This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm
Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible. I’m glad that I’m able to do this episode, because there have been times in the last several weeks when I have been unsure as to whether I would be able to physically continue to write or play music in any capacity. Those of you on the Discord channel or who follow my notices on Patreon have likely noticed my announcement that I injured my hand and that that would interfere with the continued production of the show, requiring a hiatus. I’m not going to get too into the details because I don’t want this show to become Todd’s confessional, but the narrative that I’ve been telling myself by way of explaining how this happened was that I pushed myself hard through 2020 by way of trying to stay sane through the pandemic and by way of helping my audience do the same, and at the end of it I collapsed, in a manner of speaking, and hurt myself on the way down. My right hand is broken—not as badly as I had feared at first, but now about three weeks past the incident, it remains painful to type. It’s getting better, and the improvement is faster than I had anticipated, so at this point I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to return to full production mode soon. That said, I want to make sure it heals properly and that I’m both physically and mentally recovered before I really get back to work, and I don’t yet have a concrete time frame for that. I think and hope that I’ll get back to my normal release schedule in February, but I may wait until March. I may do as I’m doing now and release a few one-off episodes here and there until I’m back on my feet. I’ve gotten many messages of support from my patrons and others, both encouraging my healing and reminding me that they’ll be there whenever it is that I’m able to get back to work, and I can’t express how much that means to me. I’m immensely grateful to have such a supportive audience and I’m going to take the time that I need to heal so that I can get back to bringing you great content.
I’m also excited about this episode because it’s very old school Satanist Reads the Bible. If you enjoyed the earlier episodes where it really was mostly readings from and analysis of the Bible, I think you’re going to enjoy this one, because that’s what’s I’ll be doing.
This already very difficult period in my own life also saw the events of January 6th, an insurrection and attempted coup against the United States government by those inimical to the foundations of liberal democracy. I, along with several people whom I’ve spoken with about the events, felt much the same way that we did observing the attacks of September 11th. In some ways, I feel worse about it, because it was an attack from within. For all the problems of the United States of America, I still identify as an American, understand myself as an American, and take some measure of pride in that. In the weeks that have passed since January 6th my capacity for national pride has been stifled and smothered.
As with my stances on many things, my interpretation of January 6th hinges on its hypocrisy. Those who flew the Confederate battle flag in the Capitol on that day, for the first time in the nation’s history, who removed American flags and replaced them with those of Donald Trump, were likely the same ones who took the position that even kneeling to the American flag during the National Anthem was too disrespectful to do even in protest of widespread state oppression and violence. In general, during the insurrection, the symbols of the nation of the United States of America were shown a pervasive disrespect by those very people who claimed to hold those symbols as paramount, and as well, it was the intention of the insurrectionist mob to disrupt one of the basic functions of American democratic government: the peaceful transition of power.
Donald Trump is no longer the President of the United States, but neither Trump nor his following nor the discourse he’s created disappeared on January 20th. I think I’m as angry about what happened as I have been about anything, to the point that it’s been hard to even think about anything else, and as much as I’d like to head out to the streets with a bat and hunt down redcaps, I think I do the best for myself by doing what I’ve always done and analyze the ideas, especially as they relate to religion. There is indeed a clear religious component to Trump’s presidency and following; I looked at this before in the piece “Political Propaganda in America” (Bilsborough, 2020), which analyzed the propaganda video created by Donald Trump on June 1st and its religious symbolism in particular. Evangelical Christians remain the core of Trump’s base, and it’s not only a case of shared political goals; rather, Trump’s Christian following is itself religious in nature. In the aforementioned propaganda video, Trump implicitly connects his presidency to the Christian religion. During the January 6th insurrection, the insurrectionists erected a cross and prayed to it, and the insurrection itself was connected to prophetic claims made by televangelists and other Christian leaders (Boorstein, 2021). For example, on January 4th, the televangelist and conservative religious advisor Pat Robertson spoke on his television show The 700 Club, stating:
As we start this program today, I have a word, I believe, from the Lord. You can judge it when it’s over; you can say you’re either right or wrong, but I want to lay it out right now. The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is not official until the electors are certified by the congress. Now, that takes place on Wednesday, and that’s the 6th, that’s the most important day. Now, the word I believe I have is that so many people have been praying and there’s so much that has been irregular about this election… outright fraud but also just irregularities, not in accordance with the Constitution, and I have been praying and I’m sure you have been praying because in my heart, I felt that Donald Trump won the election and it’s been stolen away. But what’s going to happen, I believe, and you can judge it now, you can see what happens a couple days from now, I believe something dramatic is going to happen before the congress votes on those electors, something very dramatic that’s going to change the outcome of that vote, so, mark it down…. Something dramatic, the holy spirit of God is going to enter in to this situation and it’s going to be something very dramatic, so keep an eye on that, okay?
