Postscripts 13.

1 (2022) 1–26] Postscripts ISSN (print) 1743-887x

http://www.doi.org/10.1558/post.20855 Postscripts ISSN (online) 1743-8888

The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of

Exegesis

Courtney J. P. Friesen

University of Arizona

friesen@arizona.edu

The presidency of Donald Trump exposed and amplified dynamics long

active in American religion. Although the overwhelming support of evan-
gelical Christians took many by surprise due to his unconventional reli-
gious qualifications, scholars have increasingly established that this
political alliance reflects numerous well-established commitments.
Accordingly, this study analyses the function of the Bible in the rhetoric
of Trump’s Christian supporters. Among those surveyed, fundamental-
ist assumptions of biblical authority and inerrancy are held in common
even while the exegetical techniques deployed diverge widely from the
corresponding principles of “literal” interpretation and “original” mean-
ings. Their tendencies are rather towards divinatory, even quasi-magi-
cal, appropriations of scriptural excerpts, practices attested in antiquity
though less well known in American Christianity. For these political apol-
ogists, the Bible’s status approaches that of a ritual icon possessing spirit-
ual power and conferring authority and legitimacy on those who wield it.

Background and Introduction

On 1 June 2020, President Donald Trump stood in front of St John’s
Episcopal Church prominently holding up a Bible as a prop for a photo
opportunity. The spectacle occurred as the culmination of a procession
from the White House across Lafayette Square while a crowd protesting
racial violence by police was aggressively cleared with chemical agents.
This event was in many ways emblematic of the function of Christian
scripture in the Trump presidency and the divergent public reactions

Keywords: Donald Trump, Bible, exegesis, icon, ritual

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Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S1 2BX.
2 Courtney J. P. Friesen

underscored the polarization of the nation’s religious communities.

Among his Christian supporters, some praised the display as inspiring
hope and advancing the Bible’s message of healing and lawful order
(Coppins 2020). But the bishop of the local diocese, Mariann Edgar
Budde, condemned the action, noting that her church’s authorization
had not been requested; Trump’s purpose was not to pray but rather to
appropriate “our symbols and our sacred space as a way to reinforce a
message that is antithetical to everything that the person of Jesus, whom
we follow, and the gospel texts that we strive to emulate […] represent”
(Chappell 2020). For his part, Trump’s personal ignorance of the Bible had
often been exhibited during his campaign. For instance, when asked to
identify his favourite verse, he strained to call to mind a single phrase
– “‘an eye for an eye,’ you can almost say that” – and was apparently
unaware that from the Christian perspective of his interviewer and
audience, in the Gospel of Matthew (5:38–42) Jesus had explicitly rejected
this principle of retaliation (Kaczynski 2016; cf. Taylor 2016). Even so,
Trump clearly perceived the Bible’s cultural power as an icon and that to
wield it in front of a site of Christian worship invested him with an aura
of religious authority independent of whether his actions aligned with
its words.
The interplay between Trump, Christian scripture and its American dev-
otees was unusual for a politician from the outset of his presidential cam-
paign. Not only was he unaware of the Bible’s contents, his lifestyle and
attitudes were antithetical to those long cherished by “Bible-believing,”
“family-values” Christians. That he successfully obtained widespread and
loyal support among this constituency, though a thrice-married man and
former casino owner who once appeared on the cover of Playboy maga-
zine, is perhaps one of Trump’s most remarkable political achievements.
Indeed, roughly four out of five self-professed white evangelicals voted
for him in 2016 and a similar number did so again in 2020.1 While this
seemingly anomalous phenomenon has exercised political pundits, aca-
demic analyses have increasingly demonstrated that this political alli-
ance is not an aberration but the culmination of several factors that have
long animated conservative Protestantism in America. These include
white nationalism (Gorski 2017; Whitehead and Perry 2020), Zionism and
support for Israel (Durbin 2020), fear of diminishing cultural standing

1. According to exit polls, in 2016, 81 per cent of “White evangelical or white born-
again Christians” voted for Trump, and 76 per cent in 2020 – Huang et al. 2016; Andre
et al. 2020.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 3

(Martí 2020, 209–248), economic commitments (Martí 2020, 111–162) and

patriarchal, authoritarian masculinity (Du Mez 2020).
Initially, a few evangelical critics questioned whether Trump’s support-
ers who self-identify with evangelicalism in polls genuinely understand
its beliefs or practise its piety (e.g. Kidd 2016); however, recent research
has established that in fact “devout” evangelicals who hold to “traditional
beliefs” and were active in their churches were more likely to vote for
Trump than “nominal” evangelicals (Margolis 2020). Among traditional
tenets, beliefs about the Bible proved to be an especially strong predictor
of a Trump vote: according to Darren Sherkat’s (2021, 189) analysis of the
2018 General Social Survey (GSS), respondents who view the Bible as “a
book of fables” were 80 per cent less likely to vote for Trump than those
who took it as the literal word of God. It is significant, moreover, as shall
be noted below regarding the GSS, that affirmations of a high view of
scripture are prevalent nationally and remain relatively constant even
while Bible reading is rare and church membership steadily declines.
In view of these considerations, the Bible’s function as an icon of power
in American culture merits further analysis. While Philip Gorski has
rightly observed that Trump’s mode of “white Christian nationalism”
is “secularized” and “dispenses with the subtle allusions to Christian
Scripture that have long tethered American exceptionalism to Christian
ethics and political theology” (Gorski 2017, 343), this study explores the
strategies of his Christian apologists who did in fact leverage the Bible
to consolidate support. Initial progress has been made: Rebecca Barrett-
Fox (2018, 510–515) and Sean Durbin (2020, 126–131) have investigated
how religious leaders evoked several biblical characters (Cyrus, David,
Samson, Esther) to explain Trump’s persona. The present study builds on
this work by surveying specific exegetical techniques used by Trump’s
Christian promoters and placing them within a larger historical typol-
ogy. The focus will be particularly (though not exclusively) on two figures
as illustrative of the range of conservative evangelicalism. First, Lance
Wallnau, an evangelist-entrepreneur, self-proclaimed prophet, speaker
and writer, who was invited on several occasions to Trump Tower along
with other religious leaders during the 2016 presidential campaign. He
gained widespread notoriety for his 5 October piece on Charisma News,
“Why I Believe Trump Is the Prophesied President” (2016b), with a corre-
sponding Facebook video reaching nearly 4 million views and book God’s
Chaos Candidate (2016a). Second, Wayne Grudem, a theologian with a doc-
torate in New Testament studies from the University of Cambridge, who
has been a seminary professor at leading institutions (Trinity Evangelical

