Jason Ross- Faith Office Advisor Paula White-Cain offers a prayer to the God of war with President Donald Trump.Credit: White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
A year ago on Easter Sunday, President Trump shared on Truth Social what he called “the golden rule of negotiating and success": “HE WHO HAS THE GOLD MAKES THE RULES.”
One year on, the gold has not made the rules. What it has made is war.
This Holy Saturday, Trump posted:
“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE
HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out—48 hours before all Hell will reign
down on them. Glory be to GOD!”
“Glory be to GOD.” Appended to a
threat of mass destruction against a civilian population, on the holiest
weekend of the Christian calendar. The brutality of the invocation is
the point. At the White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Pastor Paula
White-Cain told the president: “Because He rose, we all know we can
rise, and, Sir, because of His resurrection you rose up. Because He was
victorious, you were victorious.” The White House posted and then
deleted the video within hours.
From Rome comes another voice, from another American. Pope Leo XIV declared
on Palm Sunday that “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom
no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of
those who wage war, but rejects them.” Echoing Isaiah, he said, “Even
though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of
blood.”
On the occasion of Easter, let us recall a different philosophy:
“Therefore
all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them,” said Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, according to Matthew.
We quote from Matthew 5:
“Love
your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,
and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that
ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh
his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and on the unjust.
“For if ye love them which love you, what
reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute
your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the
publicans so?
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
Both
Trump’s “golden rule” and his administration’s invocation of God’s
blessing for its ungodly war glorify raw power over principle. It is a
worldview in which justice, truth, and virtue are irrelevant if you’re
rich or powerful enough to achieve your aims. It denies the idea that
rules should come from natural law, reason, and the consent of the
governed, in favor of the “might makes right” outlook of Thrasymachus,
so devastatingly countered by Socrates in the first book of Plato’s Republic.
A different concept of the “golden rule” is found in the work of Cotton Mather, whose Essays To Do Good
were, excepting the Bible, the writing that most influenced Benjamin
Franklin. “If I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen,”
Franklin wrote in 1784, “the public owes the advantage of it to that book.”
In
modernized spelling, Mather writes that there is much to be done, “that
the miseries of the world may have remedies and abatements provided for
them; and that miserable people may be relieved and comforted.... What
an ample field among all these, to Do Good upon!”
Mather’s proposal: “That we resolve and study to do as much good in the world as we can.”
That is a true golden rule.
On Easter Monday, April 6, EIR will act to do good by convening an Emergency Roundtable Dialogue of Civilizations—“Is There Still Time To Prevent the War Against Iran from Escalating into a Global Nuclear Conflict?”—bringing
together strategic thinkers and representatives from Iran, the United
States, Europe, China, and the Global South, including Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Iranian Ambassador Abolfazl
Pasandideh. The premise: there is nothing more “impractical” than
allowing this war to escalate into nuclear conflict. The alternative is
the Oasis Plan—reconstruction, development corridors, desalination, and a
dialogue of civilizations that builds what cannot be bombed away.