Gut Check Time

This week I felt optimistic for the first time in a while, as young and energetic next-generation leaders were sworn into their seats in the House. I am still thankful for the optimism they bring. 

At the same time, I remain concerned about the forces aligned against them. 

Support for this--phony from head to toe--most  unethical, least fit, and demonstrably dangerous president is hard for me to comprehend; support from those who self-identify as Christians is unfathomable.

Conservative columnist Michael Gerson of the Washington Post argued today that white evangelical Christians have become the most rock-solid component of Trump’s base because they have traded a commitment to following in the path of Jesus for adopting the tactics of successful interest groups: hiring their own Goliath.

This fundamentalism is the strange bedfellows I find hardest to understand. As Gerson puts it, “the most ethically challenged president of modern times—prone to cruelty, bigotry, vanity, adultery, and serial deception—is depending on religiously conservative voters for his political survival.”

Gerson argues that Trump has stumbled onto a characteristic of this voting block that, in my view, suggests calling them ‘religiously’ motivated misses the point. Perhaps, like the R effort to rebrand Ds as the ‘Democrat’ party, we should rebrand white evangelicals as ‘privilege protection’ motivated. Or something that has more a ring to it.

Anyway, Gerson follows many others to point out that this group is likely more motivated by the desperation and fear associated with losing their power & privilege than they are motivated by any reasonable reading of how to be follow in the footsteps of Jesus.

White evangelicals “were once a culturally predominant force. Many of their convictions were also the default settings of the broader society. But that changed….”

The pastors for privilege protection paint politics as a struggle against secularism. This is an effort to reframe what is essentially a struggle to protect their own narrow private and unearned privilege as if it were a struggle to advance some widely shared public interest: a classic tactic of traditional interest groups. Hardly the humility of walking with Jesus.

To do this they have hired their Goliath. “He is willing to use the hardball tactics of the secular world to defend their sacred interests,” according to Gerson. While I get his point, be his analysis is incomplete here in ways that matter.

It should read something like “He is willing to use the hardball tactics of the authoritarian world to destroy democratic institutions and processes to defend what they imagine (wrongly, in the view of most Christians, much less in the view of most who are actually religiously motivated) to be their sacred interests.”

He is softpeddling their threat and overstating the accuracy of their analysis. They are authoritarian theocrats with nearly no genuine grounding in loving our neighbors as ourselves. And while hardball tactics are, of course, common this is both an inaccurate description of Trump’s tactics and has nothing to do with tactics unique to secular agents, but is rather most troubling precisely because one side (Rs) have chosen an apocalyptic approach to politics (see Mann & Ornstein: it is inaccurate to claim ‘both sides are doing it’).  Gerson’s larger argument presumes this, but because he accepts too much of the secular-sacred frame in his own analysis he is too easy on them.

Gerson concludes that we have been here before. That is helpful, particularly because he offers it as an analytical lens promising a sliver of hope rather than a naïve ‘all will be okay’ perspective.

While Gerson suggests that even as Christianity is wielded as a bullies’ weapon against the weak there is still the Foucaldian dynamic of planting within this dominant discourse the seeds of its own destruction…. I wonder about timeline, since it is true that the market always corrects in the long term but we all live in the short term.

We have been here before. One of the most dangerous characteristics of Trump is he habit of doubling and tripling down, no matter how inaccurate his position. And he is commander in chief of the world’s most powerful forces of destruction. If this is combined with a discourse about going to heaven the fact that we have been here before might just mean we are watching the build-up for the Crusades 2.0 in the making.

Let’s hope that the energy and ideas of our new generation of leaders remain united and get amplified and gently guided and aligned by the wisdom and experience of our elder leaders to navigate the troubled waters ahead. As we redirect public service toward helping all American families, we want to allow the pastors of privilege protection the space and dignity to choose more productive coalitions or to fade away quietly as they recognize that expanding our political community does not mean an end of times is approaching.