Essay

Church and state

Creed

Politics

20 February 2025

7 min read

How to test the religious claims made on Trump

An old Puritan offers a way to question the assertions.

Anthony Baker

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

A montage shows a bishop, a preacher and a president being looked down upon by a puritan.

Jonathan Edwards considers.

Christian theological language is a fairly constant garnish to the dish that is American political theater. In recent weeks, however, with the rhetoric responding to the initiation of Donald Trump's second term, such language has arguably shifted into a substantial side dish, if not the main course.

At the Inauguration, Rev. Franklin Graham prayed, "Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand." He compared the new President to Moses and Samuel of the Hebrew Scriptures, and implied that the years of the Biden administration were akin to Israel's years of enslavement in Egypt.

The President himself made a bold claim of divine intervention in Inaugural address:

"I was saved by God to make America great again."

Christians, however, are far from united in this interpretation. Pope Francis suggested prior to the election that American voters were facing a choice between two evils. He has since called Trump's mass deportation plans "a disgrace." The Episcopal Bishop of Washington went viral just after the Inauguration when she called on the newly elected President to amend his rhetoric around sexuality and immigration in the name of mercy: "Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land."

The discipline of theology can seem like an exercise in evaluating faith language against the grid of personal conviction. Rev. Graham has his theology, Pope Francis his, Bishop Budde hers. But as any true student of theology knows, the tradition is rich with critical tools that go far beyond private taste or political orientation.

Good theology acts as a grammar for the language of Christians. Think of how German or French has rules that keep our subjects and objects aligned and that connect propositions and antecedents. Sentence-diagramming, that dreaded rite of passage for the language student, shows those connections visually on a chalkboard. Cumbersome as they are, such structures allow us to make the most sense possible when we go to put thoughts into words.

So too in the language of faith traditions: we can fail to make sense by ignoring the long evolution of "grammar" that is that tradition's critical reflection on its own faith.

What forms and structures might allow us to evaluate claims about whether or not God's hand is at work in the election and vision of a new U.S. President?

Divine intervention never shows up "full strength," given that it only ever arrives through the words and acts of human beings.

In the eighteenth century, American Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards weighed in on arguments about whether God was at work in the movement of revivals that we have since taken to calling the First Great Awakening. His careful evaluation of arguments and claims for and against the revivals could serve as a model for evaluating the political theology of our day.

Edwards is most famous for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a text that my high school English teacher justly called a stunning piece of rhetoric and an alarming bit of theology. Less famous, though, are the writings that explore the true center of his theological vision. For Edwards, the world was created out of the bounty of God's own character. Call it a theological aesthetic: God delights in the beauty of his own goodness and truth, and so makes a world whose character is, at its best, a reflection of of a good and beautiful God.

This aesthetic runs like a soft bass line through his short treatise The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. This work opens with a passage from the first Epistle of John. The writer says that Christians should not believe every spirit, but rather "try the spirits whether they are of God." Edwards is surprised to find that this invitation is not one that his contemporary theological evaluators have taken up. There's his aesthetic running in the background: If God made us to be Godlike, then we ought to be vigilant in our attention to the energies sweeping through the world, and certainly "try them" before we decide to trust or mistrust them as the presence of God's own Spirit.

When he addresses those who deny that the hand of God is at work the Awakening, he takes seriously their criticism that some preachers are excessive, or harmful, or even riddled with errors in their sermons. Edwards doesn't disagree or defend such preachers, but rather reminds the reader that one must consider the distance between the eternally holy and righteous God and the temporally limited and fallible creature. God made us to be Godlike, but that likeness is a calling, not a presumption. For this reason, "If some fall away into gross errors or scandalous practices, it is no argument that the work in general is not the work of the Spirit of God." In fact, "if we look into church history, we shall find no instance of a great revival of religion but what has been attended with many such things." In effect, humans are imperfect receptors of divine transmission. Acknowledgement of our imperfection is not a denial of divine activity. This is, for Edwards, as for the whole of the theological tradition, a key principle of good theological grammar. Divine intervention never shows up "full strength," given that it only ever arrives through the words and acts of human beings.