2021
To be clear, what Robertson actually says is “…there’s been so much that has been irregular about this election, not…” and here he seems to pause and reconsider and then continues, “outright fraud.” My interpretation is that he was about to say “not in accordance with the Constitution” but then reconsidered and claimed that “outright fraud” had indeed occurred and then said the thing about accordance with the constitution a few words later. This seems to be supported by his subsequent use of the conjuctive phrase “but also,” but just by way of being transparent about my citations, he did say the word “not” immediately before “outright fraud.” Regardless, he was explicitly perpetrating the falsehood that the election had been rigged against Donald Trump and we see a clear link between Trump’s presidency and following and the Christian religion, a link that has been established both by Trump’s followers and by Trump himself.
In an article on the religious nature of the insurrection in the Washington Post, religion reporter Michelle Boorstein writes, “The high-octane, emotional fight for Trump makes sense for these believers, who take the stories of Christian scripture literally and see daily life as a visceral struggle between God and the devil” (2020). This is hardly a new development. In her book The Origin of Satan (1995), religious historian Elaine Pagels describes how, in the early days of Christianity, this same framework was integral to the establishment of one particular interpretation of Christianity over the many others extant at the time. The Gospels are rife with language that casts worldly political struggles in terms of a clash between cosmic forces of good and evil. It’s a reductionist oversimplification of the moral complexity of the universe that not only makes those complexities more comprehensible but also allows people to feel that their lives are important and meaningful on the grandest of scales and that they are on the side of absolute good.
My opposition to religion being used in this way is itself religious. In The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels quotes literary scholar Neil Forsyth saying of Satan that “If the path is bad, an obstruction is good” (Pagels, 1995, p. 40). I am an adversary to the insurrectionists not only in a political and moral sense but also in a religious sense. The novelist Haruki Murakami, after interviewing adherents of the violent Japanese religious group Aum Shinrikyo—who, much as the insurrectionists, exhibited a tendency towards oversimplification—said that reality is created out of confusion and contradiction. “…[I]f you exclude those elements,” he writes, “you’re no longer talking about reality” (2001, p. 363). Seeking to emulate Socrates, who described himself as a gadfly, I desire for people to continually reexamine their beliefs and consider that things are always more complex than they seem.
And on that note, how is it that evangelical Christians, who have long advocated for America to more fully endorse their strict and bigoted interpretation of Christian morality, simultaneously endorsed someone who is so clearly morally destitute by their standards, or by any standard? A capacity for cognitive dissonance among evangelical Trump-followers offers a partial explanation, but much of the weight falls on what I’ve seen called the “King David defense,” which reject moral failings as being necessarily contrary to God using someone for Their plans for the world, as David, the Biblical 10th century BCE king of the united nations of Israel and Judah, was likewise a flawed person who was key in the execution of God’s plans for the world.
The life of King David—who is believed by scholars to have probably been a real, historical figure—is described in the Biblical Books of Samuel, with further details given in the Books of Chronicles. He is also believed to be the author of many of the Psalms in the Biblical Book of Psalms, although the Hebrew attributions here are ambiguous: the words we typically translate as “A Psalm of David” might also be translated “…to David” or “…for David.”