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4 Courtney J. P. Friesen

Divinity School and Phoenix Seminary) and served as president of the

Evangelical Theological Society. He has authored numerous popular text-
books, including his 1994 Systematic Theology which has sold more than
750,000 copies, is required reading in many colleges and seminaries, and
has recently been reissued in a revised edition (Grudem 2020). His other
major textbooks concern the Bible and politics (2010) and the Bible and
ethics (2018a), and he is general editor of the English Standard Version
Study Bible. In 2016, he endorsed Trump and has since become an active
writer and apologist for Trump on the conservative blogsite Townhall.
com.2
My contention is that the exegetical techniques surveyed in this study,
far from the shibboleths of “literalism” or “original” meaning conven-
tionally associated with fundamentalism, 3 resemble ancient uses of
sacred texts as divinatory or even magical objects to be extracted, recon-
figured and reapplied with direct immediacy, divine power and author-
ity for contemporary circumstances. This will be demonstrated below in
three sections: concerning Wallnau’s identification of Trump with Cyrus
by way of the number “45” as a contemporary mode of bibliomancy (sec-
tion 3); Grudem’s proof-texting methodology to produce biblical excerpta
for evaluating the sexual ethics of a president (section 4); and use of the
Bible in the promotion of Trump’s southern border wall and support of
his controversial immigration policies (section 5). First, however, I offer a
brief preliminary survey of how scripture’s function as an iconic object
has shaped and continues to shape exegetical procedures, thus blurring
distinctions between divination and interpretation. While these have
been well documented for antiquity (section 1), their ongoing legacy is
less widely known in American culture where, I argue in section 2, they
remain enshrined in some fundamentalist appropriations of the Bible.
1 The Bible as Icon of Power in Antiquity
Sacred texts are icons that confer power upon those who possess them,
often through the exercise of exegetical mastery over their semantic
content. Cross-cultural studies provide valuable insights, such as J. Z.
Smith’s classic essay on “canon”:
Where there is a canon, it is possible to predict the necessary
occurrence of a hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it

2. For a more complete survey of Trump’s “court evangelicals,” see Fea 2018, 50–63.
3. On the importance of biblical literalism in Christian academic institutions and
congregations, see Crapanzano 2000, 29–193; Malley 2004, 92–103; Bielo 2009, 47–72.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 5

is continually to extend the domain of the closed canon over

everything that is known or everything that exists without altering
the canon in the process. It is with the canon and its hermeneute
that we encounter the necessary obsession with exegetical
totalization. (Smith 1982, 48)
The impulse for exegesis concerns primarily five areas – “divination,
law, legitimation, classification, and speculation” – with “divinatory
procedures” as primary (Smith 1982, 50). From a different perspective,
James Watts arrives at similar conclusions about the divinatory quality
of biblical interpretation. He delineates “three dimensions of scripture”
– semantic, performative and iconic – each of which exists as ritual, thus
distinguishing scripture from other books (Watts 2013, 14–22). As shall
be seen below, while American Protestantism with its aniconic legacy
and prejudice against ritualism privileges the semantic dimension
of scripture, Watts observes, “evangelicals also ritualize the Bible’s
iconicity in many ways” (2013, 21). And as Bradford Anderson (2019, 41–45)
demonstrates, even amidst the rapid trend towards digitized textual
formats, iconic functions persist.
For Judaism and Christianity, the iconicity of scripture is encoded
within the legends of its origin (Parmenter 2009). When Yahweh deliv-
ered his laws to Moses on Sinai (Exod 20–31), he concluded by giving “him
the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger
of God” (31:18). As Moses descended from the mountain, the tablets in
hand established his political and religious authority over the people.
After shattering them in anger at their idolatry (32:19), Yahweh replaced
them with new ones re-establishing the covenant (34:1–35) and instruct-
ing that they be placed in the ark (Exod 25:15; Deut 10:1–5). In subsequent
legends, the ark, as it contained the iconic writings of God himself, pos-
sessed supernatural and even magical power: it was carried at the head of
the procession that crumbled the walls of Jericho (Josh 6); it also brought
plagues upon the Philistines who captured it (1 Sam 5) and death upon
Israelite priests who accidentally touched it (2 Sam 6:3–8). When Solo-
mon’s temple was later dedicated, the ark was situated within the inner
sanctuary and the narrative emphasizes that “there was nothing in the
ark except the two tablets of stone that Moses had placed there at Horeb”
(1 Kings 8:9). In this position, scripture’s function as a ritual object is clear,
venerated as a sacred icon, akin to a cult statue in other ancient Mediter-
ranean cultures and mediating the divine presence within the commu-
nity. Moreover, as Watts (2005) emphasizes, the processes that initially led
to the Torah’s canonization would have involved ritual performances in