The "proof" of God's hand, theologically speaking, is not in the strength of one's conviction or in the number of people who hold it.

When he turns from what might negate the claim of divine action to what might affirm it, Edwards says, first of all, that a growing affection for Christian teachings is an integral part of such evidence. "The devil has the most bitter and implacable enmity" against the whole story of the virgin birth and the redemption wrought by Jesus' death and resurrection. If people begin falling in love with the beauty of the story, he suggests, it is a pretty solid indicator that God is at work.

But this alone is not sufficient evidence, if for no other reason, Edwards says, than that there are false prophets who mislead even as they speak in ways that sound pious. For this reason, a love of truth-telling supplies a touchstone for our theological grammar. "If we see that a spirit operates as a spirit of truth, leadings persons to truth, convincing them of those things that are true, we may safely determine it is a right and true spirit." For Edwards, if I speak out loudly in favor of the divinity of Christ while lying about my own actions or intentions, you should not trust that I am a faithful witness to the work of the Holy Spirit.

But the most important of all marks of the work of the Spirit of God is neither of these; or perhaps, it is a mark that lies within and shapes all other evidences. Edwards says that "humble love" of God and fellow humans is the "highest evidence of a true and divine Spirit." The adjective here is important: a love that is self-aggrandizing is not the love that shares in God's own character.

Here again the aesthetic sounds the bass line: God's love changes us like a beautiful memory or a lovely person does. We want to belong there, we want to be like that. If the energy, the spirit, sweeping through a culture is not that sort of energy, then it's likely not the work of the lovingly humble God.

Edwards ends his own treatise by grading the revivals on his grammatical grid, and determining that it is, in fact, the work of God. For our current moment in U.S. society, the evidence is not yet in. Will the Trump administration cause an increase in affection for Christian teachings? Will it explode in an epidemic of truth-telling and a cultural outrage at falsehood? Will the policies and practices of the next four years demonstrate humble love? If so, Christians will have good reason to attest that the interpretations of leaders like Reverend Graham are accurate.

The "proof" of God's hand, theologically speaking, is not in the strength of one's conviction or in the number of people who hold it. It is rather in the humility, Christian devotion, and the divine and neighborly love that grows from the events in question.

On this note, Bishop Budde's admonition invites a reading that not far from the theological grammar that Edwards supplies. "You have felt the providential hand of a loving God," she reminded the President. "In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now." If it was in fact God's mercy that spared you, it was so that you could be merciful. The proof of providence will be in the pudding of practice, Mr. Trump.

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Article

Attention

Creed

Education

Psychology

1 April 2025

6 min read

We miss so much when we only see what we are looking for

Explaining why we don't see the unseen - with the help of a gorilla.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Manuel Bonadeo on Unsplash.

In a thriving Pentecostal Church on an English city street, a room full of worshippers are singing, clapping, dancing and throwing their hands in the air. The preacher cries “Come, Holy Spirit!” and there are cries of “Amen!” and “Yes Lord!” One person has tears on their cheeks.

A few doors down, a few dozen Anglicans also gather. Heads bent over their liturgy books, there is a hum of responses and an air of reverence. “Give us the joy of your saving help: and sustain us with your life-giving Spirit.” The altar candles flicker as the community settles itself into pews. The Holy Spirit is no less present to these worshippers, although they respond in a completely different way.

Both churches share one creed, in which they commit to their belief in God as the source of all things, seen and unseen. Whilst Pentecostal theologies tend to focus on the observable and unpredictable signs of the Spirit at work, many Anglicans would describe the Spirit in terms of an inner experience, perhaps one that is cognitive rather than physical. But either way, Christians share one belief – that God is present in the world, and we call that the Holy Spirit.