The narrative of how David came to be king begins in 1 Samuel 15. The monarch whom David succeeded was Saul, whom God commanded (via the prophet Samuel) to slaughter an opposing tribe, the Amalekites. Samuel’s report of God’s instructions to Saul on this matter were: “‘…[G]o and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey’” (1 Samuel 15:3). Saul proceeds to destroy the Amalekites but spares their king Agag as well as “the best of the sheep and of the cattle and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was valuable” (1 Samuel 15:9). With Saul having failed to follow God’s commands, Samuel informs him that God has rejected him as king of Israel. God sends evil spirits to torment Saul and his servents employ a shepard, David, to play the lyre—a kind of small harp—in order to sooth him.
In one of the more famous stories of the Bible, David defeats the gigantic champion of the rival army of the Philistines by hitting him in the head with a rock from a sling. David becomes the leader of Saul’s armies and a very popular figure among the people of Israel, and also develops a relationship with Saul’s son Jonathan. This relationship is often described as a particularly strong friendship, but I’ll read a few passages for you and let you judge for yourself. The first is their first meeting after David slays Goliath:
When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul…. Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.
1 Samuel 18:1-5
Saul becomes bitter and inimical towards David, in part because of David’s growing popularity, but it also seems that David’s relationship with Jonathan was a thorn in Saul’s side, as we can see in this passage when Saul and Jonathan are together at dinner:
Then Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan. He said to him, “You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness?”
1 Samuel 20:30
And after the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, after which David ascends to kinghood, David offers this lament for Jonathan:
How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan lies slain upon your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
2 Samuel 1:25-26
Regardless of whatever homoerotic overtones are present in the narrative, linking oneself or another figure to King David has been a means of legitimation throughout history. The prophet Isaiah wrote that
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse [father of King David] and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
11:1-3, NRSV
And in the writings of the prophet Jeremiah we find
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
23:5-6
The gospels of Matthew and Luke both link the ancestry of Jesus to King David, but these verses can be more broadly interpreted as associating certain qualities (wisdom, understanding, might, knowledge, righteousness) as being associated with King David and his line, and thus tying oneself in some way to King David can serve to bolster one’s image among Christians. In the world of United States military propaganda—and I’ll note to new listeners that I am a former U.S. military propagandist and propaganda analyst—this is referred to as the use of authority. One can increase one’s credibility in the eyes of one’s target audience by associating with someone or something that that audience already believes to be authoritative. This is something that Trump and his propaganda team certainly know how to do; the entire point of the June 1st White House propaganda video was to align Trump with the authority of the Christian God. I’m not aware of Trump having actively supported the King David defense himself, but it has been offered by, among many others, political pundit Sean Hannity, a known ally of and mouthpiece for Donald Trump (Coaston, 2018).
Starting at 2 Samuel 11 we find one of the stories for which King David is most known. During a war against the Ammonites, David remained in Jerusalem, which in itself would have been unheard of at the time: a king’s place was at the front with his army. While walking on the roof of his palace, he observed a woman bathing. He asked his servants to determine the woman’s identity, and they reported to him that she was named Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, who was away from Jerusalem fighting the Ammonites. David sent for Bathsheba. In typical fashion, the Bible fails to mention whether Bathsheba consented to their subsequent sexual relations, but in any case it’s doubtful that she was in any position to refuse and she subsequently became pregnant.
Now facing a potential scandal, David summons Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to Jerusalem, ostensibly to get a report on how the war is going. David hopes that, while Uriah is in Jerusalem, Uriah will sleep with Bathsheba—and David effectively orders him to do so—and then the child could be believed to be Uriah’s. Uriah does not so much as return to his own house; he’s not happy being in Jerusalem while the rest of the army is fighting the Ammonites. And so David sends a message to Joab, who is commanding the army, instructing him to place Uriah at the forefront of the next battle and then “draw back from him so that he may be struck down and die” (2 Samuel 11:15). This plan results in several of David’s soldiers being killed, Uriah among them. David then takes Bathsheba as his wife.
