This page is about Donald Trump's maternal line and the cultural backdrop to
his mother's emigration to New York in 1930. During the 1820s, two sides of the
president's family were cleared (forcibly evicted) from
their ancestral lands on the Isle of Lewis. This was during what were called the
Highland Clearances. His mother grew up in hard times for the island. A great many of her generation - especially the young men
who survived the First World War and its aftermath - emigrated to North America.
In Poacher's Pilgrimage: an Island Journey, I touched on Donald Trump
but did not develop the theme as few people then thought that he would win the
presidency. Now, through the Foreword the the American edition of the
book (Cascade - and imprint of Wipf & Stock, 2018), the leading American speaker
and writer, Brian D. McLaren, has given voice to my research on Trump into the
story. I also explore it in greater depth but with less of the broad context of
Poacher's in
my most recent book: Riders on the
Storm: the Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being (Birlinn 2020). What follows
on this page, are links and visual material that illustrate that to which Brian
helped me to give voice.
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Brian D. McLaren's
Foreword to Poacher's Pilgrimage in the USA edition
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My Findhorn TEDx talk, 2017,
Donald Trump and the Second Sight
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Donald Trump and the Second Sight
article (the picture was not of my choosing!)
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Trump's election and American evangelicalism,
article
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Poem published in Earthlines -
O Donald Trump, Woe
Donald Trump
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Buy the USA edition from Cascade (Wipf
& Stock), or the UK/rest-of-world 2023 edition (Birlinn)
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Download a free PDF of my book
Island Spirituality, from
the Islands BookTrust book, a theological spin-off from writing Poacher's
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Return to the book's main
menu
It was with land reform in the Isle of
Eigg
in 1991 that I first consciously invoked what I think of as "the
rubric of regeneration", the process of re-membering that
which has been dismembered, re-visioning how the future could be,
and re-claiming what is necessary to make it happen. There's a
diagram of those 3Rs in my Schumacher Briefing,
Rekindling Community, which is now out of print, but free to
download in PDF. In writing
Soil and Soul (2001) I came to see them as as the central driver
of a wider process that I think of as "cultural psychotherapy". This is
not to pitch a claim of uniqueness for such a way of thinking, though I
did not see others using the term back in the early 1990s. Rather, it is
to describe a process of self-discovery and application in my activism
for social, environmental and sprititual development.
What do I mean by cultural psychotherapy? Nothing
complicated. Just as
an individual in a condition of psychological suffering may find it helpful to
re-member
what happenedto them, to re-vision alternative ways of being, and to
re-claim or call back the soul, so too the process can apply to whole cultures, subcultures
and communities. How so? By working with these groups, in person, in
writing, in addresses, etc. in ways that open depth psychological and even
spiritual knowledge and literacy. I have never written on this in a concentrated way, but
it runs deeply through most of my work. I see it as germane to
consciousness raising, it ties in closely with liberation theology and
Paulo Freire's "conscientisation", and have applied it for over a third of a
century in my work with rural land reform and
urban poverty.
This is why the Lewis connection to Donald Trump,
and from there, his empathy with the kind of Scots-Irish political base that J.D. Vance writes about (see
the material
quoted in Riders) so fascinates me. I find it to be an approach
that "works" in what I do. I
often get letters from people who are engaged with bringing their communities back
to life, and who'll say things like, "You helped me understand myself," or "... what happened to
us." Neither is this about "Trump bashing". I hope my "O Donald Trump" poem
and the use I made of it in the TEDx talk (both linked above) make that very
clear. Rather, it is about trying to understand the depth psychospiritual dynamics that
drive the way the human condition interacts with the unfolding history of the
world. As a potted example of an attempt at cultural
psychotherapy, keep an eye open for my essay, due April 2024, in the literary
journal, Dark Mountain. With the title, "A
Sermon to the English on Land Reform", it's like a reviewer wrote of Poacher's
Pilgrimage: "It could sound jokey, but it isn't." Mind you, it's that too!
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Brian D. McLaren's US
Foreword to Poacher's Pilgrimage
Cascade Books, Oregon, 2018
(see also the images, above)
This is the pre-publication unedited text. If quoting, the
edited version can be verified from the Cascade edition, pp. xvii - xxii, or
from 'Look Inside'
on the Cascade web page.
Poacher’s Pilgrimage has been,
simply put, the most delightful read of the year for me. The writing is a joy
and the experience of reading is the next best thing to donning a backpack and
venturing out into fog, hail, mist, rainbows, and sunshine. And like any good
journey, there are surprises along the way - gifts for the soul as well as the
imagination.
But Alastair McIntosh’s account of a
twelve day trek across the mountains, moors and treacherous bogs of his home
island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland is far more than just a
beautifully-crafted travelogue. Here is an urgent book for North Americans to
read, especially in these times. Why, you might ask?
