2020

Christianity and Trump

11/04/20 08:05 PM

Christianity and Trump
Whether we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or something else, a common tenant of faith communities is to be faithful to something greater than ourselves, not to place ourselves as supreme. Parents of all beliefs try to teach their children to believe this. Donald Trump has exploited certain Christian groups in unprecedented ways and in-so-doing has exposed the hypocrisy of trading Christ for power. I try to be a Christian, so I will comment in that context, but other religious traditions can make similar observations.
If we are really, truly Christian, we try to teach our children to love and follow Christ. The prophet, Micah (6:8) writes that the Lord requires only this: “to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (NIV). John says that “Whoever does not love, does not know God, because God is Love.”- 1 John 4:8. God is Love, not hate. Peter said that all things that are excellent and good are of God. Paul had a lot to say. We are not “some of Peter and some of Paul and some of Apollos,” no we are ALL of one God (and He requires that we respect others who seek God from different traditions). We are all sinners, deserving one awful fate but hoping for a better one. None of us can “be of Christ” and also “be of” an avowed demagogue. Judas Iscariot was a member of a political sect called the Zealots. The Zealots were, well, zealous about having political power over the Romans and would do anything to get it.
Judas followed Jesus when he thought Jesus was seeking an earthly, political revolution, but when he saw that this was not the plan, he betrayed him. Any of us who abandon Christ and HIS teachings in favor of one who promises political power in exchange for loyalty is taking the road of Judas. There is no middle ground. Christ’s way, God the Father’s way, is love not hatred.

For some, Christianity has truly meant following Christ’s example of love and grace. For others, the “Christian” mantle is merely a vehicle for advancing a quest for power or preserving the pre-eminence of a white, rural, unevenly educated majority. They have sold out Jesus in favor of political power through Trump. Paul said that “they will know we are Christians by our love”. No real Christian could have anything to do with Trump’s doctrine of fear and hatred. No real Christian would ever lock a child in a cage away from his or her mother and father in order to “Make America Great Again”. If one claims allegiance to Christ, taking this path is an admission of apostacy. People in America who identify themselves as “Christian” need to consider that voting for such a person as Trump has something to do with their soul and salvation.

Jesus gave us the prescription for our lives in The Lord’s Prayer. God is God, and he has a paternal relationship with us. He is in heaven, which is a place, a place that is perfect in peace and forgiveness, and love. He is “holy” which means that he alone is Him. He isn’t a perfect example of love or power, or anything else. Those things exist because they come from Him, not He from them. We pray that His kingdom might come here to earth, a fallen place, not perfect like heaven. The Kingdom comes to the extent that we bring it by following the Father’s will and Christ’s example of love and forgiveness and mercy, and faith. We ask God the Father to gives us just what we need to get through the day and to forgive us for more or less continually making mistakes, “trespassing” upon his will, trying to take things into our hands instead of his. The condition for this is that we do the same for others, including others who don’t look or act like us, who don’t approach God in the manner that we do. We are not all of Peter, or Paul, or Apollos, or Mohammad, or Abraham, or Pope Francis, or the Dalai Lama, or Franklin Graham, or Jerry Falwell, or Trump, or Barney the big, purple dinosaur. We are all of God, who simply is whether we acknowledge His existence or not.

Paul also helps with understanding God’s love, but he has more to say about what it isn’t than what it is. It’s interesting that Paul knew the importance of confronting our urge to pull others down more than to help them up. From 1 Corinthians:13, “Love is patient and kind”. Yes, good start. But what is it not? “It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It does not keep record of wrongs (hold grudges). It does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.” What “love is not” reads like a list of the seven deadly sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Greed. It reads like the clinical definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It reads like Mr. Trump’s defining characteristics.