God is at this point greatly displeased with David and sends the prophet Nathan to rebuke him and promise him all manner of calamities, including the death of David and Bathsheba’s son. This is yet another Biblical example of God punishing the innocent for the transgressions of others. In any case, David repents of his transgressions and authors (it is believed) Psalm 51 by way of asking God for forgiveness. This is marks the most significant break between King David and Donald Trump: David was at least able to recognize when he had gone wrong, which is something that Trump has never done, even under the threat of punishment. Additionally, we find that David is, very much unlike Trump, literate, intelligible, and even, at times, quite eloquent.
But while there are some distinctions between Donald Trump and King David, I also think that the comparison is not entirely unwarranted. Both, for example, are feckless, cowardly womanizers. If we take the Psalms of David as actually having been authored by David, then he, like Donald Trump, appears to be someone with a persecution complex as well. But for however much such comparisons might be valid, I do not consider them to constitute a defense of Donald Trump’s actions or of his presidency. King David’s actions have been, much as Trump’s, historically justified in ways that I find to be completely untenable. For example, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia,
Some Talmudic authorities even assert that David did not commit adultery, for at that time all women obtained letters of divorce from their husbands who went to war, to use in case the latter should die on the field. Similarly David must not be blamed for Uriah’s death, since the latter had committed a capital offense in refusing to obey the king’s command.
DAVID – JewishEncyclopedia.Com, n.d.
Much as has often happened over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, this seems to be an attempt to excuse and lionize someone who is entirely undeserving. That David was used for God’s purposes is certainly arguable—I recognize that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will accept this, but I do not think it follows that deeply flawed and problematic leaders should be accepted by us. There are some significant theological problems here: first, no one can claim to know the mind of God. If God exists and can rightly be called such, then They are infinite, and as finite beings, we humans are unable to mentally encompass such a being or such a mind, and thus we cannot be certain of who is fulfilling God’s plans unless we can only act according to God’s plans and thus have no free will, which is itself disputed by Abrahamic doctrine. Second, if God is indeed a being of infinite capability, then They can use a morally upright person for Their plans just as much as a morally destitute one. These being the case, it seems unwise to tolerate deplorable leaders on the assumption that that’s whom God had chosen.
In terms of the Bible’s being a sacred text for me personally, I approach it as being a history of the human relationship to the divine among a particular people with whom I share a cultural heritage. It documents some of our greatest achievements in that regard, as well as some of our lowest failings. I think of King David in the same light, and indeed think that, in King David, the Bible is presenting an excellent example of how religion can go wrong, especially in the case of political leadership. Looking at the Psalms, David’s relationship to his God seems to be largely petitionary in nature: God is someone upon whom David can call in order to achieve his own goals. The Psalms of David largely alternate between obsequious supplication and calls for God to destroy the author’s enemies. Consider, for example, Psalm 13:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
And have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
And my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
My foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
But I trusted in your steadfast love;
My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
Because he has dealt bountifully with me.
Again, we don’t know that the Psalms of David were actually written by King David, but that is how they are taken by many Christians.
As has always been one of the core goals of this project, my intention is to demonstrate that certain interpretations of Christianity are wrong not only in general but even in their own terms. I believe that that is exactly the case here: comparisons between Trump and King David are, at best, limited in scope and application, and in any case should not be taken as excusing Trump’s character or behavior or his actions as or election to the position of President of the United States. I’d even go so far as to say that, if one can make a broad comparison between King David and a potential elected official, then that official should probably not be put in any position of leadership.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works cited or referenced
Bilsborough, T. (2020, June 13). Political Propaganda in America. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/political-propaganda-in-america/
Boorstein, M. (2021, January 14). For some Christians, the Capitol riot doesn’t change the prophecy: Trump will be president. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/01/14/prophets-apostles-christian-prophesy-trump-won-biden-capitol/
Coaston, J. (2018, March 26). The “biblical” defense of Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/26/17164268/stormy-daniels-donald-trump-bible-christian
DAVID – JewishEncyclopedia.com. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2021, from http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4922-david
Murakami, H. (2001). Underground (A. Birnbaum & P. Gabriel, Trans.; 1st Vintage international ed). Vintage International.
Pagels, E. H. (1995). The origin of Satan (1st ed). Random House.
The 700 Club. (2021, January 4). The 700 Club—January 4, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11aezfHUsmA&ab_channel=The700Club