Consider this: Mary Anne Macleod, the
mother of Donald John Trump, was from a village eight miles north from where
Alastair grew up. This President of the United States, it turns out, was a child
of the lands you will encounter in these pages. When Alastair made his
pilgrimage through the isle that is called Lewis in the north and Harris in the
south, he couldn’t have known that one of its native sons (already infamous in
Scotland for building a golf course that impinged on a pristine natural area)
would soon run for and win the American presidency.
In October 2016, while on a European
speaking tour to promote The Great Spiritual Migration, I met up with
Alastair in Glasgow. We spent a morning at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and
Museum. There we viewed Salvador Dali’s painting, Christ of Saint John of the
Cross. I will never forget that morning, just bathing in the gentle light of
Dali’s cosmic Christ, so transcendent and yet so human - the very antithesis of
the political carnival taking place back in my homeland.
Poacher’s Pilgrimage makes
only a couple of mentions in passing of Trump, along with a detailed endnote to
chapter sixteen. This is not a book about him. Rather, one of its key themes
focuses on conservative politicians who prefigured him, especially the two
presidents Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and the role of Billy Graham. However, those
insights translate with radical effectiveness onto Donald Trump. Even more to
the point, they shed light on the religious psychology of his electoral base. A
quarter of the American electorate identify as evangelical or born-again
Christians. These voted 81% for this second-generation immigrant son of the Isle
of Lewis.
Alastair sets out on his island
pilgrimage, complete as is a local custom with a fishing rod as if to do a bit
of ‘poaching’ on the island’s salmon rivers. A Quaker, but versed in the
island’s Presbyterian traditions, he had just returned from Geneva where he had
addressed NATO diplomats and senior military. For over twenty years now he has
lectured at military academies across Europe – on nonviolence. Our wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq were ongoing at the time. Libya, with its flood of
refugees into Europe, had not yet happened. Alastair with over forty pounds of
gear on his back set out to walk into the lonely heart of his familiar island.
His mind was afire with the wretchedness of war and burning with a yearning to
understand its psychological and spiritual roots. At the same time, he seemed to
be seeking solace from the soil, the grass, the wind, the rain, and the symbolic
wisdom of the salmon.
On one page, we may encounter in
Alastair’s crisp prose the enchanting visible sights of the landscape he
traverses: the welcoming inns, the mercurial weather, the holy wells, the ruins
of tiny ‘temples’ or churches that can date back to Celtic times, the domed
stone ‘beehive’ dwellings know as Druid’s houses that transport us to the Bronze
Age, and the island’s haunting stone circles.
Turn the page, and the reader finds
Alastair recalling a recent visit to a military institution, late at night in
the officers’ mess, talking with soldiers about the effects on a human soul of
having killed another human.
Sometimes the beauty and the violence
are intertwined. As Alastair trudges through beautiful glens, stark and empty,
and as he skirts the ruins of bygone settlements, he describes how these places
were cruelly emptied of their native populations through a series of events
called the Highland Clearances during the 19th
century. The masters of the British Empire had either dispossessed the old clan
chiefs, or turned them into rapacious landlords who favored sheep over people.
The land was rendered a commodity, valued only for the profits it could return.
The tenants were made outlanders - perhaps dispatched to fight imperial wars, or
into intergenerational urban poverty - or onto emigrant ships that were bound
for North America.
As you grasp this history, a more contemporary real estate
mogul will come to mind, and you may feel resonances that are, at once, both
fascinating and deeply disturbing.
Alastair tells me that after getting
in touch with Bill Lawson, the islands’ expert on genealogy, he established some
facts of Donald Trump’s lineage. Both sides of the president’s island
grandmother’s families had been evicted from their homelands in the clearances
of the 1820s. The MacAulays, from Kirkibost on Bernera off the south-east coast
of Lewis. The Smiths, from Buanish (Budhanais, Gaelic) in the remote
south-west. From there, Trump’s forebear, Malcolm Smith (1760 – c. 1845),
nicknamed ‘Calum Taillear’ or Calum the Tailor, was removed in 1826 to the
village of Tong that lies twenty miles across sea lochs and rugged territory to
the north. It was here that Mary Anne was born.
Meanwhile, back at Buanish, the ruins of their homesteads and the abandoned runs
of their raised bed agriculture can still be seen to this day. Strikingly so,
when viewed on Google Earth, as Alastair shows in a specially created web page,
https://goo.gl/zzCMB8.
An added factor in Mary Anne
Macleod’s background, is that the First World War had hit the island
disproportionately hard. Not only did it leave an acute shortage of young men in
her marriageable age group, but in the 1920s many of the surviving young men
wagered their chances on emigration. It was an era when widowhood or
spinsterhood were commonly a woman’s lot. However, Mary Anne had other
ambitions. On the day after her eighteenth birthday, she arrived by ship in New
York as near-penniless economic immigrant, and took up work as a domestic
servant. She was, as they’d say on the island, ‘a bonnie lass’, and for one
whose forbears had been evicted by the evils of landlordism, it was an irony of
ironies that she should meet and marry an immigrant property developer from
Germany, Frederick Christ Trump.
