God Help Us

 Over the weekend, Donald Trump and Ross Douthat apparently sat down together for a lengthy interview on the Bari Weiss-ified 60 Minutes. It was like a head-to-head match-up of my personal betes-noires. (To be sure, I don't actually put Douthat in the same moral category as Trump. I only make the comparison in the sense that these are probably the two men I've spent the most time complaining about of anyone—with the possible exception of J.D. Vance—since this blog's inception.)

Unsurprisingly—this being a Douthat interview—the conversation eventually came around to theology. In the Wall Street Journal's telling, Douthat at a certain point asked Trump: "What happens when you die?" and the latter apparently replied "that he hoped to go to heaven."

To which I can only say, as Lord Byron did of King George III: "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."

The WSJ account of the interview goes on: "Then Douthat pressed further, asking whether Trump would be willing to forgive his political enemies [...] to go to heaven."

I never know how metaphorically we are meant to take these things. It's hard to imagine any two grown-up people—even these two grown-ups—in the year 2026 having a straight-faced conversation about whether we will go to the pearly gates when we die, or instead down into the realm of shades known as H-E-double-hockey-sticks. 

Arthur Koestler put it well, in one of his essays: "To ask twentieth-century man to believe in a loving God who condemns half his children to eternal damnation without hope of an amnesty, is really a bit thick. The reassuring statements of some modern theologians that Hell does exist but is empty, or that it merely means exclusion from grace without overheating, are hardly on a more adult level." 

But Douthat for one is on the record as purportedly believing in Hell (he thinks Tony Soprano would be there, for one). I'm unclear on which of the menu of options Koestler presents here—ranging from the physical to the spiritual—Douthat would endorse as a description of what exactly he means by "Hell"—but I'm inclined to agree with Koestler that all of them are hard to take on an "adult level." 

Regardless, we must accept Douthat at his word when he says he believes in an actual Hell. Thus, there are real stakes for him when he questions Trump as to whether he would be willing to forgive his enemies in order to avoid going there, and end up in heaven instead. 

Now, I am unfamiliar with any stripe of Christian theology that sees salvation this way. The idea that you can get to heaven by being a good person or following the ethic of the Gospel alone would be denounced as rank Pelagianism and heresy by conservative Protestants and Catholics alike. The real question for the literal-minded orthodox would be: is Trump baptized? Or: does he have faith? Or: does he show outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace?

No matter, we are not actually talking theology here. We are talking the child's Sunday comics pop culture version of Christian mythology, according to which the "good people" go one place when they die, and the "bad people" go another; and Douthat is asking Trump if he has it in him to try to be a good person in order to go there. 

To which Trump, with admirable consistency and trueness to form, replies—effectively: nahhh. Not worth it. He'd like to go to heaven, as he's said many times in the past. But if he has to forgive James Comey to get there, it's a pass for him. 

Ross Douthat is much more ideologically proximate to the Trump administration—and specifically, to J.D. Vance—than I would ever be (though Douthat has, in fairness, criticized them all at various points). Yet, ironically, Douthat seems much more likely to put conditions on Trump's salvation than I am. 

For my part, I would have to believe that if there is a heaven worthy of the name, Trump will have to be going there—along with James Comey and Tony Soprano, for that matter. This is because any God who made Trump apparently made him the way he is. He "moulded his desires," as Stephen Crane put it in a poem. And I think Trump is being perfectly honest when he says it's just not in his nature to practice forgiveness. 

Besides, a God would have to be "a Being of infinite cruelty" (to borrow a phrase from Bertrand Russell, from his description of James Mill's theology) to bring any life into being and then condemn it eternally. 

Of course, this is heresy, as we all know. As Byron observes, in the same poem quoted above, this opposition to damnation is seen by many of the confessions as itself a damnable offense. As he puts it: 

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.

I know this is unpopular; I know

   ’Tis blasphemous; I know one may be damned

For hoping no one else may e’er be so;

   [...] God help us all!