Let me show you what is actually happening in that photograph of the Kennedy Center, because it’s a sight the Bible’s plain language has long since trained us to recognize. A tarp the color of a politician’s suit covers the space where a name was pried off a building, and the man who put the name there wants you to believe the tarp is about legal process. It isn’t. It’s about the oldest operation in Scripture — the one where someone who thinks he cannot be seen covers his work and calls the covering wisdom. And the Evangelical church, which should have been the first to name the operation, said nothing at all.
I know that silence. Thirty years in those pews, and the first two commandments came around every quarter in Sunday School, and the teaching was always the same: the idol is the thing in your heart that competes with God. Don’t love money more than the Lord. Don’t worship your career. Don’t put your children or your comfort before the Almighty. The commandment was about the private devotional life of the believer, and it was never — not once in thirty years — turned on the man in power.
Exodus 20:3–5, NRSV: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.”
Let me read that passage the way a people freed from Pharaoh would have heard it. God had just brought Israel out of Egypt — out from under a ruler who demanded worship, who stamped his image on every monument, who made the people build cities in his name and called the construction sacred. The first commandment is not an abstraction about the contents of your heart. It is a liberation text. It says: the ruler who demands your worship is not God. The monument bearing his name is not holy. You shall not bow. You shall not build him a temple and call it worship of the Lord.
Now let me read what Isaiah saw, writing twenty-seven centuries ago to a people who had learned what happens when a ruler’s image is treated as divine. The prophet spoke for a God who had had enough of rulers who thought the dark was the same thing as safety: “Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, ‘Who sees us? Who will know?’” (Isaiah 29:15). The Hebrew verb — sathar, to hide, to conceal, to cover over — is doing the same work the blue tarp is doing on the Kennedy Center’s facade. Both are an announcement, just not the one the concealer thinks. Both say: what is underneath cannot bear the light.
And Isaiah saw another kind of covering, too — the one where a man takes a piece of wood, burns half for warmth, and carves the other half into a god. “Half of it he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal… The rest of it he makes into a god… He falls down before it and worships. He prays to it and says, ‘Save me! You are my god!’” (Isaiah 44:14–17, NIV). Half a tree. Half firewood. Half sacred. The prophet named the absurdity and did not apologize for naming it.
The chasm between what the text says and what the captured operation wants you to think it says is the whole column. The Christian Nationalist apparatus that spent years treating this president as a Cyrus figure — the pagan king anointed by God to restore the fortunes of the faithful, per the reading Lance Wallnau made famous in 2015 — has to read Isaiah 29 and Isaiah 44 in a specific way or not at all. It has to find a reading that exempts the ruler from the prophetic indictment while preserving the prophetic aura. The legalist machinery is excellent at this. It can hold “Cyrus” and “woe to those who hide their plans” in the same brain because it never applies the second passage to the first ruler. The machinery is designed to prevent that cross-application.
But let me be specific about what that machinery was silent about. The president — and we should be plain about who did what here — seized control of the Kennedy Center’s board last December. He sacked its leadership. He installed loyalists who immediately made him chair. He ordered his name added to the building, supposedly temporarily, alongside John F. Kennedy’s. The institution shed staff, shed artists, shed ticket buyers. A board he controlled then announced a two-year closure for renovations. A federal judge — Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee — ruled the renaming was illegal on the straightforward ground that only Congress can rename the institution. He set a midnight June 12 deadline. Trump’s lawyers appealed and lost. The Justice Department then filed a certification that the court order would be obeyed, and a crew erected scaffolding and draped that enormous tarp over the facade. Behind the tarp, workers began prying off the bronze letters. The only evidence the name actually came down is a single Associated Press photograph shot through a gap at the side of the scaffold. The public has been denied the sight of the name being removed. The tarp remains up. No one will say when it comes down.
This is a distinct move, not a random one. The operation goes like this: when a court orders you to stop doing something you were never legally authorized to do, you obey — technically — and you wrap the obedience in a visual that suggests you are being persecuted rather than corrected. The tarp becomes the instrument. It says to the faithful: they are humiliating him. It says to everyone else: he is still in control of what you are allowed to see. The physical removal of the letters happens, but the public witness to the removal — which is what Judith Levine, in her fine Guardian column on this, correctly identified as the source of iconoclasm’s power — is withheld. The legal loss is converted into a permission structure for grievance. What could have been a clarifying moment — the name of a would-be monarch pried off a public arts institution by order of a court — is instead a shrouded operation, the work done in what amounts to darkness. Isaiah 29:15 names this with precision. The woe is pronounced on those who “do their work in darkness and think, ‘Who sees us? Who will know?’” The tarp is the twenty-first-century equivalent of the closed door, the covered window, the deed done in the hours when witnesses are asleep. To cover the removal of the name is to attempt to annihilate the public fact of it.
