Godspeed You! Wack Emperor
Comparing Trump to Constantine, feels like nothing could possibly go wrong there.
Last week I wrote about Cardinal Dolan’s unbelievable simping for Donald Trump of all people, although much smarter people than I also wrote about it and used fewer swears. National Catholic Reporter’s editorial staff came out swinging with “Certainly, it is without precedent that the leadership would cozy up so cravenly to a president whose most consistent attribute is an uncontrollable propensity for lying, continuously and about everything. He is dangerously disconnected from reality and is defined by characteristics that normally are condemned from pulpits.” Jamie Manson wrote a separate column for NCR that was arguably even more harsh:
“In his media appearances, Dolan often likes to put on an aw shucks, simple servant kind of image. (Those of us who watch CBS News were subjected to three such appearances by the cardinal on Easter Sunday.) But this latest episode reveals that this shepherd of the church is also a cynical, political operative, as willing to manipulate as he is to be manipulated. This might be easier to bear if he were just another one of Trump's dupes, but Dolan has shown too many times that he is eagerly complicit. Long after the president finds his rightful place in the trash heap of history, one question will still linger over Dolan: What did it profit you to gain Trump's utterly corrupt world?”
As I said last week, Dolan sucks and he sucks a lot, but the guy also presumably went to divinity school and has been doing a pastoral job for a long time, so I was thinking about what his possible thought process could be, besides the obvious lust for power and fandom for the Republican party. And that sent me back to my earlier piece about Rick Heilman, a priest who compared Trump to Constantine:
“Christians are unable to speak freely. Religious freedom is under attack. Society is materialistic and immoral. Western civilization is facing huge threats, from within and without. And apparently the one powerful emerging leader is no saint.
You’re thinking America 2016? [I am not thinking this] No. Rome 312.
The leader is Constantine, who is vying to become the Roman Emperor. Constantine had many defects: he had multiple wives and even put one of them to death, was extremely ambitious, and was a ruthless general and politician. But the legend remains that he had a “Road to Damascus” moment, saw a vision, converted to Christianity, triumphed over his opponents, and became a great emperor of Rome.
Constantine would go on to not only save the Roman Empire, but also liberate Christianity. He signed the Edict of Milan in 313, giving Christians the right to practice their faith and speak freely. This was enough to allow Christians to engage in the public sphere with freedom, thereby enabling them to spread the Christian message to the ends of the empire and Christianize a pagan culture.
Constantine himself was no pillar of virtue, but he created the environment which gave Christians the freedom to influence society. The early Christians were perfectly capable of influencing society themselves; all they needed from the emperor was the freedom to do so. Fast forward to 2016, and we can see many obvious similarities.”
This was how Heilman squared the circle of being Catholic, presumably giving a shit about morality, and being okay with Trump: well, Constantine was a pretty shitty dude, but he made it easier for Christians to practice their faith, so net it was good, right?
This point of view is, to use a term from moral theology, bad. If you extend it logically, it makes the case for unchecked, raw abuse of power and abandonment of democratic pieces, just as long as the institutions of Christianity end up on top. It allows for mass death, persecution of other religions, conquest of other nations, and more generally, the justification of brutal means for an overall abstract end.
But, I actually fucked up the quotation in my original piece about Heilman, because I thought he wrote it himself; in fact, he actually was copy-and-pasting from a different trad blogger, Blaise Joseph writing for MercatorNet. He’s actually posted it multiple times over the past few years, leaving me to wonder what he does all day if he’s not actually writing these blog posts himself. But these two aren’t the only ones to draw the comparison. LifeSiteNews, a Canadian answer to Church Militant where reactionary ideas are exchanged at a 1.40x rate, also ran Joseph’s piece with the following commentary:
“We don’t need Donald Trump to be enthusiastically with us so much as to appoint a few Scalia-like justices, kill the Johnson Amendment, restore the Mexico City Policy and Hyde Amendment, dump Common Core, and then not get in the way of what should now be heavily ramped-up efforts to evangelize and change the culture.
An incredible window of opportunity is before us. We cannot afford to slow down.
It is time for more action than ever on all fronts. Such an opportunity did not even exist under Reagan and Bush.”
How the fuck did Common Core get in there? Of course, there’s also Church Militant itself, where psycho blogging all-star Michael Voris made the same comparison, also before the last presidential election:
“Killary is a self-declared enemy of conservative or orthodox traditional Christianity, and Trump, by campaigning on the "Restore America" theme, has unwittingly and perhaps without even realizing it found himself on the side of supporting the Church. It's like a battle between a type of Diocletian and another Constantine. A direct battle between the two never happened, but close enough for an analogy. Obviously, Clinton is Diocletian.”
