Why Trump as King Cyrus?

I'm exploring the positive effects of shared narratives. Specifically, I'm looking at the narrative of Trump as a modern-day King Cyrus that many Evangelicals believe and share. I have a habit of thinking about these stories in a negative light, as harmful or false in some way, but I think that is in part because I do not identify with Evangelicals. Thus, I have tried to define and understand such stories from the outside, which tends to focus on the distinctions and differences between Evangelicals and myself. I'm trying to explore these stories in a more positive light, more from the inside. My first question is why the Trump as King Cyrus narrative at all? Why has this story gained traction in the Evangelical community?

My approach to this question borrows heavily from Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm, which I explored in several posts in late 2020, starting here. Fisher's paradigm still makes sense to me, and I use it liberally in many of my posts. Key to Fisher's thinking is the idea that narrative lies at the heart of human identity and human community. Fisher claims that we all can think through narrative rationality, while not all of us have a command of formal rationality. To my mind, this narrative rationality is more a matter of being rather than knowing, ontology rather than epistemology. Our stories define who we are and how we live more than what we know about ourselves and our world. Though both forms of rationality can overlap and complement each other, they can as easily conflict with each other. For this post, the key idea is that stories can define from the inside who we are as individuals and as a community. I think the Trump as Cyrus story helps Evangelicals do just that: define who they believe themselves to be. Stories also define from the outside. Non-evangelicals can learn much about Evangelicals by exploring the stories that they share among themselves.

Cyrus cylinder, after 539 BC

For instance, the King Cyrus story (I recounted the Evangelical version in my previous post) can be read in other ways, and the reading by Evangelicals says as much about them as it does about the story or about King Cyrus. Largely Evangelicals have emphasized a couple of points in the King Cyrus story: persecution and deliverance, but this is not the only possible reading.

The Cyrus Cylinder in the British Museum has provided archaeologists and historians with a different reading of the same story. According to the British Museum website, this clay cylinder is "a Babylonian account of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus in 539 BC, of his restoration to various temples of statues removed by Nabonidus, the previous king of Babylon, and of his own work at Babylon." Written from a Babylonian perspective, the cylinder appears to be propaganda to justify and praise Cyrus' occupation of Babylon and reversal of some of the policies of the previous Assyrian rulers, all under the divine guidance of Marduk. Though Cyrus was not a worshipper of Marduk, the god of Babylon, the god uses Cyrus to relieve the Babylonians of the harsh Assyrian rule, which tried to destroy the temples and worship of non-Assyrian gods, including the Israelite god Yahweh. Cyrus reversed this policy, among others, allowing conquered people, including the Jews, to worship their own gods.

This telling of the Cyrus story emphasizes the Babylonians and their god Marduk rather than the Israelites and Yahweh, as we might expect of a Babylonian story, but the story has also been read in different ways by modern scholars. The British Museum notes: "Because of its references to just and peaceful rule, and to the restoration of deported peoples and their gods the cylinder has in recent years been referred to in some quarters as a kind of 'charter of human rights'. In his article "Cyrus the Great, Exiles, and foreign Gods: a comparison of assyrian and persian policies on Subject nations" (2014), R. J. van der Spek of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam notes that Cyrus:

has a good reputation … among modern historians [who] stress his tolerance toward the countries and nations he subdued. It is mentioned time and again that he allowed them freedom of religion, that he behaved respectfully toward Babylon and its temple cults, and that he reinstated several cults, especially that of the god of Israel in Jerusalem. … [A replica of the Cyrus Cylinder has] been on display since in the UN headquarters in New York as “the first declaration of human rights.” A state-organized conference intended as homage to Cyrus was held in shiraz. In the same vein, Cyrus’ tolerance was treated by Cyrus Masroori in a volume dedicated to religious toleration. (233-234)

Van der Spek praises this reading of the Cyrus story by academics as a corrective to "the usual Eurocentric approach to the history of the near East in traditional scholarship, which tends to see all the blessings of modern civilization as coming solely from Greece and Rome"; however, he goes on to show how these changes in policy were likely the result of political expediency rather than a shift in thinking about political tolerance and the rights of individual citizens. It appears, then, that academics are quite capable of creating their own stories that introduce anachronistic elements such as social tolerance and individual political rights when it suits their own identities. For this post, the main point is that any community can repurpose a narrative to meet its own needs and to clarify its own identity. Evangelicals are not unusual in this respect; rather, they are typical.

It is worth noting here, however, that Evangelicals do not emphasize the themes of tolerance and individual rights that modern scholars have seen in the Cyrus story. Rather, they emphasize persecution and restoration. While it's likely that none of these themes were on Cyrus' mind at the time he was conquering Babylon, emphasizing those different themes today says more about Evangelicals and about modern scholars than it does about Cyrus. The Cyrus story is a narrative structure, then, that both communities use to define who they are, both internally to themselves and externally to others. That both communities likely miss the factual King Cyrus is almost irrelevant to their use of the story.

