This is interesting. Trump’s press secretary Sarah Sanders, who happens to be the daughter of a pastor, told Christian Broadcasting Network that “God wanted Donald Trump to become president.” We must begin by first not dismissing this claim outright. She is saying something with the seriousness of an open soul. Sanders believes God wants things. This also implies, He does not want other things. Ultimately this kind of theology sees God as imperfect. Her God is not immortal but animal.
To want something (Trump to be president), means before Trump was president, God experienced a lack. And here things really get very complicated. Sanders’s God has only things that He wants and doesn’t, and therefore, He is really not that different from a mango (which wants to be eaten), or at least its tree wants it to be eaten (trees certainly have wants) or a mosquito (which wants blood), but also, God has experiences. This means Sanders’s God moves through time in the exact same way that we do. In time, you experience a lack (I do not have a Trump in the White House). In time (and only in time—for an eternal thing to want something means it wants it eternally, it wants Trump forever); in time, this want is satisfied (I finally have a Trump in the White House). And God, according to Sanders, has a past that is known, because you cannot be satisfied if the past does not exist. How would you know you have been satisfied if you have no idea of what you wanted in the first place? Satisfaction needs a past and a future. That happens in time. There is no other way to explain her statement.
Sanders’s words:
“I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president, and that’s why he’s there and I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about.”
It’s as if Evangelicals have grown bored with passive-aggressively ignoring their God, and are now outright insulting Him.https://t.co/LbzbyVnyth
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) January 30, 2019
Now, some may say: Trump fucks porn stars and is a pussy grabber and so on. How can God want such a coarse person? But this kind of argument will get us nowhere. It’s easy to claim that God can see the purity of a pussy grabber’s soul. So, Trump the person of flesh and bone is not His concern (the soul is, or his place in some grand plan—and this is another aspect of Sanders’s theology that gets very complicated: the master plan of God), and also it’s not what defines and problematizes her fundamental theology, which, by necessity, requires, whether she knows this or not, an imperfect God. A God who is, of all places, inside of time. A God who is awake and may even lose sleep over the affairs of His supreme creation, the human.
If her God was perfect, then he would not want a single thing because He would be nothing but an everlasting satisfaction. A satisfaction with no beginning or end. And here we see where the problem is. A God that is completely satisfied would not really need humans and their dramas (for example, the presidential race of 2018). He would become an It and simply exist outside of time. How can the “people of faith,” as Sanders calls them, love something that is so monstrous? This cosmic It. An It that lasts forever is pretty much as good as no God at all. This a-temporal It is impersonal. The It that wants nothing has no need to listen to the prayers of “people of faith” because it may involve answering them, and once so involved, It becomes (God) entangled with human wants.
The God who can answer the prayers of “the people of faith” is the kind of God who might want things like Trump, and not want things like Obama. He has a beginning. He has a mission. He was disappointed when the Dems took the House in 2018. He was not expecting that. He huffs, He puffs, He blows the clouds about the skies.
