A Post-Trump World?: Reflections a Year After the Storming of the Capitol
By Lesley Ann Earles and Jamie McLeod | Progressive Southern Theologians | January 11, 2022

For many Americans, the morning of November 7, 2020 brought what felt like an opportunity to breathe for the first time in four years. At 11:30 in the morning (for those in the East), major networks began calling the State of Pennsylvania for former Vice President Joe Biden. Pennsylvania represented the electoral votes that had tipped the scale toward now President Biden and with it, the end of what had been an exceedingly long and chaotic four years. Celebrations grew in most of the big cities in the country, with an exceptionally large crowd gathering in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. These folks invited the current President to “pack your [stuff].” For those who supported the incoming administration, this felt like the precursor to a new day in the United States.

There was also a reckoning that was going to be needed moving into the future. The 2016 election had brought together two historically loathed presidential candidates. Donald Trump had sealed his fate with a not insignificant portion of the population (and late night hosts) the moment he began to make his way down the gold plated escalator to demean the entire populace of our neighbors to the south (though, he did assume that some were good people). Hillary Clinton, for her part carried the weight of a woman with well over two decades of drawing a laser-like focus from the professional pols of the right. Questions posed 30 years ago about financial profits made in cattle futures had morphed into everything from the murder of Vince Foster to running a child sex-trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong Pizza on Connecticut Ave in Northern Washington, DC. For a great many, there was a pervading sense they were choosing the lesser of two evils. Even then, Trump’s victory seemed to have been propelled by the intervention of then Director of the FBI, Jim Comey, as he called a press conference a week before the election to announce that the Bureau was going to be investigating Clinton’s use of email, again. Though she won the majority of the votes in the country, there would be no celebration for the election of the first female President of the United States and with the look of a deer in the headlights, a shaken Trump made his way onto the stage to offer a hastily written victory speech.

The 2020 election was fundamentally different. Trump, the incumbent, had following him the trail of a term in which he would send financial markets into turmoil with a single tweet, undermine his entire intelligence apparatus while standing next to Vladimir Putin, and order up a plan to turn the military against its own citizens in order for the same Lafayette Park to be cleared with rubber bullets, helicopters, and tear gas. All so he could shoot a campaign video of him walking across to St. John’s Church to have his picture taken holding a Bible. Upside down. Joe Biden, for his part had historically been seen as kind Uncle Joe by many in the nation. He was plain spoken (even at the risk of the more than occasional gaffe). In contrast to the President who had rarely attended worship in a non-campaign or wedding setting, Biden was a devout Catholic who attended Mass every week. Moreover, many in the nation grieved with the whole Biden family on two separate occasions: the death of his first wife and daughter, and then with the passing of his son, Beau, from a brain tumor in 2016. Throughout all of this, Biden had been vulnerable and authentic as he grieved before the nation. In many ways, he was the antithesis of Trump. And yet.

Election Night

As results began to roll in on November 3, 2020, many progressives around the country believed they were going to be in bed near midnight with the winner of the presidential race already called. What followed, instead, were four straight nights of little to no sleep as the nation waited. And the remaining states that were too close to call counted ballots at a pace that would have embarrassed a snail. When the dust settled, Biden enjoyed a relatively comfortable victory, but the now former President had also gotten the second-largest number of total of votes in the history of the country. Across the board Democrats lost Senate races they believed to be in the bag, house races that put their majority in real doubt, while realizing that the millions of dollars they poured into long shot contests had not moved the needle one iota. Most importantly, 74,216,154 of their family, friends and neighbors had voted for the other guy. And that felt completely foreign to their understanding of the world. The gap formed in that moment has only widened in the time that has passed since that night.

Stepping Out

Of all the things brought to the surface of the nation in the midst of the Trump years none seem more apparent than the permission so many felt to lean into the racial hierarchy embraced by Trump during the first campaign and brought to full rancor during his time in the White House. Trump received the endorsement of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. Though less powerful than they were fifty years ago, they were joined by a whole cadre of White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups that had sprung up in the interim and now were out in the open with their notions of race in the country. The Proud Boys, who had gotten a special charge from President Trump during the first debate, now constituted the most well-known of the collectives. The American Freedom Party, the Boogaloo Movement and the Aryan Nation all enjoyed a time in the spotlight in which they had a megaphone through which to blast their vile rhetoric. Perhaps more troubling than racist groups saying racist things were the words boldly coming out of the mouths of those who had no official allegiance to any of those groups. At a golf cart rally for Joe Biden in The Villages retirement community in Florida, a resident in a golf cart who was against this parade shouted, “White Power!” at the participants. In images of the crowds at Trump rallies, numbering in the thousands, television viewers saw the cheering on of the hateful speech of the President.