The Donald was raised perhaps with
certain gifts from his island heritage, including his oratory and famously
prolonged handshakes, but without the social checks and balances by which a
traditional community raises a child.
As Alastair explores the
psychohistory of landed power and land reform during the course of his walk, he
explains how the oppressed so readily become oppressor: you either join them or
get beaten by them. But how, then, do you live with yourself? How do you justify
a presumption of supremacy over those you now oppress?
Here is where this book’s theological
literacy aids interpretation. Mary Anne Macleod was baptised and raised in the
Calvinism of the Free Church of Scotland. Ironically, that church’s roots in
Lewis are in the hard line evangelicalism introduced by the clearance landlords
of the 1820s, yet it was founded in reaction to their landed patronage. Trump
credits his mother with his religious sensibilities. Back home, within its
context of tightly knit communities, such religion can provide a deep and
wondrous spiritual path. As Calvin put it, humankind is ‘knit together with a
holy knot,’ and this can foster strong communities. But history also provides
many examples of the ways in which Calvin’s theology of double predestination
can project out a harshly binary worldview, a cosmic soul-sort or apartheid,
that divides the mass of humankind into the Elect on the one hand, and the
Damned on the other.
Poacher’s Pilgrimage argues
that such theology has played out across the generations of American
conservative political narratives, creating a strong cohesion for the in-group
while projecting a callous dismissal of the out-group. In this binary
geopolitics, you’re either with us or against us, a good state or a bad state.
You’re either, as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush termed it, an ‘evil empire’
on ‘the axis of evil’, or you’re the chosen people in a ‘city on a hill.’
In a recent TEDx talk, Alastair
surmised: ‘The wall with Mexico is a wall that cuts across the mind of Donald
Trump.’ He added that it also cuts across the minds of his American evangelical
constituency whose family psychohistories might often have echoed that of Mary
Anne. In these pages, you’ll sense how Trump’s background perhaps intuitively
helped him to exploit that divide, weaponizing an age-old theological
controversy, lending the succor and impetus of divine legitimation to a politics
of ‘divide and rule.’
To Alastair (and to me as well), many
of our most important political problems have theological roots, and each step
of his journey seems to lead him deeper into theological reflection. Notably, he
challenges Calvin’s penal substitution notion of the meaning of Christ’s
crucifixion. We have been fed, he says, a violent theology of violent men of
violent times. Our burning task today must be to disarm such theologies, and
decolonize the soul. That brings us back, as little children, to the gospels and
the first apostles. Back to these, seen in a fresh, nonviolent light.
If this sounds heavy duty for a
lovely walk, fear not. Alastair’s theology flows seamlessly through his
acclaimed nature writing, his love of his own people and their history, and his
frequent unexpected bursts of humor. That includes exploring ‘faerie’ legends of
the landscape as a ‘metaphor for the imagination’ – a depth of imagination that,
he shows from early Celtic texts, leads us into nothing less than God’s
imagination of the creation. This deep imagination, you will feel, just might
have the necessary magic to heal the psychic wounds of war, not to mention the
ordinary background trauma that we take for granted but which numbs our
sensibilities from day to day.
So this book leads readers both on a
physical journey through a very earthy landscape, and on a spiritual journey
into deep recesses of the soul and spirit. Just as pilgrims often undertake a
pilgrimage in a quest for healing, Alastair’s pilgrimage invites us to face our
own individual and societal scars and trauma, rekindling our inner life,
reintegrating our inner and the outer imaginations, re-sensitizing our
individual and social souls that have been so battered, savaged, and calloused
by violence. In one pivotal scene, Alastair leads us to a kind of inner
pinnacle, from which we see Christ’s crucifixion not as the outpouring of a
violent God’s wrath on an innocent victim, but as Christ’s utter absorption of
the violence of the world. As I
read, I felt that I had been led to holy ground.
I am a better human being for having
joined Alastair on this pilgrimage. And on a more mundane political level, I am
better prepared to understand such figures as Mary Anne Macleod’s unavoidable
son, a prodigal son, if you will, who has yet to come to himself and find his
way home.
I learned recently that Alastair
wrote a poem while writing this book, part of the closing stanza of which I
include here, with his permission -
O Donald Trump, Woe Donald Trump
Come home, Donald …
Come home in your mind!
Come home to gentle honest folks!
Come home to nature’s guileless way!
without greed
without force
without tears
Come home, Donald …
just come on home
Brian D. McLaren
Author, speaker, activist
Marco Island, Florida
2018
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