Washington DC, US
AP
Cloaking himself in religion for the second day in a row, President Donald Trump sought on Tuesday to seize the moral authority to justify his hard line against demonstrators protesting the killing of another black man in police custody and at the same time mobilise his religious conservative base.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump visit Saint John Paul II National Shrine, Tuesday, on 2nd June, in Washington. PICTURE: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky.
AHEAD OF TRUMP BIBLE PHOTO OP, POLICE FORCIBLY EXPEL PRIEST FROM ST JOHN’S CHURCH NEAR WHITE HOUSE
Early Monday evening, President Donald Trump stood before the historic St John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Washington and held aloft a Bible for cameras.
The photo opportunity had an eerie quality: Trump said relatively little, positioned stoically in front of the boarded-up church, which had been damaged the day before in a fire during protests sparked by the death of George Floyd on 25th May in Minneapolis. The church appeared to be completely abandoned.
It was, in fact, abandoned, but not by choice: Less than an hour before Trump’s arrival, armoured police used tear gas to clear hundreds of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square park, which is across the street from the church.
Authorities also expelled at least one Episcopal priest and a seminarian from the church’s patio. “They turned holy ground into a battleground,” said Rev Gini Gerbasi.
Gerbasi, who serves as rector at a different St John’s Episcopal Church, in nearby Georgetown, arrived at St John’s Lafayette earlier that day with what she said were at least 20 other priests and a group of laypeople. They were organised by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington to serve as a “peaceful presence in support of protesters”.
The volunteers and clergy offered water, snacks and hand sanitiser to demonstrators who were gathered in Lafayette Park across the street – which sits directly in front of the White House – to denounce racism and police brutality after the death of Floyd. But sometime after 6pm, when volunteers were packing up supplies, Gerbasi said police suddenly began to expel demonstrators from the park – before the 7pm curfew announced for Washington residents earlier in the day.
“I was suddenly coughing from the tear gas,” she said. “We heard those explosions and people would drop to the ground because you weren’t sure what it was.”
Rev Glenna J Huber, rector of the Church of the Epiphany, another downtown Washington church, was at St John’s but left as the National Guard arrived. She said she watched as police rushed into the area she had just fled. Concerned, the priest sent a frantic email to clergy at the church urging them to be careful.
Back at St John’s, Gerbasi said she was dressed in clerical garb and standing on church grounds as police approached.
“I’m there in my little pink sweater in my collar, my gray hair up in a ponytail, my reading glasses on, and my seminarian who was with me – she got tear gas in her eyes,” she said.
Gerbasi said that as she and the seminarian watched, police began to expel people from the church patio.
“The police in their riot gear with their black shields and the whole bit start pushing on to the patio of St John’s Lafayette Square,” she said, adding that people around her began crying out in pain, saying they had been shot with non-lethal projectiles.
Gerbasi and others eventually fled the scene, leaving emergency medical supplies behind. By the time she reached K Street several blocks away and checked her phone, Trump was already in front of the church holding a Bible.
“That’s what it was for: to clear that patio so that man could stand in front of that building with a Bible,” said Gerbasi.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump aides reportedly told a Bloomberg News reporter that officials had planned to expand the perimeter around White House Monday afternoon, irrespective of Trump’s visit to the church – although those plans do not appear to have been shared with clergy working in front of the church.
The official White House Twitter account did tweet a video Monday evening celebrating Trump’s visit to the church, complete with footage of Trump walking to the church set to dramatic music.
Episcopal Church leaders were quick to condemn the incident. Rt Rev Mariann Budde, the Bishop of Washington who helped organise the clergy presence at the church, said Trump’s arrival at St John’s happened without warning and left her “outraged.”
“The symbolism of him holding a Bible…as a prop and standing in front of our church as a backdrop when everything that he has said is antithetical to the teachings of our traditions and what we stand for as a church – I was horrified,” she told Religion News Service. “He didn’t come to pray. He didn’t come to lament the death of George Floyd. He didn’t come to address the deep wounds that are being expressed through peaceful protest by the thousands upon thousands. He didn’t try to bring calm to situations that are exploding with pain.”
The Rt Rev Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, also criticised the move, accusing the president of using “a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.”
“This was done in a time of deep hurt and pain in our country, and his action did nothing to help us or to heal us,” Curry said in a statement. “We need our President, and all who hold office, to be moral leaders who help us to be a people and nation living these values. For the sake of George Floyd, for all who have wrongly suffered, and for the sake of us all, we need leaders to help us to be ‘one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.’”
St John’s has long been tied to the presidency. Every sitting president has attended the church at least once since its founding in 1816, earning it the nickname “Church of the Presidents”. The church’s then-rector, Rev Luis Leon, prayed at Barack Obama’s second inauguration, and the church hosted a service on the morning of Trump’s inauguration as well.