However, there are also hundreds of people who walk past both of these churches, week by week, who would never dream of setting foot inside. Many of them will think that anyone who believes in God is deluded or deceived. Such rationalist thinkers often have a strongly monist view of the world, in which everything, even mysterious things such as human consciousness and perception of non-physical entities, must have a physical or biological basis. As Ebenezer Scrooge says to the apparent ghost of Marley in Charles Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

It is almost impossible to convince someone who hasn’t had a first first-hand experience of God that anything like the Holy Spirit exists. Many nay-sayers, I suspect, quietly (or maybe not so quietly) believe that their unbelief is because they are more rational and maybe even more intelligent than those who get excited by such things. But there is another possible explanation for why some people apparently cannot, or will not, see the unseen.

The British education system is heavily orientated towards STEM. Even when more creative subjects such as literature find their way into the syllabus, they are often studied in a rather dry and analytical way. Notwithstanding the efforts of the occasional maverick teacher, I recall much time spent learning how to identify the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, and little (if any) time learning to articulate how his sonnets made me feel. Such a system turns out good scientists, but it may be that in doing so it trains our young people out of being able to perceive a whole raft of things which are arguably just as important to human flourishing.

The world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it.

A “selective attention test” can quickly prove this point. I did one recently with a room full of psychology undergraduates, almost all of whom had identified as monists. “Since you guys are the brightest and the best,” I simpered “let’s do a little intelligence test. Apparently only five per cent of the general population get the answer right to this puzzle, but in this room, I expect the success rate will be a little higher…”

Having primed them by flattering their egos, I proceeded to show them a video called “The Monkey Business Illusion”, designed in 2009 by scientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. During the short film, a group of people pass basket balls to each other, and viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the ball. It seems simple enough, and when the film ended, I asked the students how many counted the right number of passes. Almost every hand in the room went up. No surprises there.

Then I asked the more important question – who saw the gorilla? There was a smattering of laughter, and this time only about half of the hands went up. Meanwhile, the other half of my students were looking around at their peers, utterly confused…

But it was true. In “The Monkey Business Illusion”, a person in a 6ft gorilla costume walks right across the middle of the scene, weaving through the players in the game. However, because most viewers are intently focussed on watching the players in white, they simply don’t perceive it. You can try this for yourself - the video I’m talking about can be found easily on YouTube, and if you follow the search term “selective attention test” there are many others like it.

The material point is that the world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. If you pause for a moment right now, you might notice that there is the hum of a heater in your room, or the noise of traffic outside, or the smell of an air freshener, or that a piece of your clothing that is too tight – things you were simply not aware of until I pointed them out. It’s common that we don’t perceive things until something else makes us think that they are important. If someone tells you that your house might have structural damage, you will suddenly start to notice every creak that comes from your walls and ceilings, even though those creaks have probably been happening for years.

As social beings, we can be easily conditioned into paying attention to certain things and ignoring others. If I tell a group of students that intelligent people are highly attentive to the players in white shirts, I increase the likelihood that they simply will not notice a gorilla.

There is good research to show that children, even in our modern and secular society, are inherently spiritual – most young kids believe in God, or gods, fairies and the existence of many things unseen. But this is not celebrated in our STEM focussed education system, wherein young minds are highly conditioned to let go of such “irrational” beliefs and trust in the full explanatory power of science. It is so effective that, by the time they get to my classroom at university, I’ve got little hope of persuading any of my monists that there was a 6ft gorilla without showing the video again and letting them see it for themselves.

But there are always some people who are willing to challenge the idea that Marley was just an undigested bit of beef. There are always some people who attend churches of one type or another, or practice other forms of spirituality and religion. Some pray, some meditate, and many take part in rituals. This trains them in what anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann calls “micro-processes of attending”, leaving them more ready to perceive spiritual things instead of screening them out of their conscious awareness. How they respond might depend on preferred tradition – dancing, liturgy, or a little bit of both. But all agree that there is something going on that is unseen and important.

Many STEM educated, highly rational and fully committed monists no doubt think that those who attend churches are deluded and deceived into perceiving unseen things are simply just not there. These nay-sayers have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it is more intelligent to believe in the all-explanatory power of science. But perhaps it is they who have been deluded and deceived? As the Monkey Business Illusion demonstrates, if you flatter someone’s intelligence enough, it becomes entirely possible to hide a 6ft gorilla in plain sight.

Watch the Monkey Business Illusion

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