I THINK it’s fair to say that Trump veneration in this little corner of Paradise is a determinedly Protestant Thing. It’s perhaps not the done thing to mention it, but it’s just how it is.
That’s not to say that a taste for tango here is entirely confined to adherents to the Reformed faith, but it’s simply a statement of fact to say that if you wore a MAGA baseball cap while doing your messages in the Connswater Shopping Centre, that item of apparel would largely go unremarked-upon; take a dander around the Kennedy Centre sporting the same item of headwear, meanwhile, and you’ll be considered to have had a lucky escape if you get away with multiple dirty looks and an oul' bit of bad talk.
Let’s call it a unionist thing, if that makes it any more palatable; or even a loyalist thing, to complete the PUL trilogy. But whatever sticker you put upon it, it’s a simple reality that one’s take on Trump is generally reflective of one’s position on the Papacy and/or partition.
At this point I could fall back on my Bible studies and attribute the toleration of the appalling personal failures of the President-elect to the fact that Reformation theology holds that it is faith alone that delivers salvation. And while acts of kindness and charity may be indicators of a worthy man (look, it’s the Bible – the ladies have to sit this out), indicators is all that they are. You can be the Mayor of Soundtown for all your minister cares – only unquestioning, rock-solid faith will deliver unto you a seat with the Righteous. And just as rescuing old ladies stuck up trees and helping kittens cross the road aren’t deal-makers when it comes to the Ever After, so acts of cruelty and avarice aren’t deal-breakers.
You can’t even begin to understand how much I want to believe this to be the motivation behind the quite frankly worrying levels of MAGAmania in Loyal Ulster. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still hold those who admire Trump in the most profound contempt, but at least I’d be able to attribute their total abandonment of the most basic requirements of decency and probity in public life to something other than merely not giving a ballix. There might be something vaguely comforting in knowing that Trump is tolerated, or admired, or even loved, because as a declared Christian (giggle ye not, lest ye get hiccups) his various disreputable acts of commission or omission cannot exclude him from the Pantheon of the Pardoned. At the very least, this would be preferable to the idea that he gets a by-ball because crypto-fascist opinion-formers in the Irish and British media – mainstream and social – say he should.
But I don’t believe that Protestants are more likely to find a place in their hearts for Trump because they cleave to the Lutheran dogma of sola fide/faith alone. Let’s face it, the vast majority of my separated brethren have no more appreciation of what that is than my bead-rattling neighbours have of the intricacies of dogma Catholicum. Which means the origins of Loyal Ulster Trumpism are temporal rather than spiritual; that Ballybeen roots for a TikTok Trump and not a Lutheran one, while Ballymurphy roots for neither.
And the good news is that social media has precisely the same theological take on salvation as the Reformed faith: It doesn’t matter what you do or what you don’t do – all that matters is that you believe. And what you have to believe is a range of people on an arc bending from the Daily Mail at one end, Nigel Farage in the middle and Tommy Robinson at the other.
THE ORACLE: Tommy Robinson is among the far right social media opinion formers
So if you wobble a bit in your Trump enthusiasm when reading the wince-inducing details of his financial and sex crimes, it’s somewhere on this internet arc you will find justification for your condoning of his sins. When you wonder if Lauren Boebert really is the right person to be Trump’s Secretary for Education, you’ll wonder no more about her taking responsibility for the US’s kids when a Spectator columnist tells you: “Let she who has not pulled the todger off her boyfriend in a crowded theatre while getting her knockers massaged cast the first stone.”
If you worry when you hear that the next US Attorney General could be Matt Gaetz, you’ll find relief in the words of your mad uncle Frank on Facebook: “Look, dickwad, who among us hasn’t been accused at one time or another of trafficking a minor across state lines and taking cocaine at orgies?”