That stories can help identify a community is for me reminiscent of McAdams' concept of narrative identity, "a person's internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming", except of course applied to a group rather than an individual. As McAdams notes, narratives, and in our case shared narratives, provide "the [group] with temporal coherence and some semblance of psychosocial unity and purpose". This is an important insight, I think, that emphasizes the personal aspect of narrative identity. Evangelicals see the attacks on their community as attacks on themselves and their families. When they see the government and popular media privileging other social communities such as illegal aliens and LGBTQ+, then they feel personally affronted and threatened not just for Evangelicals but for themselves individually. This personal attack (it feels very much like an attack to them) opens them to anyone (Donald Trump) who will promise restoration, or to Make America Great Again. It also makes many of them willing to fight, to grab their guns and march on Washington to stop the steal of their country and their place in it. As most any psychologist will confirm, threats to one's personal identity are existential threats worth fighting against.

So the first concept I borrow from Fisher is that narratives express the identity of those who share them. A second key concept that I borrow from Fisher involves the good reasons a story must meet to be accepted by a community. As with most all communities, Evangelicals expect narratives to pass three tests:

1. narrative coherence: Does the story of King Cyrus make sense in itself, or as Caldiero says in his article Crisis Storytelling: "Is the story free of contradictions? Does it 'hang together?' Is it consistent (Fisher, 1985, pp. 349, 364)?"
2. narrative fidelity: Does the story fit well with other stories that Evangelicals already know and believe? Caldiero says: "Does the story exist on the same plane as other stories the reader has experienced? What are the “truth qualities" of the story? Is the reasoning sound? How good is the reproduction of the story? What is its value (Fisher, 1985, p. 349ff; 1987)?"
3. narrative context: Both coherence and fidelity are tempered by a person's own "history, culture, and perceptions about the status and character of the other people involved (all of which may be subjective and incompletely understood)" (Narrative paradigm). Both coherence and fidelity — or what we might call the fit or feel of a story — is determined not solely by the characteristics inherent within a story but also by the life history of the people hearing the story. Stories that fit well with what people already know and value are more readily accepted. Those that don't fit require much more persuasion, if not coercion. Thus, we cannot think merely of a narrative argument as a discrete thing itself with its own internal logic and probabilities as we can with a syllogism; rather, we must account for the ecosystem within which the narrative argument is expressed.

Is the King Cyrus story coherent? This is a tricky question when dealing with stories from The Bible, but the short answer is yes, especially for Evangelicals who view The Bible as the literal, inerrant, perfect Word of God. Any perceived inconsistencies and errors in the Word of God are the fault of the reader, not the Text. Evangelical exegesis is primarily involved with ironing out inconsistencies between the two creation stories in Genesis or the four Christologies in the Gospels or the One God among others in the Old Testament with the Three-person God among no others in the New Testament. God's Word is Truth and One. If we modern readers see double, then the fault is with us, not The Bible. For Evangelicals, the King Cyrus story in the Christian Old Testament is coherent and factually true, and they work very hard to read it as such.

But is the Trump as King Cyrus story coherent? Again, yes. If you believe that from time-to-time God involves Himself in the daily business of national politics to alleviate the suffering of His People, as He so clearly did in the Biblical narrative, then it is easy to see the parallels between the persecuted Israelites in Babylon and the persecuted Evangelicals in the United States. In the first case, God used King Cyrus to address the suffering of the Israelites, and in the second, God is using Donald Trump to address the suffering of Evangelicals. The parallels are obvious if one focuses on just a handful of data points such as oppression and liberation and ignores the other salient data points such as political expediency, social justice, or individual rights. This selective focus on just a few points can hardly be criticized, though, as it is a function of all narratives – just ask any story teller. All narratives leave out more than they include, and what is left out of any narrative is just as telling as what is included. We might criticize the points that a narrative includes or excludes, but we can hardly criticize a narrative for not including everything. Narrative coherence requires selection. Otherwise a story would collapse into a wallowing delta and never end.

Does the King Cyrus story fit well with other stories that Evangelicals already know and believe? Again, yes. The story is in The Bible. By default, all stories in The Bible must be accepted as the literal Word of God that tells a single, coherent story about the relationship between God and His People, in this case Evangelicals. I can attest from my own experience that many Evangelicals believe themselves to be God's Only People and that all Biblical stories relate to them.

Which brings us to the third test: contextual relevance. The story of King Cyrus fits well with the life experience of Evangelicals both as a group and as individuals. Evangelicals perceive that their demographic is no longer the dominant group in America, and their experience with both mainstream and social media reveals to them that their group is regularly attacked and denigrated by others. They feel oppressed, just like the Israelites in Babylon. In Evangelical thought, Babylon is routinely used as a metaphor for the World, all of society that is not within the Evangelical community.

Then, the character of Cyrus fits well with the character of Trump. Most Evangelicals know that Donald Trump is not a born-again Christian Evangelical and that he does not claim to be; however, they see the Hand of God in his miraculous victory over hateful Hillary, his defense of strong borders, and his defeat of ungodly abortionists. They concede Trump's failures as a Christian Evangelical, but they accept how God is using him to combat the demonic forces oppressing them – just as God did with King Cyrus.

As improbable as Trump as King Cyrus might seem to me, I can understand why Evangelicals can accept it accept it as historical fact: the narrative expresses who they perceive themselves to be and it has all the good reasons for why an identity narrative should be believed.

So what benefits do Evangelicals gain by believing this story? I'll address that question next.