The first pagan president

The First “Pagan” President?

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“Why leadership demands a pagan ethos.” That is the provocative subtitle of Robert Kaplan’s book Warrior Politics. Kaplan’s basic thesis: Pre-Christian pagan writings (Thucydides, Cicero, Sallust, Livy and others) provide 21st century leaders with a set of public virtues that provide a superior moral framework for a rapidly changing, fracturing world.  

I can imagine the controversial nature of such a claim made in a dominantly Christian 2002 America, but this is 2018. Thinkers and researchers have taken to describing America as “post-Christian.” Even with the emergence of such a term and the almost faddish rediscovery of Stoicism by my fellow millennials (try Googling “millennials” and “stoicism”), I had not given Kaplan’s book much thought since reading it over a decade ago.

But then, I read President Trump’s National Security Strategy.

Now, an even more provocative question emerges for me:

“In a post-Christian America, is Trump’s rhetoric and policy focus in his informal tweets and formal documents emblematic of such a pagan ethos?”  

I think it is and I believe Kaplan’s 2002 book may provide an interesting framework for understanding the Trump presidency in our current cultural context.

What does ‘pagan’ mean?

Let me be very, very VERY clear: By “pagan,” I don’t mean anything religious, nor do I imply that there’s a studied intentionality behind Trump’s use of such a typology given his apparent lack of reading. I repeat what I said above, Trump is emblematic of this ethos. What I am suggesting is that Trump’s election indicates an acceptance or emotional tuning on the part of many Americans to the values of the pagan typology Kaplan outlines.   

I also don’t mean that this pagan ethos is oppositional to Judeo-Christian morality.  Kaplan himself notes this, using the term merely as a comparative term between different schools of ancient thought. In fact, Kaplan suggests there’s a fair amount of crossover between Judeo-Christian thought and pre-Christian pagan thought with one key difference:

…pagan virtue is public virtue, whereas Judeo-Christian virtue is more often private virtue.

Additionally, let me be clear that my use of Kaplan here should not imply a total agreement with Kaplan’s argument. Kaplan’s thesis in Warrior Politics is not always clear and he creates several false dichotomies in stretching to separate pagan and Christian thought, which the above quote illustrates very well. The goal here is not to validate Kaplan, but to consider the outcome of his influence on the Trump foreign policy.

So what are these pagan, public virtues that Kaplan argues are central to American foreign policy?  Drawn mainly from pre-Christian Greco-Roman and early modern philosophers and historians, Kaplan enumerates the following:

  • self-interest
  • national pride and patriotism
  • family
  • stability
  • and (surprisingly) deceit – in service of peace

Kaplan’s basic argument is that embracing such civic, yea undemocratic, virtues provides a grounded sense of purpose in the ever-changing 21st century. Religions generally do this, but Kaplan is specifically arguing for this set of thought as the better model for state leaders on the world stage:

[T]o deposit judiciously [America’s] democratic seeds in a wider world that is closer and more dangerous than ever before, it [America] will be compelled to apply ideals that while not necessarily democratic, are worthy nonetheless.  The more respect we have for truths of the past, the more certain our journey away from it.

Trump the pagan?

Most known for his informal statements on Twitter, Trump’s value statements are easily interpreted in the Kaplan framework:

Patriotism and national pride (note, too, the almost Roman connection between farmers and the health of the nation):

Patriotism again, this is a big part of Trump’s appeal to his base:

Self-interest and deception. Note the news flash tone with an expression of doubt.  The implication is pretty clear: North-South Korean dialog is unlikely to address American concerns, but we won’t say what our alternative approach is:

Threats in the interest of self-interest, patriotism and force:

A mashup of family, civil service and patriotism from the 2016 campaign trail:

Arguably, this is one person’s interpretation of another individual’s personal opinions and words – that one should not attach too much importance to them. I would agree, we shouldn’t take Trump’s tweets overly seriously (there’s more than enough of that going on at the expense of our ability to hold sustained civil conversations). So let’s agree to note that the tweets are merely illustrative examples of the rhetoric of pagan civic virtues.

More importantly, these virtues appear in the formal foreign policy document of the Trump administration. The National Security Strategy (NSS) specifically outlines a philosophical framework of ‘principled realism’ that closely parallels the realist thought of Kaplan:

[The NSS] is a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology.  It is based upon the view that peace, security, and prosperity depend on strong, sovereign nations that respect their citizens at home and cooperate to advance peace abroad.

We are proud of our roots and honor the wisdom of the past.

The NSS is further broken into four “pillars”:

Protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life

Promote American prosperity

Preserve peace through strength

Advance American influence

These pillars closely parallel the pagan virtues Kaplan outlines: national pride and strength, the good of the national community, a focus on security and stability.

More significantly than Trump’s informal tweets, the NSS is a policy-level document that frames the administration’s foreign policy worldview in terms of the pagan ethic that Kaplan sees as being so amenable with realism.  