The nation is in the midst of a series of significant systemic shifts. There are shifts in demographics as the country grows more diverse, philosophy as younger generations are seen as more accepting of this diversity and additional differences amongst their peers, and awareness as virtually everything has the potential to be captured on video and shared with the world live and then immediately reshared exponentially. As a result younger citizens are finding the power of their voice in larger numbers and they are using the power of social media to push for the change they wish to see. In this new world, the older fixtures of the past are analyzed in a new light. Statues to Confederate leaders are being removed from public spaces or re-set somewhere more appropriate. Police violence against Black communities has now become a front-and-center issue as we as a nation watched all nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of the torture and murder of George Floyd. That event, which brought together the death of Floyd with those of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, created such a reaction it reverberated in protests across the world calling for police reform. The country, it would seem, is waking up to a new racial paradigm.

At the same time, the retrenchment by proponents of the old order of the world continues to stem the tide of justice and equality. White supremacy continues to exert a tremendous amount of power and clout in the halls of Congress and so we come to January 6, 2021. It is a moment nearly 250 years in the making, in which the whole of the nation watched, mostly in horror, as reality and myth collided. The myth of white supremacy was brought together with the mendacious tale of a soon-to-be former president that he had been cheated out of his rightful place in the highest seat of power by a cadre of illegal immigrants, Black folks and cheaters. It is a day in which the power of a president, who traded almost exclusively in falsehoods, propelled angry (primarily) white folks to march down Pennsylvania Ave, kick in the doors of the Capitol, and overtake the building. They successfully completed an incursion deeper than anyone had accomplished since the British forces in 1814, coercing the evacuation or the hunkering down of the leaders of both parties for fear of their lives, while leaving blocks of Washington, DC a smoldering mess some four hours later.

In the aftermath of the event, one might have presumed this was the wake-up call necessary to sever the Republican Party from its erstwhile leader as he beat a hasty retreat to Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps a four-year experiment that had gone horribly wrong was now being drawn to a close. The reality is far less rosy.

Historical Precedent

In the period of time immediately following the conclusion of the Civil War, the divisions of the nation between North and South were intense. Northerners believed the South should be punished for its succession from the Union and for the actions that led to the war. In the midst of the federally-driven era of Reconstruction, southerners came to believe the federal government and profiteers from the North could not be trusted. The division between North and South seemed to have woven itself into the country with little hope of being overcome. However, a snake oil salesman with a panacea was on the horizon. The myth of a white Jesus would soon unite the North and South while reifying racial division in the Church and the nation.

In his book, Reforging the White Republic, historian Edward Blum explores the events following the conclusion of the Civil War through the turn of the century. Blum concludes that while there was conversation within many of the denominations as to how to best incorporate freed African Americans into their numbers, the much larger movement came in efforts to reunify those national bodies that had severed during the Civil War. The Northern Church and the Southern Church, bitterly divided by the issue of slavery, were seeking common bonds under the auspices of a white Jesus who now beckoned all the lost who looked like him to come back home. While there was some talk of retribution or punishment for those whites who had fought on the Southern side, most were ultimately welcomed back into the fold with little to no resistance.

Religious imagery began to be used within the political arena to challenge the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant — who still bore physical scars from battle — and the desire to lift the newly freed to a high position within the country. Those who challenged Grant used allusions to Hebrew Scripture in an effort to move the nation beyond the divisions set before it with calls “to beat swords into plowshares” and “study war no more.” Blum rightly highlights that undergirding this was a desire to move beyond talk of equality and straight to a new unity forged in the fires of the white supremacy that had undergirded the nation from its foundation.

At the same time, images of Jesus and other biblical characters took a decided turn toward a deeper embrace of white skin and features. As noted by Blum and his writing partner, Paul Harvey (not that one) in their book The Color of Christ, images began to transport Jesus and all the characters of the Biblical witness from from the Land of Promise and first-century Palestine into the American context. Jesus embraced all the qualities of manliness as understood by white men in power. The Prince of Peace increasingly embraced a culture of violence and war. The Messiah who fed the hungry became a symbol of radical self-sufficiency. Most tragically, the Church empowered by a violent and strong white Jesus became the staging ground for the practice and ritual of lynching (primarily) black men, sentenced to death without the benefit of trial. In at least one of those moments of killing, a lynching stage was set up on the grounds of a white Methodist church where men of the church left a Sunday morning service of worship, murdered and mutilated a Black man, and then returned to the conclusion of the service. The racial hierarchy, that continues to plague the country today, was spiritualized into a white Christianity in service of the hierarchy of white men.

