed, as far as I can see, from any of the top Christian evangelical leaders who have boosted Trump. Nothing in the news, and nothing in their Twitter feeds. Even if the Golden Trump failed to trouble them, maybe they could have seen the magic wand as a blasphemy against their religion.
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Liberal Christians’ ridicule of the Golden Trump spreads across social media, with one Twitter user sarcastically commenting that, “If only there were some sacred text, one most people at CPAC claim allegiance to, that very explicitly warns against making golden idols.”
Often enough, what we don’t say matters more than what we do say. Silence is always ambiguous. Its meaning is never clear. Are these supposedly Christian leaders silent because they are not paying attention? Unlikely. Are they silent because they are appalled, but their political ambitions override their moral awareness? Possibly. Or, maybe, could it be that they lack any moral awareness at all? That would not surprise me. I don’t suppose we will ever know.
Still, the Golden Trump statue cries out for religious commentary, and yet we are not hearing it from the people who should be shouting about it the loudest. At this point, we run into the common law principle: “silence gives consent.” Are the Christian Right’s leaders on board with the Golden Trump? Sometimes it is good to be silent. Sometimes silence should alarm us.
P.S. Despite Trump’s America First philosophy, artist Tommy Zegan made the statue in Mexico. It took him six months.
P.P.S. I find it hard to believe that people like Reverend Jeffress read the same Bible I do. Otherwise, how does one call immigration, a subject on which the Bible repeatedly emphasizes a liberal and tolerant attitude, a “secondary” question? Yet these same people find abortion, on which the Bible is silent, to be central to the faith. To each their own, I guess, not my place to judge them. Yet the Bible teaches, “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21).
P.P.S. I wrote an existentialist analysis of the rhetoric of silence in Chapter 7 of my book about the 1896 presidential campaign. Interested readers can find the book in large research libraries or for purchase. My point was that, when speech is called for and yet is not forthcoming, the silence means something.
Update March 4, 2021: it's now reported that the statue was made in China, but this information was withheld because of Trump's antipathy toward China.
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