Parochial Joel Miller is offended that Donald Trump doesn't venerate the host

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.

Moses and the American founders

From James P. Byrd, here:

[T]he story of Moses and the Exodus was one of the most cited biblical texts in revolutionary America. In 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, about “a Parallel between the Case of Israel and that of America.” John Adams had heard this preached in a sermon, and he thought it was enlightening because it “indicated strongly the Design of Providence that We should be separated from G. Britain.” ...

In 1776, when Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson discussed what should be on a “Great Seal” for the new nation, they both thought of the Exodus story. As John Adams reported, Franklin wanted the seal to feature the parting of the Red Sea, with Moses raising his staff while Pharaoh and his chariots of soldiers drowned as the waters closed in on them. In contrast, Jefferson wanted another scene from the Exodus, with the Israelites led through the wilderness by a cloud in daytime and a pillar if fire at night.

Some of the founders saw themselves as politically enslaved by the British “pharaoh,” King George III, and his oppressive policies. ... [M]any patriots adopted this story, viewing themselves as the new Israel, and naming George Washington the American Moses. ... 

[Thomas Paine] turned to 1 Samuel 8 to make his case. Paine asserted that God did not want the people to have a king. God warned that kings would oppress them, and so they did, Paine argued. 

George Washington, My Kind Of Protestant

From George Will, here:

George Washington famously would not kneel to pray. And when his pastor rebuked him for setting a bad example by leaving services before communion, Washington mended his ways in his characteristically austere manner: He stayed away from church on communion Sundays. He acknowledged Christianity's "benign influence" on society, but no ministers were present and no prayers were said when he died a stoic's death. This, even though Washington had proclaimed in his famous Farewell Address (which to this day is read aloud in Congress every year on his birthday) that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" for "political prosperity." He said, "Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." He warned that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Rod Dreher And David Bentley Hart Finally Say Something Wholly Agreeable And Right

 

 

Here:

If you don’t believe there is any cosmic order undergirding the visible world, and if you don’t believe that you are obliged to harmonize your own behavior with that unseen order (the Tao, you might say), then why should you bind yourself to moral precepts you find disagreeable or uncongenial? The most human act could be not to yield to nature, but to defy nature. Why shouldn’t you? Or, to look at it another way, why should we consider our own individual desires unnatural? Does the man who sexually and emotionally desires union with another man defying [sic] nature? Well, says Hart, it depends on what you consider nature to be.

In the final analysis the struggle for conservatism in America is the struggle for America, the struggle for the priority of what Russell Kirk called the permanent things, for what Plato called the ideas, for what Moses called the words written by the finger of God on the holy mountain, for what Paul claimed was written on every Gentile heart, perhaps even for what the Confucians called the mandate of heaven, and surely for what George Washington called an indispensable support: the religion and morality we all once shared, "with slight shades of difference" he said.

It is fundamentally the struggle for the priority of a transcendent moral order which cannot be derisively swept aside as passe "social issues." Neither "fiscal conservatism" nor liberty can exist without "Thou shalt not steal." There can be no rapprochement with libertarianism, not even as a private matter, and the First Amendment must be rescued from those who insist its intent was inspired by the ideological thinking of the Enlightenment's atheists rather than by the progress of specifically Christian weariness with internecine warfare over religion.