Jesus did not seek political power, he transcended it. The prophets did not seek political power, they transcended it. As for Jesus, as for the prophets, as for any disciple, it is hard. It is not the life of power and privilege that Trump or his sycophants crave. It is not the false gospel of “the victorious life”. No, for the actual, real disciple of Christ, this isn’t about who wins an election, it is about their soul and its destiny. For those who got lost in the moment in 2016, for those who meant to follow Christ and got led astray before, this is a chance at redemption or a chance to double down in following the way of Judas. It is about the way of Christ or the way of a demagogue. The way of a real disciple or the way of Judas. God’s Kingdom here on earth through our own actions or a demagogue’s agenda in exchange for personal power. The real cost (and reward) of discipleship or the path to the “blood field”. The Kingdom of God or the 30 pieces of silver. Neither is it about endorsing everything the alternative might support. That would just be picking another political agenda. It is about picking the decency of a man, Joe Biden, who does seek God vs Donald Trump, who proudly proclaims that he has done more than Jesus for his Evangelical base. It is about picking one who attempts to follow the path of discipleship, however imperfectly, over one who does not. It is about us seeking to live the life of real discipleship, trying to realize God’s Kingdom on earth through actions of faith, hope, charity, and love, not accepting uncritical membership in a demagogue’s club.

We owe a great debt to Mr. Trump. God’s love is everything he is not, and he has made very clear for us the path that we, if we are to be disciples, simply cannot take. If Christians, that is REAL Christians, want to follow Christ, he or she must follow love. If we want to serve God’s Kingdom and define our own, we have only one way to go. It is not possible to approve of and follow Mr. Trump and his brand of self- deification and hatred at the same time. We must pick. God or Trump. God or hatred. God or ...

Trumpish- adj.:

10/04/20 07:38 PM

“Trumpish” (Adj.)- A new adjective for the new age
We try to teach our children. It was simpler when there was not so much information and so many opinions, so available so fast. It is hard to keep up. There are so many role models and so many influences on our moral sensibilities.

John Locke, the 17th century physician who had such a great influence on our Founding Fathers, wrote in his “Second Treatise of Government,” that the purpose of government was to protect individual rights to “life, liberty and property.” but also to oblige every person not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb, or possessions” of others.

Most of us are decent people, and we try to hew to those obligations as we aspire to the attendant rights. We try to teach our children to be decent people too. It is a hard job at times. Some things are easy. “Don’t spit at people.” “Don’t bite.” Don’t light the neighbor’s dog on fire.” Other things are harder. There are many grey areas. As a shortcut, we sometimes simply buy into a school of thought. Be a Republican, or a Democrat, or a member of one or another religious group. It relieves us of so much work (and individual thought) to simply say, “whatever they say goes”. But that requires what the German-American philosopher Eric Hoffer called a weakness of mind and a certain lack of confidence or moral courage, and it can quietly slide from group allegiance to allegiance to a mob. The Nazi’s were originally a socially benevolent organization that was going to rebuild the social programs in Germany and ‘make Germany great again’, but then...

If we are really going to teach our children to be good people, we can’t just defer to others. We must have the moral courage to take a stand on things that matter. We can use models, heroes, anti-heroes. It’s curious that we assign those roles with an eye to whether they put themselves first or others. We try to inspire with heroes and warn with villains. Mother Teresa, Albert Schweizer, Abraham Lincoln, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Martin Büber, Martin Luther King, and countless others. History is filled with acts of heroism by other nameless, forgotten people who have served as models to inspire, to encourage, to sustain.

We try to explain goodness to our kids. We draw from our successes, but more often from our mistakes. We try to keep them from being fools for scammers, enablers for swindlers, suckers of various kinds. We try to show them that the internet is full of fakers, that some in entertainment are good but others are terrible, terrible people. The earth isn’t flat just because some rapper says so. Bigfoot isn’t real even if “a lot of people are saying” so. Elvis doesn’t live in Kalamazoo no matter who says so. Fame is not a barometer of wisdom or goodness.