But how did this pagan ethos of Kaplan’s come to gain such wide appeal in what most people still view as a Christian country?  

The pagan appeal

In a December 2013 address, National Review managing editor, John O’Sullivan defined America as a “Post-Christian” country:

A post-Christian society is not merely a society in which agnosticism or atheism is the prevailing fundamental belief. It is a society rooted in the history, culture, and practices of Christianity but in which the religious beliefs of Christianity have been either rejected or, worse, forgotten.

O’Sullivan goes on to note that a consequence of such a cultural posture is a crippling intellectual inability to understand, explain, or defend Christian morality. In short, a shallow cultural Christianity develops, leaving an ethical vacuum. This vacuum expands thanks to the related trends in biblical illiteracy and religious skepticism.

But that’s just the religious trends. Social and political trends prior to the 2016 Election were also creating vacuums.

The religious trends of skepticism and illiteracy of sacred texts also parallel two important social and political trends: The rise of independent voters and a social ethos of radical individualism.

Yuval Levin, in his book The Fractured Republic, pulls these trends together to paint a picture of an American culture ripe for change in the last half century:

[I]t was the collapse of the culture of solidarity that was perhaps most jarring.  The spirit of nonconformity that had emerged at the end of World War II, which had morphed in the 1960s into an idealistic quest for self-actualization, had degenerated by the 1970s into a jaded and strident individualism.  Rejection of authority had quickly become the reigning spirit of American culture.

In the final three decades of the twentieth century, Americans began to face the implications of these changes – which turned out to be a volatile mix of dynamism and disorder.

This mix of dynamism and disorder could not be better illustrated than in the sea change of voter behavior that elected Donald Trump and initiated a far-reaching conversation on America’s global position.  Walter Russell Mead notes in an essay for Foreign Affairs:

[N]ot since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration has U.S. foreign policy witnessed debates this fundamental.

What about the evangelicals?

Much is made of the support among evangelical voters, particularly white evangelicals, for Trump. In particular is the incredulity at how people who are apparently very religious could vote for someone who doesn’t seem to share their core ethical framework. However, this perspective only works if you assume that evangelical is synonymous with orthodoxy. Not only is this assumption false, it also fails to recognize the influence of other ethical frameworks like Kaplan’s civic pagan perspective.

That being said, evangelicals across America are largely biblically illiterate (along with the general population), which should make us reconsider what motivated this demographic to turn out for Trump. Instead of assuming a motivation of biblical orthodoxy, we should consider that many evangelicals understood they weren’t voting for a religious brother in the faith. Perhaps evangelicals saw Trump as something of a fellow traveller given the areas of overlap between the pagan and Christian ethics Kaplan addresses.

The bigger point, however, is that Trump’s message struck at core human values: belonging, purpose, being . His “Make America Great Again” motto encapsulates both his message and his appeal to those values and provides an implied metanarrative by which his audience can understand their place in American society and the world.  

For professing evangelical Christians, this is a role the Bible should fill, but it generally doesn’t, leaving room for other metanarratives to shape one’s understanding of the world. While modern issues like race may be a part of those alternative narratives, they seem to be too narrowly defined to fully explain the almost religious fervor that’s been attached with Trump’s base.

And, lest we think such an appeal merely reached Trump supporters, Bernie Sanders’ appeal was largely from a similar standpoint, though more optimistic in tone. Trump’s message dealt with the reality of human nature in a way Kaplan would have approved of:

Whatever we may think or profess, human behavior is guided by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos), and honor (doxa).  These aspects of human nature cause war and instability, accounting for anthropinon, the “human condition.

“If Trump’s a pagan, then what am I?”

Christians need to recognize that the Trump ethos is fundamentally not Christian, which means there needs to be a more critical stance adopted towards his administration – adopting what Mansfield calls “prophetic distance”. However, I should caution against swinging to the opposite extreme of joining your local #Resist chapter, or otherwise trafficking in some of the anti-Trump speech and action that also finds its roots in pagan or atheistic philosophies. “Critical” should not mean “hostile” or “antagonistic.” It should mean “circumspect” and that is a needed perspective in Christian political thought in America.  

Prophetic distance applies to both Trump and his opposition (see this great example).  This doesn’t mean that Christians ought to withdraw from political activity. In fact, we have more to do than ever in terms of being agents of peace.

This ascendant pagan ethos requires Christians to re-engage the virtue conversation especially where it intersects with politics. The value of Kaplan’s work lies in the recognition that there has historically been a rich pagan-Christian exchange on the virtue-politics nexus that has provided us with excellent models of citizenship and a common political language even as it allows a lot of room for disagreement.

Ultimately, what cannot be ignored is that Trump’s messages have found fertile ground, both for support and resistance, in a pseudo-religious culture that is looking for a new gospel. The question is, does it really need a new one?

Image by Gage Skidmore via Creative Commons 2.0

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