Image, It Seems, Is Everything. Even For Christians These Days.

So the defining image of the Western political cycle is now set to be this:

I’m sitting here in an airport listening in to the conversations thirteen thousand miles away from the scene, and it’s pretty much the only conversation.

And this image defines it. And then what Trump said next: “Fight, fight, fight!”

I’ve been bemused and not a little alarmed to see Christians outside the USA put this up as a profile picture. And then seeing something like this being posted as well:

There’s something about this that seems dangerously close to blasphemy.  Something that sits very close to propaganda. And the great irony of course, is that this is the exact Psalm that Satan quotes to Jesus when trying to lure him into grasping at power with truly trusting God. Sure he could pay lip service to His Father, but he would be denying the power of heaven even while claiming it as his source.

When it comes to delivering a message, image is everything in our setting. We – not only as Westerners – but as humans made in God’s image, have a propensity to be shaped by what we can see, rather than what is actually there.

Our politics has long been reduced to image. Think of this poster and the power it had a few short years ago:

The creative types on the modern Left in the West know how to use image so well, in a softer way than say the hard propaganda of their mid-century European Communist forebears, or indeed the fascists of Europe.  But image is everything. That’s why we are so impacted by the various social medias, porn, advertising etc. Images tell a story in a way that words can often fail too. Or poorly crafted words at least.

Which is why we must use images very carefully. The same images that purport to tell the truth also hide meaning. They often tell lies. And in this age of AI curated imagery, the lies they tell are getting harder to spot.

The image of Trump at the top of the page is a brilliantly captured moment of history that has now entered the news cycle and the public consciousness. But it will no doubt be used for much more than that. It will be used as hagiography to tell the story of a leader, despised and rejected by the elite, and then nearly killed for his troubles, resurfacing in triumph.

In other words, a gospel story. This image will be used time and time again over the coming months to tell the good news story of how one man is going to make America great again. Again.

Look, I don’t buy into all of the incendiary stuff about Trump. I think he’s a poor example of a man, a narcissist leader who garners sycophants and cuts loose anyone who would dare challenge him or even direct him firmly away from decisions he should not make.

And I don’t buy into the fact that no one could ever vote for him and stay Christian or have any morals etc. The very same people who have been saying that for the past two years were the same people assuring us how noble and upright the ruling Democrats were. Saving the world from fascism and for democracy etc, etc.

You see the 0ther abiding image of the past few weeks in the US election campaign is the dull, almost deflated,  look on Biden’s face during the debate:

And those images from that night told me that even if Trump is the liar the Democrats say he is, then they are the collective liar that we know them now to be. The same propaganda machine that gave us Trump’s fist pump, tried – and failed – to give us a President Biden who was fit, vigorous and across any topic in the world at any time of the day.

They’ve tried to give us image after image of the president in aviator sunglasses stepping across tarmac, when in reality he needs to be led by the arm to get down two steps of a news studio.

We’re reduced to propaganda. And I get increasingly dismayed when I see Christians just line up with everyone else to showcase their own version of it.  Sure, vote for a candidate, but can we stop leaning into, and falling for, the same methods that tyranny has used for millennia, whether the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans or the communists and fascists of the 20th century?

Biblical Christianity eschews image. Not images.  There is nothing wrong with images, given that eight billion images of God are walking around on the planet today, and that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:5).

Yet even in the face of those realities, the gospel power comes through word not image. In fact the image often belies the word. The gospel image looks weak (ask the image-oriented Corinthian Christians how embarrassed they were about Paul’s lack of image). It was the power of the spoken gospel that was transformative.

The gospel image favours the poor. The gospel image rejects the idea that the rich man coming into church should be treated with more respect than the poor man (James 2).  Yet we so often do it. We’re suckers for image.

Perhaps a better image to reflect upon is this image, the one that to me is more telling than the one at the top of this blog post:

The bullet whizzing past his head, nicking his ear, and then passing on harmlessly.

How far was Donald Trump from eternity at that very moment? How far from standing before the true ruler of the freed world and accounting for his life lived without Jesus as his king?

A head swivel perhaps?

How far from a full blown civil war in the USA? Did God stop that from happening? Well if you believe in His sovereignty, and the fact that neither a sparrow – or a bullet – will fall to the ground without him knowing, then for sure.

Let’s not give in to image and propaganda. Champion your party or your man or woman who is running. But let’s not put them up in the 21st century equivalent of a cathedral’s stained glass.

Instead, let’s sober ourselves and remind each other that our faith is an apocalyptic one: the beastly truth of human power is hidden by the confected image, as the biblical material in Daniel and Revelation remind us.