All of this has the legal form of compliance and the communicative form of a petulant refusal to let anyone watch what compliance looks like. The name came down — behind a screen. The covering is the operation. The woe is the text’s response to the operation.
And the Evangelical church said nothing. Not the Southern Baptist Convention. Not the megachurch pastors who preached sermon series on idolatry to congregations wearing red hats. Not the Christian-nationalist apparatus that spent years insisting America must return to the God who said, at the foot of Sinai, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Through the lawsuit, the judge’s order, the appeal, the scaffolding and the tarp, not one of these institutions issued a public word about a ruler naming a national monument after himself. This is what the Evangelical church has done with Exodus 20. It has domesticated the commandment into private spiritual hygiene — a check on the believer’s personal attachments — so that it never touches the ruler who stamps his name on national institutions and calls it leadership.
I am not claiming to know what God intends for the Kennedy Center or for the man who renamed it. I am reading the Bible’s plain language and naming the chasm between what it says and what the church that carries it has allowed. The church reads Exodus 20 as a warning against wanting the wrong things. The text reads as a warning against bowing to the wrong ruler. Those are not the same reading, and the difference has consequences.
But the text will not stay in its assigned lane. Isaiah 29:15 applies to anyone who hides their work behind a covering and thinks no one sees. The woe is not restricted to ancient Near Eastern monarchs. It is not restricted to rulers of a particular party. It is the plain-language indictment of a specific conduct pattern: doing what you want in the dark and calling the dark a shield. The tarp over the Kennedy Center facade is that conduct pattern rendered in industrial fabric. The law said the name must come down. The name came down — behind a screen. The chasm is between the people who read the woe and the people who want you to think the woe does not apply to the man they have anointed.
And still the name came down. That is the fact the tarp cannot quite erase. Somewhere behind that blue sheeting, the bronze letters that read “Donald J Trump” have been pried off the facade of an institution Congress named for a different president. A federal judge ordered it. The website scrubbed the name. The legal machinery of the republic, creaking and slow and imperfect as it is, produced an outcome that will outlast the tarp. Whatever the president’s lawyers file next, whatever the board he stacked does next, the letters are off the building. The tarp will eventually come down, and when it does the blank space will read — for a moment, before whatever name Congress authorizes next — as an absence. Not a tribute. A vacancy.
The Kennedy Center is not the temple of the Lord. It is a performing-arts venue named for a president who was killed. But the pattern the Bible names — the ruler who demands his image be displayed, who installs himself at the head of the institution, who removes anyone who resists — is the pattern Pharaoh practiced and the commandment forbids. Daniel 3 is taught in every Vacation Bible School in America: Nebuchadnezzar erects a golden image, commands worship, and three faithful men refuse. The Evangelical church teaches the story and then does what the three men would not.
Amos 5:24 is still in the book — “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream” — and the word mishpat, justice, in that verse is not an abstraction. It is the specific practice of adjudicating disputes and rendering verdicts, the work Judge Cooper did when he ruled. The prophet did not separate the theological from the legal. Neither should we. A federal court order that removes an unauthorized name from a public building is mishpat in operation, as surely as a tarp that hides the removal from public view is sathar in operation.
Levine is right about iconoclasm. The desecration of a ruler’s symbols is one of the oldest forms of political revolt, and it works because symbols carry the authority of the ruler who erected them. Tear down the statue, and the authority bleeds. But the iconoclasm here has been partly stolen — the legal demolition occurred, the public witnessing of it was suppressed — and the theft itself is a second-order symbolic act. The tarp is an attempt to retain, through the management of visibility, some fraction of the authority the court order removed. It says: I may have lost, but I decide when you see that I lost. That is not the posture of a strongman. That is the posture of someone who knows the blank space will register as defeat and wants to postpone the registration as long as possible.
The blank space is coming. The tarp, like the empire, must finally fall. And when it does, the absence where the name was will not be a monument to a ruler. It will be a monument to the law’s refusal to let a ruler rename what is not his. That is a secular fact and a theological one, and they converge on the same conclusion. The covering cannot last. The work done in the dark will be seen. The prophet already read the tarp. He filed the woe.
But the commandment is also still on the wall of every Sunday-school room in America — “You shall have no other gods before me” — given to a people freed from a ruler who demanded worship. The ruler has not changed. The commandment has not changed. The name came off the Kennedy Center. The church has not named what the moment was. The question — the only question — is whether the church will read the commandment, this time, where it actually points. The prophet is waiting for the rest of us to catch up.