The Contemporary White Evangelical Church

In much the same manner Protestant Churches of the late 19th and early 20th century assisted in the unification of the country under the banner of racial hierarchy and violent enforcement, so, too has the white Evangelical Church of today given voice and vote to the odious racial declarations of the former president and those who would follow in his footsteps. A number of leaders from that sect of the faith have lent their presence, their pulpit, and their flock to propel Trump, what the Republican Party has become, and whiteness to the highest seats of power. Often their words and behavior are clownish. Sometimes it is the epitome of hypocritical. Most times it arrives under the guise of average pastor. It is, however, always under the banner of the cross, white Jesus, and an idolatrous devotion to a version of the American myth that affirms all of this. For each Sunday such pastors stand in the pulpit and preach hatred against immigrants or a love of Donald Trump they reaffirm a Christianity that celebrates a racialized society, fascist purity, and the rejection of anything that challenges that thinking. And for many citizens, white Evangelicals included, this is what Christianity itself is as such perspectives are identified as the Christian position and the voices of the Black church, Mainline Christianity, and Catholicism, who together far outnumber white Evangelicals in the United States, are viewed as minority positions if viewed at all.

This takes us back to the day of January 6, 2021. In a recent study published in the Smithsonian magazine, a team of scholars at the Berkeley Center for Religion and the University of Alabama explored the presence of religion in the events on that day. What these researchers found was religion played a far greater role than previously understood. Religious symbolism and iconography were found all over the Capitol grounds that day much of it celebrating the unity of Christianity with American exceptionalism. Moreover, images of a white adult Jesus were combined with the use of a replica of the Infant of Prague, a portrayal of the baby Jesus with snow-white skin and light blonde hair. Pictures of the Messiah wearing a Make America Great hat were paraded through the Rotunda. The event included a mash-up of symbols of White Supremacy, Confederate flags, and crosses bearing the message, “Jesus Saves.”

In the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, some Evangelical leaders pulled back their support for the president, called for a cessation of the violence, and finally joined the minority of white Evangelicals who had long denounced Trump’s rhetoric. Many others doubled down in their support. Christian writer Eric Metaxas quickly bought into the lie that it was the act of Antifa. Televangelist Mark Burns called any suggestion Trump supporters were involved with the insurrection “lies from the gates of hell.” Franklin Graham, son of the legendary pastor, Billy Graham, declared it was not for him to say whether or not Antifa was involved in the attacks. While other evangelicals reiterated their previous denunciations of the former president, they were drowned out by the efforts of more well-known and vociferous leaders who reaffirmed their support for Trump and his movement.

January 6th: One Year Later

Perhaps the guilt, remorse or honest-to-goodness shock in the immediate aftermath of the events of that day have long since subsided. Replacing it has been a collective effort to retell a story of tourists visiting the capital while Antifa infiltrated the ranks of good, honest and peaceful rally-goers or declaring the whole thing to be a “false flag” event that never actually happened. Moreover, for the most part, those members of Congress, and the party of which they are also members, have paid no real price for this recasting of events a great many of us watched unfold on live television. The House of Representatives, whose members crouched down behind their seats while federal officers piled tables in front of glass doors and aimed their weapons at would-be assassins, is poised to return to Republican control in November. The Senate, which twice impeached a sitting president, may well return to the hands of that president’s party. On the national stage, Trump remains the head of his party and the leader of a wider national movement even as he has been shown to have been increasingly involved in the actions of January 6th — and we dare say because of the storming of the Capitol. This is part of a segregated feedback loop telling insular whites no one “like us” is against Trump or supported the opposition.

Just as a bloodily divided nation was reunited under the banner of a racial hierarchy that birthed lynching, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, a large portion of our nation has been brought back together in the aftermath of an insurrection of whiteness. While persons died and the world watched, those who still imagined the United States to be a place of hope and possibility looked on in horrified silence witnessing the embodiment of a shared belief in the ontological supremacy of whiteness. Stateside, had white progressives listened to voices of color in their conceptualization of race in the United States, there would not have been near the surprise for them in the level of contemporary racist vitriol in the nation. A thread that has run through the history of the United States since our original sin of slavery has been the othering of those who were not wealthy white men. Understanding this, the President, members of the House of Representatives and US Senate who cheered on and encouraged the rioters to engage in the violence mete out on person and property are only ever symptoms of the larger problem and not the source. Only in a world in which whiteness was the central source of authority could a multiracial coalition of voters forming the clear majority be decried as illegitimate and their strength assumed to have been attained by illegal means.

Those who have decried Trump, along the continuum from the never-Trump Republicans to the socialist progressives, may wish to imagine a post-Trump world —especially after the storming of the Capitol and some of the worst fears of deriders coming to life. Though he is no longer Commander in Chief he remains a commander in the hearts and minds of many of his adherents and their pastors who have held the reins in the contemporary moment of a historical “custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.” This long tradition of spiritualized racism casts a shadow into our past and into our future far longer than the stature of Trump.