On June 1, 2020, President Donald Trump made headlines in a photo that showed him holding a Christian Bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. News outlets' opinion sections and religious figures across the country, such as the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, condemned the photo op, citing the forcible removal of Black Lives Matter protestors from the area as unnecessary and cruel. These actions, many argued, flew in the face of the religious ideology on which Trump was attempting to capitalize. To these editorialists, Trump's religious performance was inauthentic. This overwhelming response insists that we ask: what makes a religious performance authentic?
In the introduction to their book Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell posit: “Only an appropriate mode of worship generates a sound sense of authenticity.”1 This reflection relies on the ambiguous modifier appropriate as...
