Heaven and Hell

 Yesterday, in an interview, Donald Trump was asked about his goals in ending the Ukraine war. His response was uncharacteristically self-critical and disarming (though quite characteristically weird and unexpected). He said that he was trying to end the conflict so that he could "get into heaven." 

This raises the interesting (to me, at least) question of what exactly is Trump's cosmology. He seemed to be gesturing somewhat facetiously to the kind of pop culture version of Christian mythology we all have in our heads from movies like It's a Wonderful Life. But does he literally believe in it? 

You won't actually find that version of "heaven" in the Bible or any catechism. Pauline eschatology is pretty clear that no one gets into the kingdom of heaven until the end of the world has come and there has been a resurrection of the flesh. Most Protestant creedal statements reflect this. 

There's also this issue of salvation by works—which Trump appears to believe in. Who knew he was a Pelagian all this time? Most of the denominations, though, will tell you this is a heresy—salvation depends on faith or membership in the community of believers, not ending wars. 

But I think most of us would not inquire into this because we assume he is kidding. We assume he is making a tongue-in-cheek reference to heaven the same way many of us do to "the pearly gates" without literally believing that there is such a structure placed somewhere up above us. 

But Karoline Leavitt was quick to try to disabuse us of this. In a typically creepy line—when asked whether Trump was joking—she fired back to a group of journalists, "I think the president was serious [...] I think the president wants to get to heaven — as I hope we all do in this room as well."

Oh, I thought, of course she would be a fundamentalist about this. Of course she would believe in a literal heaven of eternal reward and a literal hell of eternal torment. It's inevitable that her cosmology would reflect her politics—the flattery and worship of an arbitrary, vengeful, unpredictable tyrant. 

Sometimes, I have to remind myself all over again that millions of my fellow Americans believe in a deity that sends innumerable generations of his own creatures to be tortured forever in a cosmic furnace somewhere beneath the Earth—or, perhaps, in some sort of parallel dimension. 

Once I remember that—it suddenly becomes much more explicable that millions of my fellow Americans also seem to have no problem with Trump kidnapping and torturing people—and doing it all arbitrarily, capriciously, and for inscrutable reasons—and why they worship him for it. 

He's just acting on the model of their own God. It's the model of God as fascist. They worship a fascist, so why wouldn't they be fascists?  

As Arthur Koestler once put it: "[E]ven in our day many approve of the idea that ninety per cent of their contemporaries are designated for an eternal super-Auschwitz by their loving Father in Heaven." 

But isn't there something ungodlike in Trump's narcissism; his craven need for the adulation of others? Hardly. For many fundamentalists—this too is just part of their anthropomorphic conception of God. 

They believe in a God who punishes people eternally based on whether they believe in him or not. As such, they believe "that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause"—as Hume puts it in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 

So why wouldn't they see an image of their God reflected in Trump? 

As much as I despise Trump and Karoline Leavitt and all his other flatterers and toadies, let me state for the record: I don't wish them in hell. I don't wish anyone there. I hope they do get to heaven, if it exists. I wouldn't worship a God that created any being only to torture it for an eternity thereafter. 

But this belief on my part, of course, is part of what marks me as one of the predestined goats. Universalism has always been counted among the loathsome and punishable heresies by the orthodox. "I know one may be damned," as Byron put it, "For hoping no one else may e’er be so[.]"

Byron wrote this sardonic line in his satirical portrait of King George entering heaven. And even though Byron was a ferocious critic of the king; who wrote this poem in order to deride the monarch's slavish admirers and toadies like Robert Southey—it's worth noting that Byron still doesn't damn the king in the poem. 

So too—for all my contempt of Trump—I wouldn't turn him away from the pearly gates. What Byron said of the king, I am most inclined to echo about our President today, as he reflects on his own eternal fate: 

“God save the king!” It is a large economy

     In God to save the like; but if he will

Be saving, all the better; for not one am I

    Of those who think damnation better still:

I hardly know too if not quite alone am I

     In this small hope of bettering future ill

By circumscribing, with some slight restriction,

The eternity of Hell’s hot jurisdiction.