The church, like many Episcopal congregations, is known for harbouring a liberal bent: It has hired LGBTQ clergy and advocated for same-sex marriage. Its parent denomination, the Episcopal Church, has been critical of Trump: Curry participated in a 2018 protest near the White House in which he and other liberal-leaning clergy blasted Trump’s campaign slogan “America First” as “a theological heresy”.
St John’s was also damaged during the demonstrations over the weekend when it was defaced with graffiti and suffered a small fire in its basement that was quickly extinguished.
Asked what she would tell Trump if given the chance, Gerbasi said: “You want to be living your life by the words in that book [the Bible], not toting it around as a photo opportunity.”
The priest later posted about her experience on Facebook, concluding her account with the defiant decree “I am now a force to be reckoned with.”
– JACK JENKINS, RNS
Trump signed an executive order on international religious freedom Tuesday and traveled to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine, where he and the first lady laid a ceremonial wreath and observed “a moment of remembrance.”
A day earlier, he had held up a Bible and posed for photos in front of a historic church across from the White House that had suffered fire damage from protesters. He strode through Lafayette Park to the church after authorities forcefully broke up peaceful protests there.
Trump’s religious outreach marked his latest efforts in a series of overtures to mobilise conservative voters of faith, particularly the white evangelical Christians who are among his most loyal supporters.
The furious, politically charged response to his gestures from less pro-Trump faith leaders, however, suggested his efforts to lock in one part of his base could backfire by turning off other religious voters.
Tuesday’s shrine visit was originally set as a venue for Trump to sign the religious freedom order, which he ended up signing during a private event in the Oval Office. But his tweets made clear what was on his mind as he spent much of the morning urging Republicans to vote in primaries on Tuesday that he vowed would “lead to big victories on November 3rd.”
“SILENT MAJORITY!” he tweeted.
Trump has turned to religion as he seeks to project strength and quell violent protests that have spread across the nation in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But religious leaders across denominations accused Trump of trying to coopt religion in an attempt to project leadership at a time of deep national strife.
Rev Mariann Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, said she was “outraged” by Trump’s Monday visit to St John’s Church.
She noted that Trump didn’t pray while visiting the landmark that has been visited by sitting presidents since the early 19th century. The church sustained minor fire damage during protests Sunday night.
Rev Gini Gerbasi, the rector at a church in Washington’s Georgetown neighbourhood, said she was “deeply shaken” after having been forcefully cleared from the Lafayette Square area Monday evening.
She urged Trump to live by the Bible’s words “instead of carrying them around as a prop.”
The use of “weapons of war” to help the president “show his supporters that he’s religious,” Gerbasi told The Associated Press, defied further comment. “I can’t even go there. The layers of irony and hypocrisy and sacrilege are already thick.”
As for Tuesday’s trip to the Catholic shrine, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington’s Catholic diocese said he found it “baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated”.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway defended Trump’s St John’s visit as a powerful symbol to those who set the church ablaze, telling Fox News Channel, “We don’t look into other people’s hearts and souls and discern and judge what their faith is, why the President felt compelled to walk there, why he held that Bible up”.
Trump’s campaign framed his visit to St John’s as “a powerful statement that God will always prevail by standing before the burned church, Bible in hand,” in the words of spokeswoman Sarah Matthews.
Budde challenged that narrative as she aligned with the goals of peaceful protesters, saying in an interview that “if the President was trying to capitalise on religious outrage because the church was burned, I think the real outrage was the death of George Floyd.”
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a Christian conservative ally of the President, lauded Trump’s visit for “sending a message that he’s not going to be intimidated, that our government is not in hiding”.
Perkins said the only thing he would have done differently, had he been shepherding the church visit, would be to ask a multi-racial group of pastors to offer prayer for the nation during the crisis.
Rev Samuel Rodriguez, a Latino evangelical pastor who has advised Trump, said any president holding up the Bible is a “powerful image.”
Rodriguez dismissed the idea that Trump’s recent forays into religious symbolism were “a dog whistle or a clarion call” to a religious base that, as he put it, is already firmly by the president’s side.
“Is he somehow shaky with the white evangelical community?” Rodriguez said of Trump.
But just months before November’s presidential election, polls show Trump struggling in key swing states, with some evidence of waning enthusiasm among some of his most loyal supporters, including white evangelical Christians.
Polling from the public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan non-profit, found a double-digit decline in Trump’s support among white evangelicals and Catholics from March to April, a sign that Trump could be struggling to consolidate his appeal with a demographic he desperately needs to win.
Robert P Jones, CEO of the institute, also cited data showing white evangelical voters are shrinking as a share of the US population, meaning Trump “needs to overperform” among his core religious supporters in order to win in November.
