Karma In American Actions
Dr Patrick Mendis
Karma in American Actions – Or, Has “the Mandate of Heaven” Been Bestowed Upon the Trump White House?
After his assassination order to kill the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, both domestic and international hostilities against President Donald Trump began to multiply. Since then Trump backed down on his threats but ridiculed the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei to “Make Iran Great Again.”
Within days of the president’s military order from the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, Pastor Paula White, his favorite televangelist and a newest White House aide, organized a rally of evangelical Christians at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami. There, the president singled out the two Democrat congresswomen – Somali-American Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan – and denounced that they “hate” Jewish people and then claimed God is “on our side.”
Invoking God is “on our side” is heretical and diametrically opposed to the traditional Christian faith; the true believers always want to be “on God’s side.” For the die-hard evangelical Christian base of supporters and financiers, Trump is the champion of their religious faith. And, their political agenda is cleverly shrouded in the Prosperity Gospel of health and wealth creation. For them, the genuine practice of the Christian teachings of Jesus Christ rests somewhere else.
The Mandate of Heaven over Providence?
When President Trump decided to abandon the America’s Kurdish allies fighting to defeat ISIS in Syria, Reverend Pat Robertson – the 90-year old patriarch among the influential televangelists and the founder of Christian Broadcasting Network – criticized Trump and decried that “the president of the United States is in danger of losing the Mandate of Heaven if he permits this to happen.” Using the phase “Mandate of Heaven” by a Christian is extraordinary but seemingly purpose-driven in the prevailing political environment.
The Mandate of Heaven or Tianming is an ancient Chinese political and religious doctrine. It justifies the rule of the emperor according to the natural order of the moral universe and the supreme will of the celestial power. If an emperor was unfit to govern, calamities ensued, and the mandate was withdrawn with the appropriate justice of reward and revenge. Reverend Robertson’s subtle use of the Chinese phrase was to send a coded message, which other American leaders often referred to as “Providence” or “Nature’s God” as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
When a powerful editorial in the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today described President Trump as “immoral” and called for his removal from office, the most domineering Republican group of evangelical leaders and conservative commentators rallied around the impeached president. Apparently for Reverend Robertson, Trump is acting more like a Chinese emperor or a dictator than a leader of the free world.