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6 Courtney J. P. Friesen

sacred spaces, as for instance when the recovery of scripture is made to

coincide with reinstating discontinued religious festivals (by King Josiah,
2 Kings 23 and Ezra, Neh. 8).
The subsequent status of Jewish scripture as a sacred icon is evident
in a range of sources. According to one legend, when the Temple Scroll
was delivered from Jerusalem to Alexandria for translation, King Ptolemy
prostrated himself before it seven times (Letter of Aristeas 177). In some
communities, scriptural excerpts – tefillin – were worn on the body as
ritual objects in fulfilment of scriptural injunctions (Exod 13:9, 16; Deut
6:8, 11:18; see Cohn 2008). Their purpose was apparently to ward off
evil, as suggested by the Greek designation, phylakteria (e.g. Matt 23:5),
which developed alongside amulets in the Greco-Roman world. Although
Greeks lacked a “Bible,” the Homeric epics had reached a similar cultural
status and verses could be extracted and attached to the body or recited
as an incantation to achieve healing or some other desired outcome.
For instance, a magical papyrus has instructions for a woman seeking
to avoid pregnancy to inscribe Iliad 3.40 (“may you be childless [agonos]
and die unwed”) on a magnetic stone or utter it aloud (PMG 22.a.11–13,
my trans.). As Derek Collins (2008) observes regarding this and other
examples, the effect depends upon analogical relationships between the
desired result and the poetic words; and extracted from context, they
occasionally involve a strategic “misreading” of a word or phrase for a
new meaning.4 Ancient Christians, likewise, inscribed various objects
with scriptural excerpts (Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer were especially
popular) and wore them for protection against evil spirits (de Bruyn 2017,
139–183).
Sacred texts could also be consulted as providing divine communica-
tion with direct immediacy for an individual or community. For instance,
the pesharim at Qumran attested among the Dead Sea Scrolls involve “con-
temporizing exegesis” or the application of biblical texts “to postbiblical
historical/eschatological settings through various literary techniques in
order to substantiate a theological conviction” (Berrin 2005, 110). They
consist of a biblical lemma, followed by a pesher-formula introducing the
interpretation. While some are “continuous,” verse by verse, others – par-
ticularly relevant for the present study – are “thematic”: excerpts from
across the canon are compiled according to the interests of the inter-
preter, sometimes organized around a common word or phrase (e.g. “in

4. In Iliad 3.40, Hector wishes that Paris had never been born (agonos), not that a
woman remain childless.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 7

the last days”) or identifying individual figures from the Bible with those
in the community’s present (Lim 2002, 46–48; Brooke 2005). 4QTestimo-
nia, for example, extracts texts concerning three individuals (a prophet
like Moses – Deut 18:18; the star of Jacob – Num 24:17; the patriarch Levi
– Deut 33:8–11), all of whom were to be expected imminently on the side
of God’s people at the end of days (Brooke 2005, 138–140). These antholo-
gies or excerpta, possibly “originally used for private devotion or dispu-
tation” (Lim 2002, 47), have been characterized as “inspired exegesis”
(Berrin 2005, 123) or “prophecy by interpretation” (Collins 1975, 31–33).
Not unique to Qumran, similar strategies are also evident in the New
Testament, as in 1 Peter 2:6–8, which collects a string of three verses with
the word “stone,” identified as Christ (Isa 28:16; Ps 118:22; Isa 8:14).
There were numerous other ancient techniques to consult sacred texts
for direct divine communication. Virgil’s Aeneid was popularly used for
divination through lots or dice, sortes Vergilianae. The Historia Augusta
reports several (likely fictional) instances, as when Hadrian “consulted
the sortes Vergilianae” concerning his troubled relationship with Trajan
and received Aeneid 6.808–812 which apparently assuaged his fears (Hist
Aug Hadrian 2.8).5 Christians occasionally deployed scripture in similar
ways through chance or divinatory means, sortes Biblicae (van der Horst
1998, 151–159). Antony famously converted upon entering a church while
Matthew 19:21 was being read (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2), which in
turn inspired Augustine, who recounts a similar result from opening at
random to Romans (Conf 8.12). Even so, both Augustine (Ep 55.20.37) and
Jerome (Ep 53.7) criticize fellow Christians for using scripture in divina-
tion, as was done with Homer and Virgil, investing extracts with new
meanings. Divinatory procedures are attested on Codex Bezae, a fifth-
century biblical manuscript to which roughly 70 oracular responses were
later added at the foot of the pages of the Gospel of Mark. Several church
councils, starting in 465 CE at Vennes, condemned such practices, which
suggests they were sufficiently widespread to attract clerical disapproval.
The foregoing survey delineates ways in which the power of scripture
rests upon its existence as a physical object, whether in the hands of
Moses, enshrined in the Ark of the Covenant, worn on the body or recited
in incantations. Distinctions between exegesis as textual interpretation
and techniques of magic or divination break down, as in each case the
effect of an exegetical action depends upon the extraction of words or

5. For additional examples: Hist. Aug. Clodius Albinus 5.4; Hist. Aug. Alexander Severus 4.6;
Hist. Aug. Claudius II 10.4–7; see Hamilton 1993.

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excerpts and their reconfiguration with new meaning and immediacy.

Augustine captures this phenomenon well: “When a person should
happen to consult the pages of some poet who uttered and intended
something very different, a verse would often emerge marvelously con-
sonant to the present business” (Conf 4.3.5, my trans.). In communities of
low literacy – estimates for the ancient Mediterranean range between
10–15 per cent – one can surmise the appeal of such approaches as they do
not necessitate extensive literary engagement. In such contexts, religious
authority belonged to the few who controlled sacred texts with the ability
to master and manipulate their meanings.
2 The Bible as Icon of Power in America
From the formation of American Christianity, the Bible has been cen-
tral to its self-identity as colonial preachers and theologians framed
their project as a new Exodus (see Morris 2017, 290–295). And although
the nation’s founding documents eschew explicit biblical citations,6 its
influence persisted and grew considerably, especially during the religious
revivals of the nineteenth century and beyond. Historical accounts of the
Bible, however, reflecting a dominant Protestant perspective, often over-
look its iconic and ritual functions in favour of the semantic dimension.
Vincent Wimbush’s White Men’s Magic offers a compelling corrective, dem-
onstrating how scripture was wielded in colonial enterprises in the New
World to exercise and legitimate hegemony over enslaved and colonized
subjects, which he characterizes as “the dominant culture’s festishizing
of the book, the Bible” (Wimbush 2012, 19). In popular folk religion, also,
the Bible has been widely used in magic and divination as helpfully cata-
logued by Brian Malley (2015). In one striking instance, a witch trial near
Burlington, Pennsylvania in 1730 was conducted by placing the defend-
ant on one side of a scale with the great Bible of the local justice on the
other after a chapter of the Pentateuch was read over the accused (Malley
2015, 38–39).7 Bibles have been placed within homes or carried on bodies
as a means of physical or spiritual protection (40–43); and the presence
of a Bible with an infant could positively affect the course of their future
(44). Various cures were sought, such as by striking a wart with a Bible
(44–45), and particular passages were recited to produce healings or pro-
tect against bad fortune (52–59; for more recent examples, see Anderson

