Let me set the scene for you.
A gleaming gold statue of Donald Trump — fist raised to the heavens, gold suit gleaming in the Florida sun, blue and white flowing sashes draping his sizable frame, standing triumphant on a white marble pedestal like a gold spray-painted wannabe king looking out over the poor peasants who serve (or should serve) his every whim — it rises from the manicured lawn outside his own mansion. And gathered around it, in the cheap seats or standing in self-righteous piety, eyes closed in holy reverence, are some of America’s most prominent evangelical Christian leaders. Praying over it. Blessing it.
Now, I’m no theologian. I didn’t go to seminary. I did, however, spend a solid chunk of my adult years in the evangelical church, where I was taught — repeatedly, emphatically, and with great theatrical urgency — that the Second Commandment was not a suggestion. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Full stop. No asterisks. No footnote that reads: “Unless it’s wearing a gold suit and polling well in Iowa.”
And yet here we are.
When the footage circulated of Christian leaders praying over a golden Trump statue, the immediate and entirely predictable response from the faithful was: “It’s not what it looks like.”
Of course it isn’t. It never is.
The defenses came fast. We’re not worshipping the statue, we’re praying for the man. It’s a symbol of patriotism. You’re taking it out of context. Which is a fascinating argument to make, given that “context” is precisely what damns them. Because the context is written. It’s ancient. It’s sitting right there in the Book of Exodus, and it is not subtle.
You know the story. Moses goes up the mountain to receive the Law from God. He’s gone a while. The Israelites — restless, anxious, spiritually unmoored — approach Aaron and say, give us a god we can see. So Aaron collects their gold jewelry, melts it down, and fashions a golden calf. And then — and here’s the part that should make every one of those praying pastors choke on their coffee — the people declared a feast to the Lord. They didn’t say they were abandoning God. They said they were honoring God. Through the calf. Through the symbol. Through the shiny, man-made, gold thing they’d built with their own hands.
Sound familiar?
The parallel isn’t a stretch. It’s not a liberal gotcha. It’s not clever rhetoric from the left. It is a direct, one-to-one, chapter-and-verse rerun of one of the most famous cautionary tales in all of Judeo-Christian scripture — and the people who have built their entire public identity on knowing that scripture are the ones standing in front of the statue with their eyes closed and their hands raised.
The Israelites didn’t think they were doing anything wrong either. They thought they were being faithful. They thought the golden calf was a vessel for their devotion, not a replacement for it. That’s always how it works. Nobody wakes up and says, today I will commit idolatry. They say, today I will honor the thing that represents what I believe in — and somewhere along the way, the thing stops being a symbol and starts being the point.
Donald Trump is not a vessel for Christian values. He is a man who has been married three times, credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, convicted of felony fraud, and who once had to be coached on how to hold a Bible for a photo opportunity. He is a man who, by any traditional evangelical moral scorecard, would have been the subject of a very stern sermon series circa 2004.
But they sanctified the statue anyway.
And they prayed over it anyway.
And when Moses — or in this case, the rest of us with functioning eyes — came down from the mountain and said what in the world are you doing, they said: It’s not what you think.
Moses, you’ll recall, was not particularly convinced by that argument either.
The golden calf didn’t end well for anyone involved. The people who built it, blessed it, danced around it found themselves on the wrong side of a very bad day. The text doesn’t treat their intentions charitably. It doesn’t say well, they meant well, and their hearts were in the right place, and who are we to judge what counts as worship.
It says: you knew better. You had the commandments. You chose the calf anyway.
These pastors have the commandments. They’ve preached the commandments. Some of them have written books about the commandments.
They chose the calf anyway.
Mugwump Ramblings has a strict don’t-be-an-idiot policy no matter what “side” people are from. But I will say this: if you are a person of Christian faith, and you are watching your spiritual leaders pray over a golden statue of a politician — one erected, fist to the sky, on the grounds of his own mansion, because apparently subtlety is also dead — and you are nodding along, please open your Bible. Not to feel guilty. Not to be judged. But because the story is right there, and it didn’t go well, and you deserve better than a golden calf in a gold suit standing on a pedestal outside an estate worth millions.
The Israelites at least had the excuse of being in the desert with no WiFi and their leader missing for forty days.
What’s our excuse?
Randy Scobey is the author of WHY: A Memoir and writes at randyscobey.com — where the opinions are strong, and the strict “don’t be an idiot” policy is in effect , the faith questions are real, and nobody is praying over any statues.
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