Despite having not attended any of the Kennedy Center’s events in his first term or since, Trump installed himself as Chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Center promising to usher in a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” Trump wasn’t satisfied with purging the federal workforce, pausing the work of whole government agencies, and moving detained migrants to Guantanamo Bay, he now has seized control of one of the nation’s premier performance spaces. Conservatives have been trying to reshape American culture for decades and have turbo-charged those efforts in the last 8 years.
Autocratic takeovers historically target the free press, the academy, and the arts. And here we go again, with the Chief Executive himself taking over the Kennedy Center’s board and replacing some of its members with his own loyalists (loyal to him, not to the arts). At Sunshine Cathedral the arts are sacramental and can be a primary path to an experience of the Sacred. The Queer God Squad finds the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center to be reprehensible, to be an attack on the secular spirituality that the arts facilitate, and to possibly be a threat to our democracy.