6. The Declaration of Independence famously asserts: “We hold these truths to be self-
evident”; see Noll 2001, 191–200.
7. In this instance, the alleged Wizard outweighed the Bible and was thus acquitted.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 9

2019, 44). The Bible was also consulted for divination: the most common
method was to open to a random page and verse for a relevant oracu-
lar answer (Malley 2015, 64–66). In another more peculiar practice, one’s
fortune could be read from the verse in Proverbs 21 (for men) or 31 (for
women) corresponding to one’s birthday (i.e. 15 March = Prov 21:15 or
31:15).
The Bible developed a distinctly authoritative status in American Chris-
tianity where individualism, the rejection of traditionalism and distrust
of clerical elites and professional theologians elevated scripture as the
final arbiter of God’s will while empowering local preachers and laypeo-
ple to determine its meaning and application (Marsden 2006, 223–225).
Interpretation is never unambiguous, however, as was especially evident
in the controversies leading up to the Civil War, where both slave holders
and abolitionists confidently claimed that their cause was based upon
God’s will as revealed in scripture (see further below on Romans 13).
While this debate became moot after 1865, new controversies emerged
in the twentieth century over the Bible’s authority in the public sphere
and in relation to modern science, prominently displayed in the Scopes
Trial of 1925 (Marsden 2006, 184–195). The Fundamentalist–Modernist
divisions of this period left a lasting mark on how scripture came to be
studied and taught in Christian institutions. New colleges and seminaries
were established wherein methods of higher criticism could be jettisoned
as a threat to confessional religion and the divinely inspired status of
the Bible. For instance, Westminster Theological Seminary was founded
in Philadelphia (1929) by J. Gresham Machen and other professors from
Princeton who were dissatisfied with the institution’s embrace of mod-
ernism. The intellectual milieu of modern American evangelicalism was
formulated within this context, and while some Bible scholars have re-
engaged with critical exegetical methods and endeavoured to reconcile
them with traditional conceptions of divine inspiration and scriptural
authority, the legacy of fundamentalism and its attendant interpretive
approaches remains dominant (Treier and Hefner 2017).
Such attitudes are not limited to academic institutions but continue
to be held broadly among Americans. According to the General Social
Survey, between 1984 and 2018 consistently more than three out of four
respondents affirmed a “high view” of scripture, either that the Bible is
the “actual word of God and is to be taken literally” or is the “inspired
word of God.”8 It is striking that these views have remained relatively

8. Over the available data (1984–2018), the former ranged from 29–38 per cent, the

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10 Courtney J. P. Friesen

constant, even as church membership declined rapidly and also among

many who do not consistently read the Bible.9 In 2012, for respondents
who had not read the Bible outside of a worship service during the past
year, nearly two-thirds maintained a high view of scripture.10 These
results confirm the assessment of Martin Marty in “The Bible as Icon in
the Republic”: its power depends upon being revered as an object even
if it is not read as a text, having “little to do with the content of ancient
scriptures but much to do with the form of modern American life” (Marty
1987, 140–165, at 144). Marty observes, moreover, this iconic status entails
resistance to higher criticism. Or, as expressed yet more provocatively by
Harold Bloom:
[Fundamentalists’] literalization of scripture is itself a giant
metaphor: a conversion of the Bible into a statue or an icon. […]
Even as Fundamentalists insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible,
they give up all actual reading of the Bible, since in fact its language
is too remote and difficult for them to begin to understand. What
is left of the Bible is a physical object, limp and leather, a final icon
or magical talisman. (Bloom 2006, 243–244)
In short, in America as in antiquity, perceptions of scripture as an iconic
object are prevalent and align with particular interpretive commitments
and exegetical techniques of extracting sematic meanings for application
to contemporary circumstances. As shall be seen below, the impetus for
Trump’s photo op with the Bible in front of St John’s Church reflects a
common ideology with his Christian apologists: to wield it is to possess
divine authority and political legitimacy.

latter from 43–53 per cent, with the combined total never falling below 75 per
cent. The alternative choices were “an ancient book of fables, legends, and moral
precepts recorded by men”; “other”; “don’t know.” This data is taken from https://
gssdataexplorer.norc.org/. My discussion is informed particularly by Goff et al.
2017. American levels are much higher than those of Canada and most European
countries; see Smidt 2017.
9. Over the most recent decade of available GSS data (2008–2018) a range of 76–78 per
cent of respondents affirmed a high view of scripture, down only slightly from the
first decade (1984–1994), 82–85 per cent. By contrast, according to the Gallup Poll,
from 1984–1994 church membership remained roughly constant around 70 per cent
but between 2008 and 2018 fell from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.
10. Among this group 15 per cent viewed it as the “inerrant word of God” and 50 per
cent as the “inspired word of God,” compared with 45 per cent and 46 per cent
respectively for respondents who had read it in the past year; see Goff et al. 2017,
7–9.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 11

3 “45”: Lance Wallnau and Bibliomancy

Like other evangelical Christians, Wallnau was initially hesitant to back
Trump’s candidacy, not least because he lacked conventional religious
credentials compared with several “strong Christians” running in the
primaries. Nevertheless, on 5 October 2016, when Wallnau published
“Why I Believe Trump Is the Prophesied President” on Charisma News, he
insisted that Trump’s moral and religious character need not preclude
him from being God’s chosen leader and the right candidate for Christians
to support.11 He wrote: “Don’t ask, ‘Who is the most Christian?’ Instead
ask, ‘Who is the one anointed for the task?’” As a charismatic and self-
proclaimed prophet, Wallnau possessed the ability to recognize such
divine anointing and here his use of the Bible is of particular interest:
I was updating some random social-media activity when I ran
across a simple PowerPoint showing Trump seated in the Oval
Office with the words “Donald Trump, 45th President of the United
States.” The image made a peculiar impression on my mind […] this
was more than some random Facebook meme. It was a prophetic
picture. […] I heard the Spirit impress upon my mind, “Read Isaiah
45.” To be honest, I didn’t recall what the chapter was about. I
opened a Bible and began to read, “Thus saith the Lord to Cyrus
whom I’ve anointed.” (Wallnau 2016b)
Having made this discovery, Wallnau recalls, he checked to confirm that
Obama was the forty-fourth president and that his successor would be
the forty-fifth, thereby establishing the “prophetic picture of President
Trump”: Cyrus was “a heathen king” whom God had nevertheless anointed
for the purposes of protecting his people. Citing Isaiah 45:1–2, he observes
that this foreign king is named “My anointed” to subdue enemies and
ultimately to restore the exiles to the land. Trump, likewise an outsider
to the faith community, would even so advance the Christian cause. In
short, “I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus.”12
What emerges from Wallnau’s autobiographical vignette (fictionalized
as it may be) is a clear instance of divinatory exegesis akin to the ancient
examples cited above. Often, as in the sortes Biblicae, random selection

