“Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep ’til noon.” Mark Twain
I once worked with a woman who constantly complained about how she was so busy at the office, she didn’t even have time to eat lunch or go to the bathroom. It wasn’t uncommon to hear her brag about being up till 2am the night before, just trying to “catch-up” on emails. She would periodically run between offices in our building, with frazzled hair and no makeup, appearing to juggle three work-issued cell phones, which curiously never rang.
I watched this soft propaganda slowly work wonders with supervisors and over a period of a couple years, she was regarded as the hardest working employee on the team. She was rewarded with a 6-figure salary and regular raises. However, over time, some perceptive coworkers who actually did work, started to realize that she mostly just sat in her office all day with the door closed, literally never completed a single team task and had merely mastered the art of appearing busy.
They were correct.
As we are finding out, being christened a “mighty man of faith” by the majority of Republican voters is a lot like this. A little bit of soft propaganda can go a long way.
According to a brand new Deseret News/Harris X poll, Donald Trump is viewed as a “man of faith” by a staggering 53% of Republicans.
By contrast, just 35% of Republicans viewed lifelong, devoted Mormon, Mitt Romney, as a person of faith and only 23% see President Biden as a religious man. Mind you, Romney actually served on the foreign mission field for two years and taught the Bible in his church.
This polling data is fascinating for a couple reasons.
First, and most obviously, Trump has never been religious in his life. The Christian religion requires submission and servility, and Trump has historically been opposed to both. Christianity also requires, at its very baseline, a contrite admission of failure and guilt— and to this day Trump refuses to confess either.
Secondly, he has always fumbled the ball badly when it comes to talking publicly about religious topics. It’s not that he merely lacks decorum or that he comes across as “religiously incorrect”– faux pas that are easy to ignore in politics. It’s that he is so profoundly irreligious, so absolutely clueless about the basics of religious faith, that he appears to be uncertain about what the Bible even is.
Trump claims to have read the Bible, but it’s doubtful that he can read any long document, let alone a book. (Incidentally, this clip shows how transparent Trump’s lies are about reading or even concentrating for a few minutes on anything that doesn’t directly involve him. A Right Wing religious crackpot like Pat Buchanan sussed this out on Crossfire 35 years ago!).
You would think that his bumbling and blatantly bullshitty declarations, would loudly telegraph, to even the most nominal person of faith, that they were about to be bamboozled. But according to 53% of Republicans, this isn’t the case.
The highlight reel of Trump talking about his “faith”, is 24 karat comedy gold:
“When I have my little cracker…”
Also on MAGA’s Greatest Hits album is, “Two Corinthians Walk Into a Bar”, “The Bible Verse That Never Was” and the classic “The Sermon on the Mount is Trash“.
What is so remarkable about all of his public discussions about faith, is that Trump doesn’t even really seriously pretend to be devout. That’s because he knows something no one wants to admit: HE DOESN’T HAVE TO.
So how did Trump gain a reputation as an “early riser”– i.e. a man of faith?
The Evangelical Right is so deeply sucked into the vortex of the cult of personality, that whatever Trump lacks, they are more than happy to supply for him– by way of projection and a ready defense. In this way, he is always “perfect”. Anytime he totally botches religious protocol– which is almost always–his followers are vigilant to jump in and supply a quick apologetic about what their hero really meant to say. This new Deseret/Harris X data is underscored by a CBS/YouGov poll from August, that showed 71% of Republican voters trusted the truthfulness of Trump’s statements– above family and friends, the media or religious leaders.
Even when Trump talks and behaves like a half-witted used car salesman, his followers help fill in the vast empty spaces with their own detailed religious interpretations (See: Peter Seller’s character Chauncey Gardner in the film Being There, for comedic examples of people projecting profundity onto abject nonsense). What is this???
One plausible explanation: A Modern Cargo Cult
Following victory over Japan at the end of World War II, Melanesian tribes in the South Pacific began exhibiting cult-like practices around the American servicemen who visited the islands and airdropped supplies. These venerated servicemen were viewed as “rescuers”, who were going to bring prosperity and peace back to their struggling communities. Often, devotion to these mythologized servicemen– with names like “John From”, “Tom Navy” or even “Prince Phillip”– was fused with a tribe’s pre-existing religious traditions. In many cases, it was amalgamated with the traditional Christianity which had been brought to the islands in the late 19th century by missionaries and traders. The end result was a new, syncretic brand of Christianity, which worshipped God and Christ, but also had a fixation on a contemporary hero figure, whom the faithful believed was going to return to the island with more supplies and usher in a period of jubilee.
These new religions were later termed “Cargo Cults” by anthropologists, and remnants of them still exist in very small pockets of remote South Pacific islands.
The most basic explanation is that native populations, often experiencing food shortages or other dire circumstances, would simply invent a hero that could give them hope and help them return to a place of security. Around that hero, a form of inordinate devotion and adoration would arise.
Anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace at the University of Pennsylvania found the term Cargo Cult problematic and instead referred to them as “Revitalization Movements.” Whatever label used, Wallace defined such religious movements as a “deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.”
Although it’s easy to be appalled and perplexed by the cult-like behavior of MAGA– and I frequently am– Wallace argued that the formation of Cargo Cults was not so mysterious and had several common, logical ideas at their root. The five foundational philosophies of these groups are (I paraphrase):
- Once upon a time things were awesome
- Then everything went to shit
- We turned to our old traditions and they just didn’t work anymore
- An unconventional Hero stepped forward and gave us hope again
- Only our Hero has the ability to bring back a better life
On the final point, Wallace concluded,
“This group program may, however, be more or less realistic and more or less adaptive: some programs are literally suicidal; others represent well-conceived and successful projects of further social, political, or economic reform; some fail, not through any deficiency in conception and execution, but because circumstances made defeat inevitable.”
This seems to describe at least some of the major MAGA phenomena and perhaps the motivations behind many of its followers. To those of us on the outside of this bubble, it can seem the Trump adoration is hysterical, irrational and insane. And for the most part, it is.
As to whether this Cargo Cult tendency will be adaptive and eventually produce helpful reforms or whether it will result in complete self destruction, none of us can say for sure.
How American Conservatives came to believe that Trump was an earnest man of faith and how they eventually turned to him — the most mendacious, duplicitous and deceptive president in our nation’s short history– as some sort of ultimate truth-teller, certainly defies conventional understanding.
But as time moves on, it’s not so inexplicable anymore.
