We were introduced to Melania Trump last night – interesting
potential first lady. She would be a
first in many ways. She would be the
first first lady who has posed nude in a national magazine. It doesn’t make her a bad person; maybe it’s
time for such a first. Her introduction
was a bit rocky. In her speech to the
convention, as you probably know by now, she is being accused of plagiarizing from
the current first lady, Michelle Obama’s introductory speech to the 2008
Democratic National Convention. That’s a
first. Another first is that she would
be the first foreign born first lady since Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy
Adams, the sixth president of the US; perhaps this is a needed first. When I think of Melania Trump, I don’t think
first of her speech last night, but of how she is seen in the eyes of the
Republican party’s base or part of that base, the religious right. Why?
Because of what she represents – the urban, secular, sexually liberal
view of life. Whether she, in her
personal views and dispositions is really that way is a question worth asking,
given how first ladies represent all of us.
Perhaps some of us welcome such a symbolic image of us all, but I am
sure this would not be, for many, the first symbol they would choose. Oh, by the way, a first she is not is Mr.
Trump’s first wife.
But there it is. Let
us review a bit of context to this by making a comment or two about religious
rhetoric in our political discourse. In
a recent book, Christopher B. Chapp[1]
identifies three forms of religious rhetoric:
civil religion, rhetoric emanating from particular religious groups
(such as Roman Catholic rhetoric), and civil religious war rhetoric. The first, expounded upon by Robert N.
Bellah, basically refers to the general allusion to religious beliefs that
public speakers use, as in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address – “For I have
sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed
nearly a century and three quarters ago.”[2] This, according to Bellah, is more than mere
rhetorical shorthand; it represents an integral moral substance in how
Americans generally see the role of religion within the political
environment. How distinguishable and
coherent that sense is varies from time to time. As for rhetoric emanating from a particular
religion, this will capture the national attention only when a policy affects a
particular religious group or a scandal arises within that group, as with the child
abuse by priests scandal that befell the Catholic Church. The last type, civil war rhetoric, usually
concerns the evangelical or fundamentalist groups. Oftentimes, this type of rhetoric is taken to
be an attempt at expanding the numbers of believers, but according to Chapp,
most of this rhetoric is dedicated as warnings:
God will seek retribution if we don’t live moral lives (morality defined
by these groups’ views of morality). So,
for example, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s was seen by many in the group as
God’s wrath for same sex activities. It
is this last sort of rhetoric that pertains to Melania Trump’s background.
If you are instrumental in electing a man who is married to a
woman who posed nude for a national magazine, are you inviting further
degradation (in the form of legitimizing such a display of salacious material
and imagery) and in turn, inviting the Almighty to cast some form of punishment
for such an endorsement? This,
logically, would be a question that would occur to individuals who consider
themselves evangelicals and/or fundamentalists.
Interestingly, while many of these Republicans did not vote for Trump, I
don’t hear this kind of rhetoric from that camp. But what I am seeing is a clinging effort
from those people to fight till the end, if only symbolically, the nomination
of Mr. Trump. I believe that in their
minds, this, at a fundamental level, is what is at stake.
No comments:
Post a Comment