11. Published concurrently in Wallnau (2016a, 22–28). He was not the only charismatic
Christian claiming prophetic messages concerning Trump’s victory in the 2016
election; see Fea 2018, 55–56. For wider context, see also Barrett-Fox 2018; Durbin
2020.
12. Seventy was also a significant biblical number for Wallnau: October 2016 “opens the
Hebrew year 5777, a Jubilee year. This Jubilee occurs every 70 years […] If Trump is
elected, he will be 70 years old when he enters office” (2016a, 150).

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12 Courtney J. P. Friesen

processes were deployed, and Wallnau’s numerological bibliomancy

resembles the practice attested in American folklore of using one’s birth
date to obtain a fortune from a verse in the Proverbs.
4 Exegeting the Presidential Sex Life: Wayne Grudem Between Bill
Clinton and Donald Trump
Grudem also expressed initial hesitation in supporting Trump’s
candidacy, noting that he did not do so in the GOP primary. Like most
other evangelicals, however, after Trump secured the party nomination,
Grudem embraced him. Yet, even when he published his endorsement on
28 July 2016, he openly acknowledged his initial reservations based on
Trump’s moral character:
He is egotistical, bombastic, and brash […] Sometimes he blurts out
mistaken ideas (such as bombing the families of terrorists) that he
later must abandon. He insults people. He can be vindictive when
people attack him. He has been slow to disown and rebuke the
wrongful words and actions of some angry fringe supporters. He
has been married three times and claims to have been unfaithful
in his marriages. (Grudem 2016c)
Nevertheless, he concludes, “[t]hese are certainly flaws, but I don’t think
they are disqualifying flaws in this election.” Ultimately, it was more
important to Grudem which of the two major party candidates promised
policies aligned with his view of Bible and thus he follows his endorsement
with a conventional list: Supreme Court judges, abortion, religious liberty,
border security and lower taxes. By way of biblical justification, Grudem
offers two verses which capture the theme of “exile,” also central to
Wallnau’s prophetic endorsement. First, 1 Peter 1:1 depicts the people of
God as living in a spiritual or metaphorical exile, scattered throughout
the Roman Empire; second, Jeremiah 29:7 exhorts Babylonian captives
to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you in exile.” The
implication, as for Wallnau, is that in exile one cannot expect political
leaders to exhibit faith and piety. Whereas Wallnau claimed prophetic
identification of divine anointing, Grudem instead asks, “Which vote is
most likely to bring the best results for the nation?” (2016c).
Grudem’s initial hesitations developed into a full-blown moral crisis,
however, when on 7 October 2016 the now-infamous Access Hollywood
tape was released, displaying Trump bragging about his sexual assaults
against women. Grudem acted quickly to have his earlier endorsement
taken down and in its place, on 9 October, he published a new blog in
which he called on Trump to withdraw from the race (2016b): Trump’s

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 13

“conduct was hateful in God’s eyes and I urge him to repent and call out
to God for forgiveness, and to seek forgiveness from those he harmed,”
adding that “God intends that men honor and respect women, not abuse
them as sexual objects.” By 19 October, however, when it was clear that
Trump would not exit the race, Grudem changed his mind again and re-
endorsed Trump (2016a).
Given the extensive reach of Grudem’s influence within conservative
evangelicalism,13 it is informative to contextualize his biblical justifica-
tion for endorsing Trump within his wider body of writings, especially in
his popular textbooks, alongside his political involvements going back to
the presidency of Bill Clinton. His first and most prominent textbook, Sys-
tematic Theology, is distinctive for its rhetorical position vis-à-vis the Bible.
As a work of systematic theology, it is organized according to conven-
tional doctrinal categories, but its focus is decidedly on the Bible rather
than on history or philosophy (Grudem 1994, 21–23). The task of theology,
for Grudem, is to discover “what the whole Bible teaches us today about
everything,” and he describes this on the analogy of a “jigsaw puzzle,”
to be filled out with as many biblical pieces as possible (1994, 29). This
process is conducted in three steps: first, look up as many verses as pos-
sible with the help of a concordance; second, read the individual texts,
taking notes and summarizing each one; third, collect the results “into
one or more points that the Bible affirms about that subject” (1994, 36).
This is not limited to professional scholars; it “is possible for any Christian
who can read his or her Bible and can look up words in a concordance”
(1994, 37). As a rhetorical strategy to bolster his authoritative claims, the
textbook prints large numbers of excerpted Bible verses. Whereas often
theologians simply provide parenthetical references, leaving readers
to consult the texts independently, Grudem insists that “the words of
Scripture themselves have power and authority greater than any human
words” and so he has “frequently quoted the Bible passages at length so
that readers can easily examine for themselves the scriptural evidence”
(1994, 15).
His subsequent textbooks, though concerned with different academic
fields – politics (2010) and ethics (2018a) – deploy the same biblical meth-
odology. Indeed, he signals this consistency by reprinting and adapting
relevant paragraphs from his 1994 textbook in Christian Ethics. Instead

13. Grudem is so widely respected among evangelicals that when in 2019 he changed
his interpretation of a single verse (1 Cor 7:15), so that he now believes that the Bible
permits divorce in cases of domestic abuse, the editor of Christianity Today, Mark
Galli, interviewed him to cover the story (Lee 2019).

