In 42 BC (those two little letters being not insignificant), Julius Caesar was officially declared a divinity by the Roman Senate, to be known as Divus Iulius. Donald Trump is therefore not the first egomaniacal world leader with aspirations towards the divine. This week, the US President posted an AI-generated image of himself as a quasi-Jesus figure, healing the sick with balls of heavenly light in his hands, while F-16 fighter jets hover above. After even some of his most devoted Christian fanboys balked at the tackiness, he deleted the post.

Generally speaking, religion does aesthetics pretty well: think Renaissance painting, English country churches, and Islamic calligraphy. But for some reason, modern American Protestantism is unbearably crass when it comes to art.

I blame Warner Sallman. Back in 1994, the New York Times declared Sallman the “best-known artist of the century”, mostly because of his famous 1940 painting Head of Christ. Sallman was a Chicago-born commercial advertising illustrator, who did a brief stint at art school; Caravaggio he was not. Yet his painting went on to sell over 500 million copies. What explains this popularity? The Head of Christ shows a stereotypically handsome Jesus with flowing locks of thick hair and a fixed gaze, lit overhead to create a kind of heavenly glow. The very epitome of chocolate-box kitsch, it set the aesthetic grammar of American Protestantism for generations. It is that same visual language on which Divus Trump now draws.

But the Head of Christ is not just a terrible painting: its deeper failing is a profoundly moral one. The Czech author Milan Kundera defined “kitsch” as “the absolute denial of shit”. The Nazis used kitsch aesthetics in all those films of happy blond children giving out flowers and skiing down mountain slopes. It is a picture of the world as they wanted it to be, where anything deemed unwholesome has been purged from view. Kundera called it “the aesthetics of ethnic cleansing”, because he saw it as a natural adjunct to a world in which all that was seen as unfit was sent off to the gas chambers.

Kundera is mistaken about one thing, though. In 1984’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he argues that Christian theology is the ultimate source of kitsch. The novel’s narrator remembers lying on his bed, looking up at a painting of God by Gustave Dore. His adolescent brain conducts an unusual thought experiment: if God has a mouth, then God has a stomach, and therefore He defecates. The moment this thought wafts into his consciousness, he feels revolted. The idea of God and shit cannot coexist in the same mental space. For Kundera, then, God is the originator of kitsch.

Yet the whole point of the incarnation, of God becoming human, is that the divine nestles alongside the world in all its messy reality. After all, God is born in a stable surrounded by dung. To underline this point, there is a fabulous Catalan tradition of the caganer, or “shitter” — traditionally the figure of a small boy set in the Christmas manger, trousers round his ankles, defecating. The Catalans have also used the caganer to ridicule politicians. You can now even buy a squatting figurine of Trump mid-squeeze for your Christmas scene.

The significance of the politician-as-caganer figurine is more than just gratuitous offense, though. It is deeply theological, both because it brings down the mighty from their thrones (Luke 1:52) and because it underlines the deeply anti-kitsch nature of Christianity. Jesus actively sought out those traditionally shunned for being unwholesome or impure, such as lepers and menstruating women. Love has no gag reflex. The best art understands this, because it understands human reality. Trump’s AI incarnation may represent the way in which a certain tradition of American Protestant aesthetics sees the divine. But it’s actually a kind of aesthetic sin — a refusal to understand the depths of love that, at its best, Christianity preaches.

Might the preposterous Divus Trump image be a turning point in the President’s desire to exploit religious sentiment for purposes of self-aggrandizement? By deleting the image, he is going some way in acknowledging the ridiculousness of portraying himself as a divine savior. When even his most ardent religious admirers see through the pretense, that halo begins to look very kitsch indeed.

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Giles Fraser is a journalist, broadcaster and Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew.

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