I never thought I’d find anything funnier than Americans, including some of my very Christian neighbours, voting for Donald Trump as the “Christian” candidate. For the record, here’s a man who’s publicly stated he doesn’t believe in asking anyone, including God, for forgiveness. He’s shown support for eugenics, believing his whiteness makes him superior to people of colour, remarked that what he has in common with his daughter, Ivanka, “is sex,” and once hoped his then-baby daughter Tiffany would inherit her mother’s breasts. These interviews are all online for anyone who wants to hear them firsthand. He’s a convicted felon, evades taxes, has allegedly assaulted women, cheated on his wives, and ran a divisive campaign that pitted Americans against each other. He displays neither a Christian temperament nor lives a Christian life, yet he has managed to deceive my Christian neighbours here in the United States—and now some Nigerians under Tinubu are racing to praise and canonise him. Some even composed campaign music for him, many flood social media with their support, and a prominent pastor has been posting photos up and down of himself with the president-elect, using church language to portray Trump as a saint. That’s somehow funnier than my American neighbours who viewed him as the candidate embodying Christian values.
I hadn’t planned to write about Trump or the American elections, but some Nigerians’ attitudes towards Trump reflect the country’s culture of performative religiosity. People want to appear religious, but their lives tell a different story. Clerics live lavish, obscenely opulent lives, which seems acceptable as long as they say the right things. Public officials embezzle funds, and their pastors pray for them as long as they tithe. It’s why Madam Tinubu and others could call for prayers over economic hardship instead of taking real action. It’s why we have religious leaders scrambling to stay close to power, their “kingdom” clearly in the here and now rather than in any afterlife. Scratch the surface of their beliefs, and you might find they don’t even believe in the afterlife they preach.
This fixation on the performance of religion, rather than its substance, fills sermons with prosperity platitudes rather than justice, empathy, charity, or love. And yet 1 Corinthians 13 warns that, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” In Trump’s case, it’s disturbing to see people finding ways to excuse or even praise actions and rhetoric that blatantly contradict the ideals they claim to uphold. What’s Christian or charitable about wanting to cut Social Security, make healthcare unaffordable, or grant tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy? What’s Christian about marginalising the aged and the poor, demonising the stranger? He promises to ban abortion (though he’s effectively handed it over to the states) and to bar trans women from competing in women’s sports (and does that make all his other policies acceptable, or make him a saint?).
When it comes to his Nigerian supporters, some of whom will probably never set foot in the US, there is also a narrative of Trump as a symbolic figure in a narrative about strength and “taking back” power from leftists whose policies they believe can go too far left, even when some of those policies include ways to benefit the poor, the working class and the marginalised. In his brash defiance, they see Trump’s strength rather than recklessness. One said that America needed someone capable of causing gra gra as if global politics is about how brash a leader is, how willing they are to get in the mud.
I am exhausted from reading all the ways in which Trump is very Christian. This man who couldn’t quote a single line from the Bible, and who held the Bible the wrong way up in a photo-op. It’s amazing what the moral gymnastics folks are willing to go through to justify a man so far removed from decency, as long as he appears powerful. And yet, there’s this irony: as they proclaim the holiness of a man so removed from humility or empathy, they reinforce a culture of sycophancy where all one has to do is say the word, Christian, and they are one. And perhaps that’s the real tragedy here — the celebration of image over integrity.
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