Here:
Trump went on to explain the role of the eucharist in his routine. “When I drink my little wine . . . and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness,” he said. Little wine? Little cracker? I winced both times I read the word. He might as well have said adorable or dainty. Frankly, even Trump’s flippant toss of the word cracker is off-putting. Even if the thing in his hand is identifiably a cracker, it’s not a cracker. It is the bread of life, the broken body of Christ, the bread of heaven, the food of angels, the medicine of immortality. This is how the Bible and early Christians spoke of Trump’s crumb. For him to call it a cracker is to demonstrate he knows nothing of what he is doing.
This may come as a shock to Joel Miller, but hostility to wafer-worship is as American as the father of our country, George Washington, who declined to attend communion so often that when his pastor complained he was setting a bad example stopped coming to church altogether on communion Sundays.
That, too, would no doubt exasperate Miller because the Orthodox and the Catholic cannot imagine a service without the Mass.
Trump, a Presbyterian, has gone to his communion enough times to describe accurately the typical mainline Protestant version of the sacrament, which is more than can be said for the surprisingly parochial Joel Miller.
