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By John Bachtell
On Monday, June 1, President Donald Trump stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., awkwardly clutching a Bible. Moments earlier, military police had forcibly cleared peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Park with pepper spray, flash and smoke grenades, truncheons, and rubber bullets.
Outraged religious leaders across denominations immediately condemned Trump for his photo op stunt. “Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence. We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us,” said Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who oversees the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
However, right-wing religious leaders were jubilant. They hailed both the crackdown on lawlessness and the imposition of “godly order on a disordered country,” coldly ignoring the systemic racism and police violence that underlay the most significant wave of protests in at least 50 years....
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