“Blasphemy” is not a phrase we are used to seeing in print these days even in magazines like this one. When it does appear, it is usually in a non-literal sense, meaning something like “insouciance.” But blasphemy is not a mere casual lack of concern for sacred things; it is their willful profanation.
If the image posted on Trump’s TruthSocial account on Sunday evening… is not blasphemous, the word has no meaning.
Walther’s rare hot takes always manage to be both cogent essays and barn-burners, but I’m going to push back, gently, and say that if one accepts his definition of blasphemy, then Trump is likely off the hook, because I see no evidence that the man has a concept of “sacred things” to be profaned. Nor do most Americans, so far as I can tell, for whom “church” and “Christianity” are lifestyle options of no more real consequence than musical tastes or sports fandom. Jesus is a brand with which Trump has identified himself, nothing more.
However.
Theologians have overplayed the idea that everybody “worships” the thing to which they devote their attention—Taylor Swift fans do not actually pray to her, nor hope for her blessing and protection. But the one idol Americans might be said truly to worship, in form and practice, is America itself: not the ideal form espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address but the image of national power that has taken shape since the Civil War and, especially, since World War II. The Pledge of Allegiance is nothing if not a prayer. The national anthem is nothing if not a hymn. (Hand on heart, gazing at the flag? And they say Protestants don’t do physical worship.) That is the real idol with which Trump wants to identify himself: the personification of American power, with doves and angels replaced by fighter planes and bombers. And I am very much afraid that American Christians have entirely paved the road he now treads. The blasphemy and the idolatry are not new, and not his: he’s only singing a song he heard on the radio. If you were shocked by his little AI gag, my friends, you simply have not been paying attention.