The dangerous prayer that Donald Trump just prayed

What it really means to call on God in an age of messianic mimicry.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

The US Capitol, where Donald trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States

The most important moment in the inauguration occurred in a blink of an eye. A matter of seconds. As President-elect Trump takes the oath of office, he voiced a prayer spanning four simple words, “so help me God.”

This isn’t the first prayer we’ve heard from these steps. Trump echoed prayers offered by a mob of his supporters ascending those very Capitol steps just a few years ago. The reality of pardons characterised this administration from Day One. Perhaps, in a few years’ time, a statue to a J6er will stand in the Capitol Rotunda. I remember reading that prediction from a journalist in the days immediately following, and couldn’t imagine it. Now? I can.

The party platform has become the communion table. Our prayers are filled with content of ideology and theology. We have shown ourselves to be captive to the zeitgeist of our time, consuming propaganda and debating the “truth” about January 6, 2021 in ways that betray our own capitulation, justifying an ascendant administration casting the shadow of authoritarianism with its aspirational populism and tech oligarchs.

To invoke the God of the Christian faith is to invite dispossession and disillusionment with all we once counted “necessary” and took for granted

We cannot consider what it is to be Christian before American. This collusion makes it clear why and how Trump assumes the Presidency as a convicted felon without losing much of his “Christian” base. Why? Because we failed to pay attention to the prayers of January 6^th. To the god they revealed in our midst, and the militant devotion this god demands. A god who is a paranoiac, split between ideology and theology, whose spirit bears the name “Jesus” only in messianic mimicry.

How might we regain our footing and our faith? It begins with taking prayer seriously. If the Christian life is—ever and always—a “life of calling upon God” (as the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it) then our attention must be placed upon this small little prayer packaged in the Oath. Perhaps we pray this prayer ourselves: “So help us God.”

Because it is a dangerous prayer. We have forgotten: it is dangerous to call on God. This presidential prayer invokes divine aid to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, but to invoke the God of the Christian faith is to invite dispossession and disillusionment with all we once counted “necessary” and took for granted, all as the consequence of encountering the Crucified One.

Some see in Trump the advent of revival in America. Some see in Trump democracy’s executioner. But to invoke the name of God in America is to make us radically free and thus responsible to God’s command of peace and justice.

The Dutch Reformed pastor, K.H. Miskotte, whose ministry took place in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, saw it clearly: this God is a saboteur. To invoke this God invites sabotage, and grants us a dissenting faith, one marked by abject denial and disbelief in all other claims to totality and authority and power.

Might we dare to believe such power operates in and through a prayer that cynics count as propaganda?

If the rogue word became Trump and rages among us; then it is the responsibility of Christians to remember as well the Word once for all delivered to the Saints. And the surest sign of this remembrance is not activism first, but the renewal of our prayers.

There is then, a powerful reality at work in this four word prayer. To pray to the God of Jesus Christ is to invoke and provoke sabotage of all our schemes, our slogans, our rogue words. And even in this, we can be confident that this triumph of God is for our good. It was Walter Wink who, with an eye on the earliest Christians, came to ask

“What happens when the State executes those who are praying for it? Even as the lions lapped the blood of the saints in the Roman Colosseum, Caesar was stripped of his arms and led captive in Christ’s triumphal procession.”

Might we dare to believe such power operates in and through a prayer that cynics count as propaganda?

In the renewal of our prayers, perhaps a truly Christian resistance can emerge in our days. A resistance grounded in confession, a witness in word and work to the risen Jesus who lives against all messianic mimicry, who promises us a Spirit “of malice towards none and charity for all”—as Lincoln recognized, in his own inaugural address to the American people in 1864.

May we continue to pray, “so help us, God,” unafraid of where this God leads us in freedom.

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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.