“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” President Donald Trump asked the crowd gathered at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. “You go to hell!” Beckoning the crowd to raise their right hands, Trump led the crowd in a pledge to “cheat like hell” and “go out and vote.”
Arms wide and heart abandoned, the crowd cheered their president on after reciting the promise back to him, ending the pledge with “so help me, God.”
Raised in the evangelical tradition, I was taught to be wary of “priests”—of so-called “fathers” who adorned themselves with religious garb and church systems that claimed a mediator was still needed between God and humanity. As a good evangelical, I was supposed to affirm the “priesthood of all believers” and the individual relationship each Christian has with God.
Today, ironically, many of the evangelicals who taught me to distrust priests years ago now follow a different kind of priest. These priests have their own titles and spiritual garb (although some seem envious of priestly fashion); they stand before assemblies and preach a message of salvation and warn the faithful against the evils of the world. These priests today write books of spiritual instruction drawn from their lives as faithful Christians, and they offer prayers of blessing to remind those who question them where their ultimate source of power comes from.
The priesthood that many American evangelicals follow today is not found in the church but in the cathedral that is Capitol Hill. The priests are not called “Father,” but instead “Mr. President,” “Mr. Speaker,” and “Mr. Secretary.” Their sermons are political speeches that reference theological concepts like the “ordo amoris,” while their prayers come from the book of “CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue).” They mark their bodies with Christian extremist tattoos that read “Deus vult”—“God wills it.” They appeal to a “biblical worldview” as the source of their policies, provide instruction on biblical hermeneutics, and offer commentary on the creeds. They ask God to bless their party while speaking of the “evil forces” at work in all those who oppose them. This is a partisan priesthood.
Ecclesially, the role of a priest is mediation. They stand in an ordained space between God and God’s people as they bless and baptize, receive confession, pardon sins, administer rites, and transform bread and wine into body and blood. From tradition to tradition, understanding this priestly role shifts on a spectrum from symbolism to literalism. What is important, though, is that the priest is a sacramental representation of Christ. They are called to make God’s divine work real in the life of the church.
The partisan priest perverts this divine role. They stand as mediators between a devoted American public and a white savior. Their message is not “love God and your neighbor as yourself” but “vote (for us), or you will go to hell.” They demand unwavering allegiance while raining down spiritual and material punishment on the unfaithful (e.g., non-Christians, immigrants, or those who vote differently).
Their power today reveals the frightening truth that empire is more than a political system; it is a spiritual reality. As such, the words and actions of those who sit atop the empire are imbued with spiritual significance. Trump, the Pontifex Maximus, beckons his followers to raise their hand and pledge allegiance to him.
READ MORE: Empire Is More Than a Political System. It’s a Spiritual Reality
This partisan priesthood promotes what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, calls a “priestly” morality. This moral frame is born of a feeling of resentment toward a social nobility: the ‘elites’ of society who, in their minds, see their separation from an inferior commons as good. Because the ordinary person does not have an outlet to materially enact this feeling of resentment toward the nobility, they “are forced to obtain their satisfaction in imaginary acts of vengeance.” This, you will remember, was the premise of Trump’s 2016 campaign: The working-class conservative, everyday tradesman, and traditional middle-class family had been overlooked by the progressive bourgeoisie and inflated voting blocks of left-leaning cities. Resentment builds as the imagined acts of violence grow more devious and venomous.
Nietzsche also argues that central to the priestly morality is a reformulation of the moral binary. Noble morality understands an aristocratic social position as “good” and a common social position as “bad.” But there is no moral damnation or condemnation contained in this framework. The priestly morality, however, shifts the negative codification from “bad” to “evil.” Nietzsche calls this “a radical transformation of values” that is “at the same time an act of the most cunning revenge.” This is because the priestly morality not only reverses moral positions—making the poor, weak, lowly, and disenfranchised the “good,”—but it also declares their enemies to be evil and worthy of condemnation.
To be sure, the seeds of this conservative resentment were not feigned. Long before Trump’s ascension to political power, poor, rural, white, and religious conservatives served as the butt of the joke from Saturday Night Live to city hall. They are stereotyped as uneducated, outdated, and often inebriated. They don’t participate in the economy of status. Instead, they drive a pickup instead of a Prius and shop at Meijer instead of Whole Foods. This is not a slight. I grew up in the cornfields of rural Wisconsin and know well this collective feeling of resentment that boils up whenever a CNN pundit condescendingly speaks about evangelicals, a progressive political ad interrupts Sunday football, or a morning radio show complains about Republican legislators. Daily life begins to feel like a trap set by the powerful progressive elites who laugh at you from their modern city high-rise.
Partisan priests took hold of this long-held resentment and made it the center of their narration of the conservative Christian experience. This is why, despite occupying a dominant social, cultural, and political position in the U.S., conservative Christians today claim persecution whenever they are critiqued or when anything that does not fit their distinct brand of Christianity succeeds. Even though they incessantly claim that the U.S. is a “Christian nation,” they still need to form a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.” This partisan priesthood singles out Muslim-majority countries like Palestine or Iran for the sake of conquest and violent exploitation and scapegoats marginalized communities in the U.S. for the multitude of problems our nation faces.
Partisan priests deal in these false premises and promises that further manipulate loyalists and feed their resentment. For example, they promise that if the common people remain faithful to them, they too might join the ranks of the nobility. If they cast their votes, send their paychecks, and spread the imperial message, God will bless their faithfulness. If they break the law, they will be pardoned. If they abuse the vulnerable, their wrongdoings will be hidden. If they accumulate enough wealth, they will keep even more of it. If they dismiss their concerns and just “give them another chance,” all will be well. It is nothing more than a partisan prosperity gospel.
This is the unholy spirit of empire. The partisan priest promotes the spirit of this age—a spirit of control by manipulation, of expansion by violence, of accumulation by oppression. This priesthood does not see the earth as sacramentally filled with the glory of God, but rather filled with subjects to conquer and exploit. The spiritual reality of the empire and its partisan priests demand we recognize, as writer Yanan Melo argues, that “what we struggle against is not only a system of global powers, militaries, and economies, but the very spirit that animates them from within.”
Still, we should not be without hope. Today, the U.S. empire and the gospel of its partisan priests reign in their folly. The crowds cheer for them and pledge their allegiance. Yet the wise prophet reminds us: “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:6-8).
The priesthood that many American evangelicals follow today is not found in the church but in the cathedral that is Capitol Hill.
Amar D. Peterman is an Indian American scholar working at the intersection of faith and public life. He is the author of Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local. You can learn more about his work at amarpeterman.com.
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