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14 Courtney J. P. Friesen

of a “theological jigsaw puzzle” he is concerned with an “ethical jigsaw

puzzle,” where the task is to compile and excerpt as many verses as pos-
sible relevant to “real-life” problems, thus providing the fullest biblical
picture (2018a, 47).
Grudem’s approach to the Bible is, as one reviewer characterized it,
“captive to the fundamentalist notion that the canon of biblical texts
and their interpretation can be detached from the community that deter-
mined canonicity in the first place,” and “pil[ing] up biblical proof-texts in
blithe indifference to critical scholarship” (Braaten 1996). More recently,
an evangelical theologian describes Grudem’s work as “naïve Biblicism,”
which amounts to “a theology derived from a concordance” (Bird 2014,
77–80, at 78).14 This exegetical technique – excerpting proof texts with
common words or themes and reconfiguring them for direct contempo-
rary import – bears striking resemblance to the thematic pesharim from
Qumran discussed above. And the impulse to impose these upon public
policy and presidential politics well illustrates J. Z. Smith’s observation
that “the rule-governed exegetical enterprise of applying the canon to
every dimension of human life is the most characteristic, persistent, and
obsessive religious activity” (1982, 43). Working within the constraints of
a fixed canon, the success of a theological exegete often depends upon the
ability to extend its domain while maintaining the impression of merely
expounding the original, God-given meaning. The results, however, are
inevitably controlled by the selectivity and creativity of the interpreter;
this is evident in Grudem’s treatment of presidential sexual ethics as
discussed in this section and his advocacy for Trump’s border wall and
immigration policy in the subsequent section.
American religious leaders have long maintained that politicians
should model at least a minimal level of personal morality, an expecta-
tion that crystallized during the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose false
testimony under oath denying his inappropriate sexual relationship with
Monica Lewinsky led to his impeachment. At that time, Grudem joined a
group of some 140 leaders representing the breadth of American Chris-
tianity in signing the “Declaration concerning Religion, Ethics, and the
Crisis in the Clinton Presidency.”15 The statement expresses profound
concern over Clinton’s misuse of public religion (especially the Presiden-
tial Prayer Breakfast of 11 September 1998) as a means of eschewing full

14. Nevertheless, Bird praises Grudem’s Systematic Theology as “in many respects a fine
theology textbook” and “robustly biblical” (78) and throughout his own theological
tome regularly registers his approval of Grudem’s results.
15. For the text and list of signatories, see Fackre 1999, 1–7.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 15

responsibility for his actions, including among other things “his ill use
of women, and […] his knowing manipulation of truth for indefensible
ends.” These Christians worried, furthermore, about the effect of moral
deterioration on society at large:
We are concerned about the impact of this crisis on our children
and on our students […] in general there is a reasonable threshold
of behavior beneath which our public leaders should not fall,
because the moral character of a people is more important
than the tenure of a particular politician or the protection of a
particular political agenda. Political and religious history indicate
that violations and misunderstandings of such moral issues may
have grave consequences. (Fackre 1999, 2–3)
These events and joint statement left a lasting impression on public
religion in America and Grudem revisits them in his 2010 textbook Politics
According to the Bible. In a section entitled “Governments significantly
influence people’s moral convictions and behavior and the moral fabric
of a nation” (2010, 97–99), he argues that such influence comes not merely
through legislation but also through the personal model of leaders. As his
single negative example, he recalls Bill Clinton and alludes directly to the
1998 Declaration: “One reason the people of the United States – from both
parties – felt such profound disappointment in President Bill Clinton’s
sexual misconduct in office was the poor example it set for adolescent
children and, indeed, for the rest of society” (2010, 98). In keeping with
his established methodology, Grudem adds Bible verses in support of
this principle (absent from the 1998 document), stringing together five
lemmata (Ps 94:20, 125:3; Isa 10:1; Esth 3:13; 1 Tim 2:2) interspersed with
brief commentary. From these, he concludes “the implication is that good
rulers can influence a nation toward good conduct, while evil rulers can
encourage and promote all sorts of evil conduct among their people”
(2010, 97).
Grudem’s commitment to this principle came under challenge in 2016
with Trump’s candidacy, particularly after the revelations in the Access
Hollywood tape (see above). It is especially suggestive that when he later
re-endorsed Trump (2016a), his justification, though in a different con-
text, included 1 Timothy 2:2, one of the same texts he had used to explain
his profound concern over Bill Clinton’s sexual misdeeds (2010, 98). By
contrast, now the injunction to pray for good rulers “that we may lead
a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Tim 2:2) is set
against the fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency in which “Christians
would increasingly experience systematic exclusion from hundreds of

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16 Courtney J. P. Friesen

occupations, with thousands of people losing their jobs” (2016a). Also

striking in his re-endorsement was the subtle but discernible shift in
language: whereas he had earlier characterized Trump’s comments as
describing “sexual aggression and assaults against women” and “morally
evil,” he now dropped “assaults” and “evil.” Later, when he published his
ethics textbook in 2018, he reprinted his 2010 comments on Bill Clinton
word for word, without any hint of Trump’s sexual misconduct (2018a,
446–48 = 2010, 97–99).16
In short, Grudem’s exegetical methodology is constructed around
his claim that “the words of Scripture themselves have power” and he
thus excerpts and has them physically compiled and reprinted in his
textbooks. As with the pesharim at Qumran or the various divinatory
techniques discussed above, Grudem wields the power of scripture by
extracting and reconfiguring it to assert its divine authority in the pre-
sent moment. The malleability of biblical texts and his own exegetical
creativity is particularly evident in his selective application to the sexual
ethics of different US presidents.
5 The Bible and the Border: Building Walls and Separating
Families
When Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, he made
headlines with his hardline stance on immigration and his now famous
characterization of Mexicans: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing
crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”17 During the
same speech he declared, “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds
walls better than me […] And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” He also
vowed to “immediately terminate” President Obama’s executive order on
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and called “for a total and
complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (Taylor 2015).
While many objected, Trump’s message clearly resonated with Christian
nationalists (Whitehead and Perry 2020, 89–120), including Lance Wall-
nau. In making his Cyrus–Trump identification, he found additionally

16. Elsewhere in Christian Ethics, however, Trump is discussed, but exclusively as an

example of positive, successful, and even Christian behavior (Grudem 2018a, 662,
684 n. 26, 935). His defense of Trump’s moral character culminates in a 2019 blog
post in which he claims he “absolutely” does not believe Trump “intentionally and
habitually tells lies” (Grudem 2019).
17. “Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” Washington Post, 16 June
2015 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-
text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/ Accessed 6 April 2020).

