Bibles for sale!
Craig Shearer - 2 April 2024
It’s April First, as I write this, which is normally a day where various pranks are played in the name of April Fool’s Day. A quick look at the online newspapers doesn’t reveal any obvious stories, and it would appear that, in the age of the internet, the day has lost its usefulness.
But this last week, former US president Donald Trump, king of “hoaxes” announced his latest fund-raising effort - the God Bless the USA Bible. I put “hoaxes” in quotes because, of course, the things that Trump calls hoaxes aren’t hoaxes in the usual sense of the word, where a trick is being played to deceive people, often in a humorous way.
“Happy Holy Week” declared Trump on social media. Trump claims he has “many” Bibles in his home, and that it’s his favourite book. Trump will “Make America Pray Again”. Trump’s latest product joins a long list of previously sold items, such as ties, vodka, steaks, menswear (all now defunct), and most-recently, $400 gold-upper sneakers.
The God Bless the USA Bible is a specially themed American “patriotic” print. The “God Bless the USA” part relates to a famous country song by singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood.
The song was written back in 1984, but has been popular with Republican presidential candidates at their rallies, and at times of great stress in the US - such as the launch of Operation: Desert Storm in 1991, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. And it’s been used at Trump’s campaign rallies in 2016 and 2020.
On the back of the popularity of the song, Greenwood created the God Bless the USA Bible back in 2021, hoping to profit off the 20th anniversary of 9/11.At that time, the bible sold for $49.99 USD. For reference, you can buy a perfectly good Bible for under $10 NZD.
The Trump version, released this past week (Holy Week, as the week leading up to Easter is known), and priced at $59.99 USD, features a tan cover (which nicely matches Trump’s face) with an embossed American flag, and gilt edges to the pages. Incidentally, the gilding of the pages can make the pages stick together, so a good test of whether somebody’s actually read their bible would be to check whether the pages have been separated!
The book also features other patriotic American texts such as the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Trump version of the bible differs from the Greenwood version in that it uses the KJV translation, whereas the Greenwood version uses the NIV translation. Apparently, the reason for this is that the KJV version is in the public domain, being literally from King James I back in the 17th century, whereas the NIV translation was done in the 1980s, and updated in 2011. As such, the NIV version would be copyrighted and would require royalties to be paid.
Of course, the KJV version (yes, I know that’s a redundant acronym) is much older, and suffers from antiquated language. According to my reading on Christianity.com, the KJV has formal equivalence, whereas the NIV has dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence means that it’s essentially a word-for-word translation from the original Hebrew and Greek, whereas dynamic equivalence is the translation of the meaning or thought of the text (as interpreted by the translator).
No doubt, the KJV version is being used to avoid the costs associated with using the NIV version, so as to maximise the profit. How Trump is benefiting from this, according to the website’s FAQ section, is that the site “isn’t political” and has “nothing to do with any political campaign”. The use of Trump’s name, likeness and image is licenced from CIC Ventures LLC, which is a Trump company. No doubt, the revenue from this is going into Trump’s pockets to pay his mounting lawyers’ bills.
An interesting fact is that there are over 100 full translations of the Bible into English, and over 3,000 translations into 2,100 languages!
It is certainly ironic that Trump is promoting a bible, when it’s fairly obvious that he’s not a Christian.
A Trump biographer claims that Trump is an atheist, though not an “out” one. Given the massive evidence of Trump’s propensity for shallow thinking, I doubt he would be able to articulate the reasons for his lack of belief in god.
From the post:
“I’m a bestselling Trump biographer, and I’m telling you that Donald Trump is an atheist. He doesn’t believe in God and never has.
There’s nothing wrong with atheism; I’m agnostic myself. But for Trump to frame himself as a Christian is heretical because—again—he’s a nonbeliever.”
There’s plenty of evidence that he’s not a Christian, and has never engaged in Christian practices or studied the Bible. There’s video of him attending a church service where the Lord’s Prayer was recited. Standing on stage, he could only mouth the well-known last line “For yours is the power, and the glory…”.
And Trump’s previous engagement with the Bible was shown in the photo of him in front of Lafayette Square in Washington DC, holding a bible upside down!
Trump may well have been the first atheist president, but of course, he courted and utilised the American Evangelical Christians, who’ve traditionally been associated with the political right.
Various Christian leaders have come out and expressed their disgust at Trump profiting off the Bible, especially during the week leading up to Easter.
To me, it’s frustrating to see people manipulated by such shallow efforts. Traditional Christian values seem to be quite divorced from the “Bible-believing” gun-toting, Evangelical Christians that support Trump. It will be interesting, come the November presidential election, how well he fares, and whether the background of legal battles, and likely at least one completed criminal court case and potential criminal conviction, affect his chances. I hope that common-sense and decency prevails, but efforts to gerrymander electoral districts, and to suppress the vote, will likely make it a close race.