Wow. Last week’s combo of the National Prayer Breakfast on the heels of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and acquittal — along with the Sen. Mitt Romney rebellion — filled the news with so much religious content that one would have thought the event was a papal conclave.
But no. This was Washington, DC.
The timing could not have been better. The prayer breakfast, always the first Thursday each February, brings some 3,000 guests to town, creating the perfect audience for the political theater that is our nation’s capital these days. And the major players did their best to ramp up the drama.
The opening act was Romney voting last Wednesday to remove Trump from power; the lone Republican to do so. As the Washington Post noted, retribution was quick.
Mitt Romney no longer has to guess about what “unimaginable” consequences are in store for him after the Utah senator voted to convict President Trump of abuse of power: A Utah legislator has moved to censure him; Donald Trump Jr. has called for Romney to be expelled from the Republican Party; and the National Prayer Breakfast (and later White House speech) turned into a Romney rage-fest, as the president insulted both the senator’s ethics and his faith.
Romney grew emotional on the Senate floor on Wednesday, when he explained that whatever waited for him in terms of political retribution for his vote would pale in comparison to what he would lose by violating “an oath to God.”
The cascade of articles about Romney’s faith that followed was a religion writer’s dream — although most were commentary, as opposed to news coverage (see our own tmatt’s post on that topic). It is something that Romney, whose Mormon beliefs have been criticized for being sub-Christian, is coming out as the most Christ-like among our politicians.
The Deseret News ran a column by a Brigham Young University professor that set the debate in more of a Mormon context wavered on whether Romney should have voted as he did. Writing for the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University said Romney’s speech will go down in history as one of the great speeches in American politics. Notice how the article segues into a faith Hall of Fame.
Americans, of course, don’t have a monopoly on the lonely figure of faith who sticks to his or her principles no matter what the personal cost: Other peoples have their Wilberforce, their Zola, their Bonhoeffer, or for that matter their Socrates or Cicero. A distinguishing feature of real civilization is that it produces such people, and admires them. But from Anne Hutchison and Roger Williams refusing to yield to the zealots of Puritan Boston to Romney standing on the Senate floor, these have been figures that Americans more than most have admired, even if in many cases they have taken some time to do so.
On the other side of the aisle, The Daily Mail had a riposte from Sen. Lindsey Graham that set an imaginary scene in heaven.
In a dig at Senator Mitt Romney, who on Wednesday was the only Republican to go against his party to vote Trump guilty, Graham said he ‘used the common sense that God gave me to understand this is a bunch of BS.’
Before Romney cast his fateful vote, making him an instant pariah in the Republican party, he gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor that it was his faith – Romney is a devout Mormon – that led him to that decision.
In response, Graham called in to the Brian Kilmeade Show on Fox and said: ‘When I go to meet God at the pearly gates, I don’t think he’s going to ask me, ”Why didn’t you convict Trump?”’
Gotta move on to the prayer breakfast, which was one bizarre event. CBN has a transcript of Trump’s remarks here. We’ll let Politico set the stage.
President Donald Trump immediately attacked his political rivals at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, just hours after his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial — charging that they had inappropriately invoked “their faith as justification” for calls to remove him from office.
The dig appeared to be directed at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who have both referenced religion as they explained why they believed Trump needed to be impeached, though the president did not specifically mention the lawmakers by name.
I’ve covered this event and it’s a bear: You have to be at the White House at some insanely early hour in the morning to be included in the press pool, as the breakfast kicks off around 7 a.m. The media pros don’t get to eat, of course; they sit there until the president speaks.
“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” Trump added. “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you’ when they know that that’s not so. So many people have been hurt, and we can’t let that go on. And I’ll be discussing that a little bit later at the White House.”
The president’s incendiary remarks, lobbed during the traditionally bipartisan annual event in Washington, echo a broadside he leveled in December against Pelosi, a devout Catholic, after the speaker insisted during a heated exchange with a reporter that she does not hate Trump and prays “all the time” for him.
I’ve included in this blog Dan Burke’s Tweet about the bizarre nature of this year’s prayer breakfast. Make sure to read the responses.
I’ve been Washington a long time and covered a lot of National Prayer Breakfasts, and I have never seen anything like this morning https://t.co/fpmjEw6fA0
— Daniel Burke (@BurkeCNN) February 6, 2020
We then got the spectacle afterwards of Pelosi defending her prayer life.
Pelosi struck back at the president during a news conference in the Capitol, telling reporters Thursday morning that she found his statements to be “so completely inappropriate” and chiding Trump for “talking about things that he knows little about: Faith and prayer.”
“He really needs our prayers,” she said. “So he can say whatever he wants. He can say whatever he wants. But I do pray for him, and I do so sincerely and without anguish.”
Folks, this is so rich. We don’t often get people debating their religious commitment during news conferences at the Capitol.
In the hours and days that followed, there was an explosion of commentary, starting with evangelical syndicated columnist (and former Moral Majority vice president) Cal Thomas suggesting it’s time to suspend holding the prayer breakfast. Thomas organizes a media dinner (which I’ve attended several times) the night before the breakfast, so he definitely has a stake in the event. He wrote in the Washington Post:
For 68 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a respite from politics, a chance for Republicans, Democrats, national and world leaders to assemble and pray for each other and the nation.
Not this year.
One could tell where things were headed Thursday when President Trump arrived later than most other presidents and immediately held up two newspapers with headlines including “acquitted.”
Other conservatives of various brands joined the outrage including Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, also in the Post calling Trump’s appearance “a strange moment in U.S. religious history” and saying evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Jr, Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress and Eric Metaxas have lost all credibility by defending such a sociopath.
First, the president again displayed a remarkable ability to corrupt, distort and discredit every institution he touches. The prayer breakfast was intended to foster personal connections across party differences. Trump turned it into a performative platform to express his rage and pride — the negation of a Christian ethic. Democrats have every right and reason to avoid this politicized event next year. And religious people of every background should no longer give credence to this parody of a prayer meeting.
So it’s open war between evangelicals at this point with many of them furious over how this president ruined their most cherished display of civic religion. This is where the story is going and where reporters need to go this week.
Oh, and throughout the day, it got better when Donald Trump Jr, on Twitter, said the following about the Bible.
Who’s going to tell him?🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/mnkM4lfcxP
— Shane Claiborne (@ShaneClaiborne) February 6, 2020
The whole Trump clan needs some basic Bible knowledge. Read Matthew 4, bro.
One face that was absent on prayer breakfast footage: the Rev. Paula White, Trump’s pastor. Does she remonstrate with Trump about his shoddy understanding of Christianity? When I interviewed her two years ago, she wouldn’t say what they talked about. With everyone screaming about Trump’s desecration of the prayer breakfast, what’s she saying, if anything?
This week, reporters didn’t have to try hard at all to include religion angles when the angles were screaming from the rafters.
Watch the resentment build among evangelicals — when you have got Cal Thomas mad at you, that says a lot — who may have formerly muted their criticism but now are completely fed up. Lots of stories have focused on evangelical dialogue with the outside world but the real story is the knife fight going on within. There hasn’t been a lot of coverage over that but we know the tensions are out there and they’re not hard to find.
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