Sure, why not. Obviously. Let’s keep going.
“Diocletian's persecutions were the order of the day. And to Trump has fallen the role (whether he yet realizes it or not) of Constantine, the ambitious man who wanted to be emperor of Rome, but who was ignorant of the fact that Heaven would step in for him for Heaven's own reasons. God had additional plans for him once he was undisputed emperor.”
Why people like Heilman and Voris think that having a new Constantine around would be an unalloyed good is befuddling. As another more skeptical blogger put it in 2017:
“From that point Constantine began to adopt the Christian church as his favored religion and the rest is history. But what kind of history? To say the least, that history is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Constantine halted persecution of Christians, and that is undoubtedly a good thing. On the other hand, within a few decades the Christian church was actively persecuting the “pagans” in a lamentable illustration of Psalm 137. (Read the psalm. It’s amazing how quickly we move from the persecuted to the persecutor.) To make matters worse, the church which had once been lean and mean now began to suckle at the civic teet. Needless to say, it is difficult to maintain a prophetic stand against the very institution that’s paying your bills.”
Perhaps this is an overreaction, but on the other hand, Dolan was literally asking the president to pay the church’s bills, and then went on to use his streaming Mass the next day to gush over how great Trump was and wish Melania a happy birthday. I'm not sure I would have ever called the American Catholic church “persecuted” in my lifetime, but Dolan definitely has no problem aligning it with the persecutors.
Incredibly, Constantine is not the only one of “The Twelve Caesars” to whom Trump has been compared. Public Radio International ran a 2019 piece called “Is Trump the New Nero?”; I personally think Caligula is the better comparison, but the Cornell professor interviewed for the piece had yet another emperor ready to go:
“Augustus was a genius at branding. As you know, his name wasn't Augustus, he was born Gaius Octavius. Then he was adopted by his great uncle Julius Caesar and he became Gaius Julius Caesar and some people called him Octavian. And then finally he took the name Augustus which means "reverend." So that's a sign of his branding. Also, he had a slogan: "the republic has been restored." Now, the one thing that Augustus did not do is restore the republic. He turned the republic into an empire. But this was his slogan. Likewise, Donald Trump has a slogan: "Make America great again." And I think both men would have agreed that slogans are tremendously important.”
But the professor also said this as his parting shot:
“If you're saying that modern leaders have failed to learn the lessons of history, I would say yes. Absolutely I think they've failed to learn the lessons of history and they could benefit from looking at the lessons of history again. I think we can't study history enough. History doesn't lay down the law. History isn't an iron rule of what's going to happen, but it does suggest some lessons and some parallels that we ignore at our peril. And I think particularly as Americans, we love novelty. We love things that are new and we don't want to look at the past. We're always looking forward to the future, but the future is rooted in the past and human experience is very old. Which is why I think we need to look back at people like the Romans.”
Dolan should perhaps spend some more time looking back at history at what happened when the church tried to ally itself too closely with the wordly government, when the teachings of Christ were too big and too complex for the church to handle so they just outsourced their morality to one government - or one political party! The bishops have already issued guidance that abortion should be the “pre-eminent” concern of Catholic voters this election cycle, even after a lengthy debate over whether they should give a shit about children dying in U.S. custody or the Earth overheating (to which the answer was “nah”). They’ve already made their choice, the choice is to embrace Trump as Constantine. And as Dolan has shown, it’s not to “reluctantly” embrace Trump as Constantine, but to do so loudly and enthusiastically.
So, let's be clear about what will happen. Even if Roe/Casey aren't overturned outright in the near future, they will certainly be chipped away at. With every restriction on abortion that surfaces in the new era, the leaders of our church will look at it, and in their peripheral vision they'll see the migrant children dying in concentration camps in Texas, and the 20% of Americans on unemployment, and the workers forced to keep plants running and risk catching COVID, and the overflow morgues in New York, and the synagogues being vandalized, and the unsuspecting people gunned down by another senseless mass shooting, and the public schoolteacher whose union is dying and who can't get supplies for her classroom, and the sexual assault victims who are too afraid to speak up, and the public housing residents whose rent just tripled, and the return of Jim Crow voting laws in Republican-controlled states, and the death row prisoners executed with improvised drug cocktails, and the militias storming statehouses with assault rifles, and the slowly frying planet. They'll see all of it, and they'll say “we did it! We built the Kingdom here on Earth! Thanks be to our emperor!” Their actual God was too much for them to get their heads around, so they picked a God that was a little smaller.