In September 2007, the then-eight candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination came together for a debate at Dartmouth College. The moderator was the late Tim Russert, of NBC, and for most of the 90 minutes, Russert’s questions addressed the issues one would more or less have expected to be on the table in September 2007: the still-raging war in Iraq, the prospect of universal health care, gay rights and the candidates’ views on same-sex marriage, the future of Social Security and Medicare, terrorism, taxes. But, in his penultimate question of the night, Russert changed tack and asked each of the candidates, one by one, to identify their favorite Bible verse.
I’m a religion professor at Dartmouth College, and my specialty is biblical studies, so you’d think this question would have been right up my alley. But, in truth, I thought it was silly. To be sure, this debate preceded the major events of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, so the state of the country’s economy was not the all-consuming issue that it soon became. But there were plenty of other problems in the country and in the world, and giving over precious debate time to a question about the Bible seemed to me a mistake.
The events of this past Monday, when Donald Trump followed a speech in the White House Rose Garden by walking across Lafayette Park in order to have his picture taken holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, have convinced me that I was wrong. Trump didn’t quote any particular Bible verse on the occasion of this photo-op; there’s some doubt, indeed, whether he even held the Bible that had been procured for the occasion right-side up. But it turns out this is not the only time Trump has held up the Bible — at least metaphorically — as an icon of his leadership.
As The Guardian reported on June 2, Trump frequently touted the Bible as his favorite book (his second favorite being his own The Art of the Deal) while on the campaign trail, and although he struggled when pressed in subsequent interviews to identify a chapter or verse from the Bible that particularly inspired him, he finally came up with “an eye for an eye” — a snippet taken from Leviticus 24:19-20: “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.”
To Trump’s credit, he went on, in this same interview, to say, “That’s not a particularly nice thing.” Nevertheless, “an eye for an eye” is arguably the Bible verse for this president, one who answers any slight by lashing out at the perpetrator (preferably by posting demeaning insults on Twitter); who fires government officials for any seeming disloyalty, even when — like the government’s inspectors general — these officials are doing their jobs by investigating potential administrative malfeasance; and who responded to the seeming humiliation of being forced to shelter in the White House’s underground bunker on Friday night by proposing three days later to call out the American military against America’s own citizens at virtually the same moment that, under orders from his administration, peacefully protesting citizens were being attacked in Lafayette Park with gas and rubber bullets.
Can we do better? In 2008, Joe Biden told Russert that his favorite Bible verse was “Christ’s warning of the Pharisees … and I worry about the Pharisees.” In many respects, this response is vintage Biden: It’s a little bumbling and imprecise (the Pharisees are a group of people who appear in the Bible, not a “verse”) and, like so many Biden statements, it is politically infelicitous and inept. After all, the Bible positions the Pharisees as a foil to Jesus. They are cast as pedantic and unimaginative Jews who insist rules and laws must be precisely obeyed, even when their fellow Jew Jesus argues a rule or a law’s specifics can be overridden to help those who are suffering or otherwise in need. Because of this, the term “Pharisee” has come to function, over the millennia, as an anti-Semitic trope — surely not what Biden was trying to say.
Instead, what Biden was presumably reaching for was Jesus’ characterization of the Pharisees as hypocrites, Jesus’ fellow Jews who, from Jesus’ point of view, had undermined their common religion even as they sought to uphold it.
This is the kind of hypocrite, Biden reminded us in his speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday, who swore to us all, on Jan. 20, 2017, that he would uphold the Constitution of the United States, and whose administration acted on Monday, and continues to act, in deploying the military in Washington, D.C., to undermine the First Amendment right “of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition their government for redress and grievances.”
In decrying that hypocrisy, Biden let us know that the Bible “verse” he cited in 2008 really does tell us something about who he is, just as Trump’s “an eye for an eye” reveals his vengeful, vindictive and retaliatory character.
Russert was right, it turns out, that what he called a “simple question” really does give insight into a leader’s core commitments and values.
As we struggle, moreover, with our nation’s core commitments and values today, and especially with issues of systemic racism, income inequality and unequal access to health care, there’s one more leader’s favorite Bible verse that we might keep in mind, that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It comes from the prophet Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
Susan Ackerman, of Lebanon, is the Preston H. Kelsey Professor of Religion and a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College.