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 17

that it was Cyrus who issued the decree for Jerusalem to be reconstructed
(Ezra 4:1–4), which crucially involved rebuilding the city wall (Neh 6:15).
Thus, “building the wall” provided a thematic confirmation for Wallnau’s
divinatory, numerological association with Isaiah 45. Trump’s wall was
not merely a literal physical barrier but, citing Proverbs 25:28 (“He who
has no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and
without walls”), Wallnau adds, “America has become a nation without
walls, a nation without self-government. We are out of control fiscally
and physically on our borders” (2016b; also 2016a, 28). The wall became
a significant biblical trope for Trump’s presidency, underscored again in
the sermon preached for his inauguration by the Baptist minister Robert
Jeffress, who took Nehemiah’s wall-building as the scriptural point of
departure (Bailey 2017).
The Trump administration’s immigration policies later provoked a crisis
during the implementation of the so-called family separation policy. On
6 April 2018, federal prosecutors in southern border states were directed
to adopt “zero tolerance” towards everyone crossing illegally, with an
express purpose of detaining children separately from their parents as
a deterrent to illegal crossing.18 The result, by the administration’s own
estimation, affected some 5,500 families, including toddlers and infants,
and produced immeasurable trauma (Dickerson 2020). The policy met
with widespread condemnation by Christian leaders, including among
some of Trump’s ardent evangelical supporters, such as Franklin Graham
who tweeted, “It is terrible to see families torn apart – it’s disgraceful.”19
The Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution “On Immigration,”
insisting upon “maintaining the priority of family unity, resulting in an
efficient immigration system that honors the value and dignity of those
seeking a better life for themselves and their families.”20
Other prominent evangelical figures defended the policy with scrip-
ture, for instance then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions:
Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church
friends about separating families. […] I would cite you to the

18. For the text of the policy, see https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=820045. For

analysis, see Shear et al. 2020.
19. @Franklin_Graham, 16 June 2018, 10:07 a.m. https://twitter.com/franklin_graham/
status/1008033284750757889 [accessed 4 June 2021].
20. For the text of the SBC Resolution, see https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/
resolutions/on-immigration/. Albert Mohler (2018), president of a flagship Southern
Baptist seminary, described “the brutality of the policy now undertaken by the
Trump administration in separating children from their parents.”

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18 Courtney J. P. Friesen

Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to
obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them
for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in
themselves and protect the weak and lawful.21
Sessions’s application of Romans 13:1 is consistent with many of the
exegetical techniques discussed above depending upon the isolation
of excerpts from literary and historical context. In this case, Paul’s
instructions concerned how the Christ-followers at Rome should negotiate
life under a “pagan” administration that occasionally persecuted them
violently; Sessions repurposed the same words in order to insist upon
obedience to his own administration despite its violence against children
and families. This evocation of Romans 13 has clear historical precedent
in the United States as a popular proof text for pro-slavery arguments
that the institution was sanctioned by God and required obedience
(Harrill 2000, 169; cf. Noll 2006, 34–50). As Mullen (2018) concludes from his
historical analysis of Romans 13 in American public discourse, “Sessions
may claim the Bible’s contested authority, but what the attorney general
actually has on his side is the thread of American history that justifies
oppression and domination in the name of law and order.”
Less than three weeks after Sessions’s speech, Grudem returned to his
blog site for the first time since the election, now to promote Trump’s
immigration policy: “Why Building a Border Wall Is a Morally Good
Action” (2018b). Although his primary concern was to make a biblical
argument for building Trump’s wall, Grudem clearly understood the
larger stakes. Trump had explicitly made family separation a negotiat-
ing tactic for the wall in a tweet on 26 May 2018: “Put pressure on the
Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic]
parents [...] we MUST continue building the WALL!” Grudem echoes pre-
cisely the same connection: “[a]n effective border wall would also be the
best way to keep children together with their parents […] We would never
have to detain either parents or children on US soil in the first place.”22
Several years before Trump’s campaign, Grudem had advocated for a
southern border wall: “a secure fence that would effectively stop some-
thing like 99% of illegal immigration from Mexico” (2010, 473). This
task was so urgent, in his view, as to merit “special legislation […] that

21. This speech was delivered at Fort Wayne, Indiana, on 14 June 2018; for the text, see
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-sessions-addresses-recent-
criticisms-zero-tolerance-church-leaders.
22. By the time Grudem published his blog on 2 July, however, Trump had already
ended the policy, on 20 June, simply with an executive order.

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 19

would override environmental challenges” and if necessary use “emi-

nent domain to obtain the right to build on the property all along the
border” (2010, 474). When Trump adopted the slogan “Build the Wall,” it
appealed to Grudem, as he cited securing the borders against “terrorists
and drug smugglers” among his reasons for endorsement (2016a). But his
2010 textbook (uncharacteristically) provided no Bible verses as a basis
and his 2018 blog set out to fill this lacuna. Applying his “jigsaw puzzle”
methodology, he compiled eight excerpts containing the word “wall(s)”
and another with the combination of “gates,” “bars” and “borders.” From
these, he derived several principles: Jerusalem’s city wall was a blessing
from God, a source of peace and security (Ps 51:18; 122:7; 147:12–14); con-
versely, its destruction by the Babylonians was understood as the result
of God’s judgement (2 Chron 36:19; Neh 1:3), while the restoration of the
nation required its reconstruction (Neh 2:17; 12:27, 31). Even in the New
Testament, the book of Revelation depicts the new heavenly Jerusalem as
surrounded by a high and strong wall (21:12).
Like Wallnau, Grudem found Trump’s wall-building rhetoric compel-
ling. Yet, whereas the former focused more on its spiritual and symbolic
significance, Grudem was inclined to take Trump’s promise literally and
even urgently: he writes, it is “something absolutely essential if a govern-
ment is going to prevent a nation from devolving into more and more
anarchy […] A high, double wall with modern electronic equipment to
detect tunneling would stop perhaps 90–95 percent or even more of ille-
gal border crossings” (2018b).23 Nevertheless, Grudem and Wallnau share
a common exegetical assumption: a biblical figure (in this case the Jeru-
salem wall) has a direct contemporary correlation and application (US
southern border wall). While Grudem concedes that this is not a one-
to-one correspondence, acknowledging that the United States involves
“a larger area” than an ancient city, he insists that “the principles are
the same” (2018b). But just how the “principles” of Iron Age or Persian
Period city fortification are applicable to a twenty-first-century nation

