Church and State

In recent months, two high-profile Trump Administration officials have suggested that Trump’s presidency was ordained by God. In interviews with the Christian Broadcasting Network, both White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that God wanted Donald Trump to be president to further the faith-based causes in which Christians believe.

These kinds of statements are a disturbing intrusion of religion upon government in the U.S. While Sanders and Pompeo are entitled to their religious beliefs, the fact that they are at high levels of the U.S. government makes their comments inappropriate and indicates a willingness on the part of the Trump Administration to defy the Constitutional separation between church and state.

At the very beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump moved to ban people from Muslim countries from entering the United States. It was a transparent bone tossed to his base of white, anti-immigrant Americans. It was also a nod to the religious right that helped elect him despite his less than savory moral character.

Over the past few years he has named an unapologetically religious Secretary of Education who is determined to see private (read, “parochial”) schools get the benefit of U.S. tax dollars. He has praised statewide efforts to have the Bible be used in public schools.

The rhetoric of the Trump Administration has been heavy on condemnation for the persecution of Christians by ISIS in the Middle East. I agree that such persecution should be called out and even acted against wherever possible. But there has been no such outcry in this administration about the mass killings of Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar. I think it’s obvious why Trump has chosen to champion the rights of the former over the latter.

Members of the Christian right keep crying about their religious freedoms being trampled upon. If anything, the Trump Administration is working overtime to assure the ascendancy of Christianity over any other religion in the United States. This is the antithesis of what the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Many countries in the world are theocracies. There is one established religion, and if one practices any others, he or she risks prosecution, imprisonment, or even death. One of the reasons that religion thrives in America is that our right to practice our religion free from government interference has been enshrined in our Constitution. The separation between church and state is a fundamental principle that is being flagrantly ignored by this administration.

It’s time people of all faiths – or no faith at all – stand up and demand that our leaders adhere to this basic freedom that makes our country great.

 

Pen and Sword

Many Fox News media personalities (I hesitate to call them journalists) are crowing over the president’s smackdown of the “liberal media” in his now infamous press conference last Thursday. Having been singled out by Trump as praiseworthy for their supposed fair and respectful coverage of His Highness, Fox pundits went on their own rant about liberal media bias with conservative comedian (also a term I’m using loosely here) Greg Gutfield yesterday. What Gutfield and friends don’t seem to realize is something Trump, however buffoonish he appears, understands quite well: The pen is mightier than the sword.

When Trump tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!,” the entire political establishment on both the Left and the Right should have called for his immediate resignation. Instead, the lone critic among conservatives was Sen. John McCain, who to his credit has been unceasingly critical of Trump’s unconscionable statements.

On his show, Gutfield proved that he has totally missed the point of Trump’s relentless attacks on the media by pointing out that no one has tried to ban or silence news outlets. But the Trump administration knows it doesn’t need to take such drastic action. Instead, they seek to create a reality in which the media in general is suspect, not to be trusted. Among Trump’s loyal supporters, this has already been the case for months. But as serious allegations surface concerning the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and other Trump administration ties to the despotic regime, it has become imperative for them to discredit the very independent press that could do the most damage to their existence.

I grew up during the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. America learned about the Republican dirty tricks and coverups of the Nixon administration only because two intrepid reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relentlessly pursued the truth. I have no doubt that there are serious journalists right now who are investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. But will they be believed?

There are some encouraging signs of the media fighting back. Chris Wallace, anchor on the right-leaning Fox News channel, took White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to task this morning for Trump’s words. As he pointed out to Priebus, “You don’t get to tell us what to do, Reince. You don’t get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama did. Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time, but I’ve got to say, he never said we were an enemy of the people.”

A free press is the very foundation of a democracy. Without true freedom of speech and an acknowledgment of the difference between facts and opinions, a democratically elected president can become an autocrat. It is up to responsible journalists to keep asking the probing questions, to keep investigating, to keep seeking the truth, whether it favors the Right or Left.

And it is up to the American people not to let a bully tell them whom or what to believe.