There is no doubt that, to be president of a country, one must possess a good dose of egocentrism. At the very least, one must believe that one has the formula to resolve the problems of one’s country—and even of the world. There are, however, pathological cases of narcissism among powerful presidents. This leads these singular figures to break with protocol, with written and unwritten norms, and, nowadays, thanks to digital technologies and AI, to project their public image with spiritual and quasi-theological elements.
The case of Donald Trump and his recent controversy with Pope Leo XIV comes to mind. The head of the Catholic Church has called for peace, as one might expect. Trump took this as a criticism of his policy toward Iran. Vice President JD Vance entered the fray to tell the Pope to be “more careful when speaking about theology.” To make matters worse, Trump had decided to publish a holy-card-like image on his social network in which he appears dressed in a Christ-like robe, healing a convalescent man with the “power” of a small light emanating from his hand, in a celestial-apocalyptic scene. The president of the United States had to delete the controversial image. He later shared another one in which he is seen next to a Jesus figure embracing him.
In Latin America, deified presidents have precedents. Although she was not the president of Argentina, Eva Perón—Saint Evita, to whom the journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez dedicated an excellent novel—lived her passion and death before the eyes of the devotees of “the Lady,” as they called her. Evita was, in her own way, a product of popular culture. A radio soap opera actress, she understood very well the importance of the media in politics. As Jorge Luis Borges wrote, the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón and Evita (they were a political-mythical duo) was marked by
“[…] years of opprobrium and foolishness; the methods of commercial propaganda and of littérature pour concierges were applied to the government of the republic. Thus there were two histories: one, criminal in nature, made up of prisons, tortures, prostitutions, thefts, deaths, and fires; another, theatrical in character, made up of nonsense and fables for the consumption of louts […]”
Another, more recent example is that of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. On several occasions, he assumed the role of demiurge. The most notable of these was the opening of Simón Bolívar’s sarcophagus on July 16, 2010. Broadcast urbi et orbi on television, it was an event somewhere between the grotesque and the ritual, in which Chávez sought to assume the role of a new Liberator by showing the world the skeletal remains of the patriotic hero, whom the president symbolically brought down from the altars to lower him into the pit of death.
Another moment came when Chávez assumed the role of a Catholic priest in a quasi-homily he delivered—amid tears (he implored for healing from the cancer that killed him) and jokes (he recalled his parents’ courtship)—during a Holy Thursday Mass on April 5, 2012, in Sabaneta de Barinas (his birthplace). Broadcast on television, Chávez’s improvised address repeatedly showed him standing before a Nazarene carrying the cross. Once again, the president-commander sought to merge himself with a religious figure (on that occasion, with the most important religious figure in a predominantly Catholic Venezuela).
A mix of politics and religion
The convergence of politics and religion today marks several global conflicts. Iran’s ayatollahs base their ideology on an eschatological Shiism grounded in the idea of a twelfth and final Mahdi (the equivalent of a messiah) who is in occultation. For the Mahdi to reveal himself, Iranian clerics believe, it would be necessary to hasten the End Times by unleashing a war of apocalyptic proportions against what Iranian leaders call the Great Satan (the United States) and the Little Satan (Israel).
In Israel, some factions of the current government led by Benjamin Netanyahu are inspired by a nationalist messianism with an eye also on final redemption. This is the case of the controversial national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (Otzma Yehudit, “Jewish Power”) and the likewise contentious finance minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party), who advocate an ideology of maximalist aspirations according to which Israel should exercise sovereignty over all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
In India, the ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party, combines nationalism with Hinduism. Its program champions the socio-religious values of Hinduism, maintains problematic positions regarding India’s Muslim minority (around 14% of the population), and adopts belligerent stances toward its Muslim-majority neighbor, Pakistan.
It seems that the advent of modernity has not clearly ensured the separation between “church and state.” The republican principle derived from the revolutions of the eighteenth century—a division between earthly and celestial powers—has been tested several times in the twenty-first century. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a crusade against the enemies of the United States and the West was invoked (as President George W. Bush did), Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations resurfaced, and populists on the right and left have opportunistically drawn on a second-hand theology to justify their warlike or revolutionary actions.
As early as 1978, in the run-up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the French intellectual Michel Foucault enthusiastically observed the “spiritualization of politics.” An atheist like him, anti-disciplinary and anti-power, saw in the Islamization of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini an explosive mix that would forever change power relations in the Middle East and in the Islamic world more broadly. Foucault was not wrong. However, the explosive mixture of religion and politics guarantees neither peace nor stability. The results are plain to see.
Autor
Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. Consultant on communication and health, crisis management and corporate social responsibility. PhD from the University of Montreal.
