President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration address was perhaps even more powerful than the one he gave in 2017, highlighting right from the start: ‘The Golden Age of America begins right now.’ Indeed, he capped an unprecedented political comeback, eight years after his 2017 inaugural address when he painted a dystopian vision of ‘American carnage’ and four years after his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn his defeat.
In a certain manner, he paralleled to what President John F. Kennedy said in 1962 when, faced with the space challenges of the Soviet Union, that the U.S. should send a man to the moon and have him safely return home, by landing astronauts on Mars: ‘And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.’ Yet what was perhaps more fundamental in the statements President Trump made was not so much securing the southern U.S.–Mexican border or revitalizing the economy, but an appeal to reconstruct what Alexis de Tocqueville famously referred to as the ‘American experiment’.
De Tocqueville noted the American tendency to form associations for various purposes, from commercial endeavors to moral causes, which he saw as the foundation of American democracy. In his day, he observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone’, and that ‘[o]nly if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function’. Yet such moral consensus has to be based on a morality that is not just going to challenge humankind but one that would not be indifferent to the moral demands of society.
For the last four years the U.S.-led Western society has been tainted by the LGTBQ+ policies to the point of redefining the institution the family, which can only be exclusively founded upon a marriage between man and woman—our American Founding Fathers would have been in ultimate shock to think that our body politic would pursue the contrary. It was, thus, reassuring to hear the president say: ‘As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.’ And it is about time this is clearly defined!
Naturally, this is going to be a challenge in itself, for it is not so much the executive orders, legislation, and judicial sentences that have favored, if not imposed the LGTBQ+ agenda, the leftwing protagonists have indoctrinated our youth with it. This is why, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has done in his country, we need to promote the concept of the family.
‘As Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has done in his country, we need to promote the concept of the family’
Missing from Trump’s speech was the defense of the unborn. And of course, sustaining that life begins at conception, the child in the mother’s womb must have his/her constitutional rights acknowledged—the infant is not a simple piece of tissue in a woman’s body that can be removed at will!
Of course there are also certain stipulations that make one wonder, such as changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Many question the legitimacy of this, if not ridicule it. However, just like reclaiming the Panama Canal that President Jimmy Carter handed over to Panama in 1977, Trump’s assertion that the U.S. will take it back is a reflection of the Manifest Destiny—a nationalist concept 19th century concept of American expansionism.
Just like when President Richard Nixon took office in 1968, Americans were deeply divided over the war in Vietnam and civil rights. The divisions in the U.S. have gotten even worse these past couple of decades. It is essential, as President Trump said, that ‘we…not forget our God’, for that has been the reason of American decline.
The Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his public opposition to the National Socialists in the 1930s and 40s, had his moral convictions tested when he saw the silence of his ecclesiastical community during the rise and rule of Adolf Hitler. In his epic The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Bonhoeffer called for a true acceptance of God’s ordinances when spoke of the dichotomy between ‘cheap grace’ and ‘costly grace’. The former ‘is the grace we bestow on ourselves…grace without discipleship….Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again…It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.’
‘The golden age Trump spoke of can only occur if we see that we are the ones who can make America great again’
His outspokenness was not just limited to the Nazi regime, but against his own Lutheran clergymen who had gone along with Hitler’s politics, specifically those under the leadership of Ludwig Müller. As a leading member of the pro-Nazi German Christians, Müller encouraged many Protestants to combine Christianity and National Socialism into a movement ‘that would exclude all those deemed impure and embrace all ‘true Germans’ in a spiritual homeland for the Third Reich’.[1]
Bonhoeffer put his life at risk as he tried to save Jews from genocide, simultaneously being drawn into the epicenter of a failed plot to assassinate Hitler, which brought about his death by hanging.
The golden age Trump spoke of can only occur if we courageously stand up for our beliefs, pray more faithfully, and see that we are the ones who can make America great again. Let us pray that President Trump and all elected officials heed to the will of God the Father for the common good of society.
[1] Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1996, 4.
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