‘The Lord Almighty,’ divine intervention, and the misplaced role of religion in politics

Earlier this month, Joe Biden said the only thing that could make him step down from his reelection bid was divine intervention. “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.”

Last Sunday, Biden got out of the race. Did God tell him to do so?

I don’t know, and neither do you. But over on the GOP side, there’s little doubt about God’s wishes: He’s foursquare behind Donald Trump.

That’s been a big theme among Christian conservatives for the past several years. And at the recent Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker declared that God had intervened to protect Trump during the attempt on his life the previous Saturday.

Trump agreed. “I felt very safe because I had God on my side,” Trump told the convention, describing the attack.

The comment evoked Bob Dylan’s famous 1964 song, “With God on Our Side,” which captured the dangers of believing it. If you think God favors you over your enemies, you can justify anything.

You can lie about your net worth to banks and other lenders. You can sexually assault a woman, then defame her. You can have an affair with a porn star, then pay her to keep quiet about it.

You can lose a presidential election, then try to overturn it.

Trump committed all of these sins, as multiple judges and juries have confirmed. But he has also been anointed by God, according to many of his supporters. So they deny the facts or simply ignore them, which gives him a free pass. “[Y]a never ask questions,” Dylan wrote, “When God’s on your side.”

But how can you be sure that God isn’t on the other side? As Dylan warned us, you can’t:

Through many dark hour

I been thinking about this

That Jesus Christ

Was betrayed by a kiss

But I can’t think for ya

You’ll have to decide

Whether Judas Iscariot

Had God on his side

That stanza inspired the creators of the 1971 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar to tell the New Testament story from Judas’ point of view. We’re not God, so we can’t divine his purpose. Each of us — even Judas — has to make sense of him on our own.

That’s what the Puritans said when they came to New England in the early 1600s. They wanted to be saved by God, but they could not know his will. All they could do was try to cleanse their souls and pray — and pray and pray — that he would shine upon them.

It was hard to live with all of those unknowns. So the Puritans looked to success in this world as a sign of their fate in the world to come. As Max Weber explained, in his famous treatise on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, they sanctified hard work, determination, and industry. Those traits couldn’t gain you entry into heaven on their own, but they marked you as someone who was trying to get there.

But venerating hard work and determination — as virtues in their own right — can blind us to wrongs they perpetuate. The operator of a sweatshop can show as much grit — to borrow our present-day term — as someone who builds a safe workplace. A tyrant who slaughters millions can be just as gritty as a democratic leader who serves them.

Venerating hard work and determination — as virtues in their own right — can blind us to wrongs they perpetuate.

The distinction between autocrats and leaders chosen by the people went out the window at the RNC, too. When speakers weren’t claiming that Trump was chosen by God, they were praising his “fight” in the face of his foes. That term became a new GOP rallying cry when a bloodied Trump raised his fist and shouted it, following the assassination attempt against him. And it didn’t much matter what he was fighting for.

“What I think of when he says [’fight’] it’s just to continue on and push forward no matter what,” a delegate at the convention said. “Just keep pushing forward, and you fight on and hope for a better tomorrow.”

That’s what we’re all hoping for: a better tomorrow. But we’ll never get there if we imagine God wants our side to win, and the other one to lose.

I’m glad Biden got out of the race. I just hope we can leave the Lord Almighty out of it, too.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.