{"id":56208,"date":"2026-04-26T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/?p=56208"},"modified":"2026-04-25T14:46:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T17:46:13","slug":"presidents-semi-gods-and-second-hand-theologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/presidents-semi-gods-and-second-hand-theologies\/","title":{"rendered":"Presidents, Semi-Gods, and Second-Hand Theologies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s country\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cmore careful when speaking about theology.\u201d 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 \u201cpower\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Latin America, deified presidents have precedents. Although she was not the president of Argentina, Eva Per\u00f3n\u2014Saint Evita, to whom the journalist Tom\u00e1s Eloy Mart\u00ednez dedicated an excellent novel\u2014lived her passion and death before the eyes of the devotees of \u201cthe Lady,\u201d 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 Per\u00f3n and Evita (they were a political-mythical duo) was marked by<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[\u2026] years of opprobrium and foolishness; the methods of commercial propaganda and of litt\u00e9rature pour concierges<\/em> 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 [\u2026]\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another, more recent example is that of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez in Venezuela. On several occasions, he assumed the role of demiurge. The most notable of these was the opening of Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar’s sarcophagus on July 16, 2010. Broadcast urbi et orbi<\/em> on television, it was an event somewhere between the grotesque and the ritual, in which Ch\u00e1vez 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another moment came when Ch\u00e1vez assumed the role of a Catholic priest in a quasi-homily he delivered\u2014amid tears (he implored for healing from the cancer that killed him) and jokes (he recalled his parents\u2019 courtship)\u2014during a Holy Thursday Mass on April 5, 2012, in Sabaneta de Barinas (his birthplace). Broadcast on television, Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A mix of politics and religion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The convergence of politics and religion today marks several global conflicts. Iran\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201cJewish Power\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s Muslim minority (around 14% of the population), and adopts belligerent stances toward its Muslim-majority neighbor, Pakistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems that the advent of modernity has not clearly ensured the separation between \u201cchurch and state.\u201d The republican principle derived from the revolutions of the eighteenth century\u2014a division between earthly and celestial powers\u2014has 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As early as 1978, in the run-up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the French intellectual Michel Foucault enthusiastically observed the \u201cspiritualization of politics.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From presidential narcissism to the sacralization of power, contemporary leaders blend politics and religion in a dangerous staging that strains democracies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":263,"featured_media":56217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17157,17047,16729],"tags":[17180],"gps":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-56208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politia-en","8":"category-lideres-politicos-en","9":"category-politica-en","10":"tag-ideas"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56211,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56208\/revisions\/56211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56208"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=56208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}