Next to vacuum cleaners and Fuller brushes, Bibles are still remembered as something peddled door-to-door from a suitcase. The meme of the evil Yankee carpetbagger lived on in the post-Civil War South, but that didn’t stop folks from welcoming in a sweet-talking local gent who had himself a way.

The pivotal character in one of Flannery O’Connor’s most famous stories, “Good Country People,” published in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), is a door-to-door Bible salesman presenting himself as “just a country boy” by the name of Manley Pointer. Proclaiming that “the word of God ought to be in the parlor,” he enters the world of Mrs. Hopewell of the property-owning class and her unmarried, Ph.D.-laden daughter who has a wooden leg owing to a childhood shooting accident. Mrs. Hopewell has crafted for herself a fatuous complacency of benevolence toward the lower classes, while her daughter, Joy (who has changed her name to Hulga), is an atheist whose bitterness toward Southern ignorance prompts her idea to seduce this clueless hick with her sophistication and send him packing.

Although the country boy has presented himself as an earnest “Chrustian,” once he gets Joy/Hulga into the barn’s hayloft and gets her to remove both her glasses and wooden leg, he reveals that one of his Bibles is hollowed out, containing a flask of whiskey, a pornographic card deck, and a box of condoms. His brutal con and his contempt for everything Joy/Hulga stands for shatters her carefully curated narrative of superiority, and he ends up running off with her leg.

While Donald Trump is not going door to door, he started selling Trump-branded Bibles during what he identified as Holy Week. As he told a crowd in 2016: “We love The Art of the Deal, but the Bible is far, far, far superior, right?” As Bible salesmen go, I’m sure Trump would consider himself a manly pointer . . . especially to the wide array of “Trump”-branded merchandise for sale on his campaign website. When he visited Mount Vernon in 2018, he said of George Washington’s plantation home: “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it. You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.” When Kristi Noem was running for governor of South Dakota, Trump reportedly told her in the Oval Office that he wanted his face added to Mount Rushmore, which he himself suggested in a tweet on August 10, 2020. But you have to wonder if he’d think it worth it without the “Trump” branding. A few pieces of rock fall off, and who could tell who that was supposed to be?

Trump’s $59.99 Bible is a licensed update of a product marketed by country singer Lee Greenwood. The Greenwood merchandise contained the handwritten lyrics of his 1984 song “God Bless the U.S.A.” attached to the text of the New International version of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and all 31 words of The Pledge of Allegiance. Trump’s signature product swaps out the globalist cabal “international” version of the Bible in favor of the classier King James but keeps all the rest, including the U.S. flag on its leather cover.

Besides making him some direly needed cash, Trump’s portmanteau Bibles add more fuel to the idea that all of America’s problems are caused by people not like us—the ones who don’t identify as Christian and are neither patriotic nor fans of country music. Trump’s Bibles are for good country people, who, by the way, are 100% blameless for whatever problem you got. Although Trump appointed two Roman Catholics to the Supreme Court, he made sure they weren’t the forgiveness kind of Catholics. You have to wonder what Flannery O’Connor, whose Catholicism was central to her identity, would’ve made of him.

The mid-1950s of O’Connor’s story were hardly the mid-1950s that the MAGA faithful consider so great. She was not alone in seeing despair in the post-God, existential age of anxiety. In 1952, a book based on a speech by the theologian Paul Tillich became a best-seller. The Courage to Be was his response to America’s growing sense of meaninglessness in an unequal society awash in consumer goods. Though people found it hard to believe in God after Hiroshima and during the Cold War, they still wanted to believe in something. But the 1950s are long gone, and though Americans believe in a lot of things, more and more, God is not one of them. In 2013, 20% of respondents to PRRI’s nationwide poll of religious affiliation said they were atheists, agnostics, or simply not part of any religious tradition; in the same PRRI poll conducted in 2023, that unaffiliated segment had risen to more than 25%.

Because O’Connor’s stories are about white people in the midcentury South, racism is always a plot point. But it’s really social class that she picks apart—the perceptions of people who feel elevated because of money and those who feel so because they are educated. Her characters see society on a spectrum between decency and degeneracy, and they are always conscious of their “rightful” place on that spectrum. The land-owning Mrs. Hopewell has hired the Freeman family of tenant farmers to help her run the farm, but she has reservations as to how much she should interact with her social inferiors, telling herself stories to rationalize her fealty to the unspoken hierarchy:

Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people.

An O’Connor story about Trump’s Bibles would be focused on the buyer, not the seller. O’Connor is famous for hateful Southern characters that people have called “grotesques,” but Donald Trump would never be one of them, just like Manley Pointer is not one of them. The hucksters and the frauds are always at the margins of the plot because they are unreachable within the economy of salvation. When the Bible salesman gets Joy/Hulga de-legged in the hayloft and has stuck the goods in his Bible suitcase, he gives her some parting wisdom:

“I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”

O’Connor would saturate a Trump Bible story with the twisting and writhing of racial and class-based hate and all the contortions one goes through to repel Christian love. And the part where you’d expect retribution to rain down on the identified “grotesque” is always something entirely different. O’Connor’s hypocritical bigots aren’t redeemed; they are grabbed and shaken by bearing witness to grace. There are, in fact, no heroes in her fiction. “We are living in an age which doubts both fact and value,” she wrote. “It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge. The novelist can no longer reflect a balance from the world he sees around him; instead, he has to try to create one.”

In O’Connor’s time, Catholics with their “worldly” (read: Vatican-controlled) dispositions were distrusted by America’s mainstream Protestant culture. You can see why a Catholic writer in the deep South would advise any writer of fiction to create their own world with its own system of justice. You have to wonder what O’Connor would make of many Americans of faith today—people who get very inventive and creative when reconciling hatreds and bigotry with their “Christ Is King” Twitter handles. Or the liberal agnostics who have long enjoyed the cover of caring passionately about “democracy” when it’s only personal freedom they are willing to make sacrifices for. Or for that matter, the growing extreme conservatism of U.S. priests ordained since 2020 and what that means for a Catholic population that has historically been politically diverse. How would she feel about conservative priests thinking Pope Francis overstepped his bounds by mentioning “the sin of racism” when he addressed the unrest of the George Floyd protests?

Given the racism that O’Connor herself revealed in her personal correspondence, it would be easy to cast her work aside. But that would be a mistake, since the relentless small-minded cruelty shown by her characters reveals to us how our humanity is interwoven, and how accepting our share of the blame is not a burden but a means to enlightenment. The Christians who have reconciled themselves to Trump’s hate and racism have the thinnest skin in the world, like some fragile Amazon amphibian that will melt if the word “blame” is whispered. O’Connor would never think of herself as a mystic, but the intensity of feeling that she describes in her essay collection Mystery and Manners has much to offer people who don’t believe in God but have a gaping need to experience something greater about our shared humanity than the mortal pleasures that a self-focused capitalist culture keeps shoving in our faces. She understood that a lot of hurt and harm is done by people who genuinely want to be good.

O’Connor had a dark sense of humor and would have relished the ugly irony of Trump launching his Bible with a God-infused national anthem on the same day as the collapse of a bridge named after Francis Scott Key, the lyricist for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She would have noticed the ugly irony of the bridge’s collapse being caused by a hit from a cargo ship full of the stuff that fuels our insatiable desires—cars and deck furniture, bidets and paving stones, hair extensions and canine camo coats, and maybe even some hollowed-out Bibles. §