23. This is down from his 2010 estimate of 99 per cent, but no evidence is given in either
case. For empirical data on effectiveness, cf. the 2017 report from the Government
Accountability Office: “Southwest Border Security: Additional Actions Needed
to Better Assess Fencing’s Contributions to Operations and Provide Guidance for
Identifying Capability Gaps,” (GAO-17-331), especially 22–23 (https://www.gao.gov/
assets/690/682838.pdf).

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20 Courtney J. P. Friesen

state remains unclear.24 Still more peculiar is Grudem’s application of the

city wall of heavenly Jerusalem as paradigmatic for US border security.25
Grudem anticipates possible objections, such as from the Bible’s injunc-
tion to “Love the sojourner (ger)” (Deut 10:19). In response, he claims that
the Hebrew term ger indicates “people who have entered another coun-
try legally.” This definition has no historical basis but is an application
to a biblical text of common anachronistic assumptions derived from
modern nation states. A similar perspective was expressed earlier in the
child-separation crisis by Paula White, Trump’s long-time spiritual advi-
sor. When asked about Jesus’s status as a refugee in Egypt as a young
child (Matt 2:13–18), she insisted that he arrived legally: “If he had broken
the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been
our Messiah” (Kuruvilla 2018). Despite White’s reasoning, there were no
legal procedures in Roman Egypt governing migration (see Keddie 2020,
224–225). Rather, her suggestion that a two-year-old child might bear
moral responsibility for his parents’ choice to migrate reflects the Trump
administration’s policy of punishing children.
In short, many Christian nationalists were drawn to Trump’s hard-
line stance on immigration. His slogan “Build the Wall” inspired a range
of exegetical activities concerned particularly with establishing Jeru-
salem’s city wall as a paradigm for the southern border of the United
States. Wallnau mapped this onto his Cyrus–Trump identification, and
Grudem compiled several biblical excerpts containing “wall” to legiti-
mate the policy. As with Jeff Sessions’s highly publicized use of Romans
13 to justify family separation, neither Wallnau nor Grudem endeavours
to contextualize migration or city fortification in the Bible within their
Ancient Near Eastern or Roman contexts. Rather, the words themselves
are viewed as possessing independent power and thus can be extracted
and reapplied accordingly.

24. Jerusalem’s wall was probably never much longer than two or three miles. On its
stone construction through its several phases during the First Temple period, see
Steiner 1986; and for estimates of the city’s size, see Keimer 2019, 17–21; Ussishkin
2012, 118–125.
25. Here Grudem omits important contextual details, such as that the city’s “gates will
never be shut by day” (Rev. 21:25), allowing foreigners from all nations of the world
to stream in freely provided they were ritually pure with names “written in the
Lamb’s book of life” (21:27).

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The Bible, the Trump Presidency and the Politics of Exegesis 21

Conclusions
Donald Trump’s photo op with the Bible in front of St John’s Church
presupposed its power to confer religious authority and political
legitimacy on the one who wields it and to re-establish order amidst
perceived threats of civil disobedience. Such uses of sacred texts as icons
and to ward off evil have their origin in antiquity, where the Torah was
enshrined as a ritual object and individuals wore texts on their bodies
to activate their spiritual power. The authority of scripture’s semantic
dimension also depends upon this iconic status and as such in many
instances exegesis is indistinguishable from divination, where words are
consulted, extracted or reconfigured for application to one’s immediate
circumstances. Magical and mantic appropriations of the Bible are also
attested in American contexts though often jettisoned in favour of other
modes of exegesis. Even so, as this study has argued, the persistence of
fundamentalist assumptions about scripture in the cultural imagination
even where it is rarely read or understood underscores its ongoing power
as an icon.
Some of Trump’s Christian apologists capitalized on these dynamics.
Lance Wallnau, by way of the number 45, connected Trump as the future
forty-fifth president to Cyrus in Isaiah 45, God’s anointed “pagan” ruler
whom he would use to defend and restore his people. Cyrus also initi-
ated the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s fortification, corresponding neatly
to Trump’s slogan “Build the Wall,” thus further confirming Wallnau’s
divinatory exegesis. For Wayne Grudem, also, the wall functioned as a
point of departure for interpretive creativity. Deploying the methodology
articulated in his popular theology textbook, he excerpted and compiled
a string of Bible verses with “wall” to argue that as with the ancient city
of Jerusalem, so also a southern border wall was urgently necessary for
national security. As he maintains, the words of scripture themselves
have power and therefore his theological enterprise involves extracting
and applying them to every aspect of life, illustrating Smith’s concept of
“exegetical totalization.” But in place of Wallnau’s numerology, Grudem
uses a concordance. The malleability of scriptural texts under this exe-
getical technique is on especially strong display in Grudem’s treatment of
the sexual ethics of a president, where he deploys the very same verse to
warn against the evil influences on society from Bill Clinton’s transgres-
sions, on the one hand, and to justify endorsing Trump despite his, on the
other. In short, if the embrace of Trump by evangelicals is the culmina-
tion of long-cherished ideals, so also the use of scripture as an authorita-
tive source of religious and political legitimation is, in part, consistent

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22 Courtney J. P. Friesen

with the legacy of fundamentalism while at the same time resembling

ancient ritualizations of sacred texts as icons.
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