Trump brandishing a Bible ‘an act of idolatry,’ says former Archbishop of Canterbury

Posted Jun 5, 2020

[Episcopal News Service] When President Donald Trump posed with a Bible in front of an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. on June 1, he committed “an act of idolatry … using the text that witnesses to God’s disruptive majesty as a prop in a personal drama,” former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said.

Williams, who currently serves as Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University, joins scores of religious leaders who have condemned the reported use of tear gas and rubber bullets to clear clergy and protesters from the area around St. John’s Episcopal Church, across the street from the White House, so Trump could use it for an unauthorized photo op.

“Quite literally, God alone knows what was going on in the head of the President of the United States as he stood outside a church this week brandishing a Bible, having walked to the church with his path cleared by tear gas and rubber bullets, posturing before a nation more tragically divided than it has been for decades, wounded at so many levels,” Williams wrote in a June 4 newsletter to the members of St. Clement’s Church, Cambridge.

“In a context where racial privilege itself has long been an idolatry, where long-unchallenged institutional violence has been a routine means for the self-defense of that privilege, the image of the President clinging to the Scriptures as if to an amulet is bizarre even by the standards of recent years.”

The full text of Williams’ letter follows.


4 June 2020

Dearly Beloved

The First Letter of St John ends with these words: ‘We are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’ Our identity as Christians is to be in the place where Jesus stands, the place from which we can see into the boundless reality that is the outpouring of God’s life. Standing there, standing in the truth, is like standing under a waterfall: the life of God is around us, soaking and overwhelming us.

We can’t grab it and hold on to it, we can’t contain it. The mystery of the Trinitarian life which we celebrate next Sunday is the mystery of just being immersed in this – the mystery of which baptism is such a fitting sign.

And living in this mystery is the opposite of idolatry, because an idol is precisely what we have made and can manipulate. Idolatry is ultimately not the worship of things so much as the worship of myself – the reduction of God to the scale of my wants and my comfort. And it is horribly easy to take even the signs and witnesses of God’s truth and turn them into idols in this sense, into things that reinforce who I am or who we – as a nation, a class, a race – are.

Quite literally, God alone knows what was going on in the head of the President of the United States as he stood outside a church this week brandishing a Bible, having walked to the church with his path cleared by tear gas and rubber bullets, posturing before a nation more tragically divided than it has been for decades, wounded at so many levels. But objectively this was an act of idolatry – standing somewhere else than in the truth, using the text that witnesses to God’s disruptive majesty as a prop in a personal drama. In a context where racial privilege itself has long been an idolatry, where long-unchallenged institutional violence has been a routine means for the self-defence of that privilege, the image of the President clinging to the Scriptures as if to an amulet is bizarre even by the standards of recent years.

But as we look towards our celebration this coming Sunday, we have to ask about our own faithfulness in standing in the truth, our own idolatries, great and small, as individuals and as a society on this side of the Atlantic. Too easy to focus on that image from Washington as a sign of what’s wrong there; but what do we use to reinforce our status and comfort? How does the poison of privilege undermine our own integrity? – and yes, it’s a question that a place of privilege like the university or Magdalene College needs to be asking with some urgency.

All of us are in some way touched by idolatry because we all inherit a human condition in which we are in thrall to the fear that we are surrounded by enemies, that we are all either winners or losers, that we have to earn our security at the
expense of our fellow humans. And this is the world of untruth from which we are rescued in the baptised life.

So our calling is to go back again and again to stand under the waterfall; to remember that sensation of being unable to measure and contain what surrounds us, and to be reborn in the truth – not so that we can point fingers and judge but so
that we can simply declare and show that idolatry in whatever form traps us in a world so much smaller and drier than the real world, the world held eternally in the life of the Father, the Word and the Spirit. ‘This is the true God, and eternal life.’


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