Heaven Or...???

Apart from appreciating their entertainment value, we usually need not pay much attention to the random ruminations of the current Commander-in-Chief. But his candid admission last month that he is unlikely to pass through the pearly gates (“I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into Heaven. I think I’m not maybe Heaven-bound") — a comment that he tried to walk back last week on account of a sharply negative reaction among many Christians in his base — is just too revealing to be ignored or dismissed.

It's revealing, first of all, that such a normally self-regarding person would say "I hear I'm not doing well. I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole" in relation to his prospects for eternal felicity. It's not that this president shows no interest at all in immortality. On the contrary, Trump wants the Treasury to issue a commemorative dollar coin for the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence that will feature his image on both sides. This is the sort of thing that kings and emperors of old did in making their bids for immortality. For all I know, Trump may yet ask to have a gold sarcophagus made up for the purpose of displaying his remains in an alcove of the new gilded ballroom.

My theory is that Trump knows full well that he is radically unfit for Heaven, especially with new Epstein connection details still coming out. He also knows that he would be unhappy and kind of lost up there. As Mark Twain wrote in his long-suppressed and highly sarcastic Letters from the Earth, it's hard to imagine that someone who has exhibited a robust interest in sex while inhabiting this mortal coil could be very happy in a sexless Heaven. Plucking a harp all day and singing hymns in a white robe isn't exactly Donald J. Trump's idea of fun, even if the streets are paved in gold.

Whereas it seems to me that the Other Place may be of considerable interest to Trump, who is more than capable of giving the Father of Lies a run for his money in the duplicity department. It's hard not to think of Trump's ingrained habit of charging others with the crimes he himself commits as anything less than supremely satanic (e.g., he pardons actual insurrectionists who are close to him while prosecuting defenders of the rule of law as terrorists and enemies of the state — and this convicted fraudster is bent on jailing others for alleged and much less serious infractions of tax laws than his own massive violations).

In short, Trump might be itching to displace the Devil himself as King of the Underworld. He does have that all-or-nothing kind of drive.

But the other reason Trump's thoughts about Heaven are so revealing lies in their theological crudeness. Heaven or Hell: a binary choice. Not that we should expect the man who clutched the Bible upside-down during the George Floyd protests to know all that much about the Good Book's contents. But suffice it to say that the scriptures are sketchy on the subject of post-mortem destinations. There are plenty of suggestions here and there that we are making our own heavens or hells by how we behave in the here and now.

I want to tread carefully here, and I lack space to fully develop the idea, but it seems pretty clear that the reference to "a great gulf fixed" in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) is a rhetorical device to underscore the self-damnation of the miserly rich man. As for the separation of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25, again I detect an effective rhetoric designed to drive home the point that the uncharitable and unjust have fatally separated themselves from God.

The crude picture of a strict division of real estate in the hereafter comes mainly from medieval churchly thought (although the church also came up with a way station called Purgatory). The division is made especially vivid in the great epic poem of Dante Alighieri: “The Divine Comedy.” But even in Dante's Inferno, there is a very strong suggestion that the damned in those various circles prepared their own hells through the way they lived: the sinners are all shown to be getting an intensive dose of their own poisons.

The converse is also true, of course: the virtuous are building up a heaven, even as the malefactors are outfitting a hell. If we take the Lord's Prayer seriously, we are invited to bring heaven to earth by doing justice and loving mercy ("thy will be done on earth, even as it is in heaven"). The single most evocative and moving picture of heavenly rest in the Hebrew Scriptures — in Isaiah 35 — also clearly points to a realm in which justice finally comes to prevail: this is an earthly paradise where "sorrow and sighing will flee away."

Again, I do not expect Mr. Trump to know anything about subtleties like these. And if a bit of apprehension about meeting his Maker causes this president to tremble now and again, it can't be an altogether bad thing, can it?

- Peter