Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
It was the curious way Donald Trump held up the Bible outside St John’s, Layfayette Square that got me thinking. It was almost like he was showing it off to the crowd as a dictator might parade a captured prisoner. Or like someone holding up a severed head. There again, it was also faintly reminiscent of the slightly camp way that sales people display their products on the shopping channel.
Everyone knows Trump is not much of a reader. In a 1987 interview, he tied himself in knots trying to name a book — other than his own — that had actually read and enjoyed. As Michael Wolff put it in his Trump biography: “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
And as with reading in general, so too with Bible reading in particular. Trump can’t answer even the most basic “what is your favourite bit of the Bible” type of noddy question, retreating into the vapid response that the Bible is very personal to him and so he doesn’t want to get into it. It’s hardly a surprise that the 783,137 words of the King James presents as a little intimidating for a non-reader. But it seems that Trump is not au fait with even the most heavily abridged version.
Elizabeth I was right that we ought not to seek to make “windows into other men’s souls” thus to put others on trial for their religious beliefs, or lack of them. But when someone is so transparently irreligious and totally ignorant of the even the most basic tenets of the faith, windows are not required.
Several people have made the point that Donald Trump probably wouldn’t like the Bible very much if he ever did read it. All that forgiveness and love your enemies stuff isn’t really his style. Nor giving all your money to the poor. And certainly the idea that you might clear Lafayette Square of peaceful protestors, with the heavy handed use riot police and tear gas, thus to do a photo op with the Bible, makes a mockery of the continual cry for justice that the Bible itself contains. This is the book that gave words of hope and defiance to those African-Americans who were subject to slavery. For Trump to so ostentatiously brandish it at a time when racial division is once again pulling American into civil war, was a deliberate provocation.
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