So, to that end, we all, as parents and as a society, owe a great debt to Donald Trump.

We try and try to tell our kids to be a certain way or not to be a certain way, but sometimes it is hard to make the message clear. Trump is almost unique in recent American history not in ideology but in pure indecency. He is so purely clueless, so purely puerile, so purely selfish, so purely self-promoting, so purely untrustworthy, so purely....well, everything we try to lead our children not to be.

He is so purely “that” that he has actually given us a word.

“Trumpish”- adj.- To be devoid of any sense of human decency. To be devoid of any respect for knowledge or achievement, especially in others. To be utterly and baselessly cruel. To have an obsessive need for...well, everything. To be all that we can know from our human nature that we don’t want to be.

We can try until we are blue in the face to explain to our children how not to be bad, but when words fail, we can now simply say “just don’t be trumpish” and they will know exactly what we mean. He has done such a magnificent job throughout his life of modeling what it is to be perfectly crass, perfectly dishonest, perfectly everything that decent people seek not to be.

Do we have trouble not believing a scam? No problem. Mr. Trump has shown us what a scam looks and feels like, and in-so-doing has helped us to know that we simply need to watch out for “trumpishness”. Do we have trouble seeing moral error in our own lives? No problem. He has shown us what perfect moral depravity looks like. We simply need to avoid being “trumpish”. Not sure what the Founding Fathers had in mind in all those cherished, old documents? It’s simple. The common theme is to be fair and just and selfless; to be the opposite of “trumpish”.

He has helped us in another way. In any society, we know that there are good sides and bad sides, and in our society there are examples of each ACROSS the American political spectrum. There is a side that wants to give and a side wants only to take. There is a side that wants to offer grace and a side that wants to take advantage of every error and every weakness in others. There is a side that wants to pull others up and a side that wants to push others down. The “otherness” of those “others” depends on the times: too Jewish, too brown, too yellow, too “un-Christian”, too different from the “base”, too different but at the same time too close to the same.

We have always struggled to avoid trouble and avoid troublemakers, but they live among us, and sometimes they are us. Trump has helped by celebrating habitual troublemakers and also by showing us what behaviors in ourselves can make us into those people. By definition, 25% of society accounts for the least intelligent 25%. We know that ignorance breeds contempt and violence. Why learn anything if you can suppress those who have. Why respect others if you can push them down. Why not make up conspiracies if they serve your purpose. Isn’t it better to shout something until it seems true than to actually learn what is true?

Thanks to Trump, we now know that 25% of the country will believe anything that reinforces their fears or purpose. There is a base that believes every fear mongering scam, that embraces every get rich quick scam, that actually calls the number at the end of those Fox News ads, that believes that others have no worth if they don’t look or act like us, that believes that those with actual expertise are all out to get us, that believes Bigfoot is real and Elvis lives in Kalamazoo. They are largely the same 25% who have fallen for Trump’s scams and think he walks on water. These are not those who lean to Republican tradition and look at Trump as a necessary evil but those hardliners who believe him to be a messiah fighting pedophilic anarchists and Satanists. How convenient for the rest of us. At least we can now recognize that elusive 25%.

So, what are some elements of “trumpishness”? What defines our newfound rubric? What is its significance for trying to maintain decent and safe society?

We try to teach our kids to have character, to be responsible, to make things happen without looking for recognition, to not make excuses. Take responsibility. Don’t blame your sister. But in the adult world, under Trump, who does that anymore? Some do, to be sure. We do have heroes. You can find them easily as the ones who stand up to Trump when he says he “takes no responsibility for anything”. Some politicians. John McCain. Jeff Flake. Mitt Romney. Yes, Joe Biden. Sports leaders. Aaron Rodgers. JJ Watt, LeBron James, Serena Williams. Entertainers. George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Sean Penn, Chadwick Boseman. Many others. There are people who dive in and try to get things done. Things go wrong sometimes. Real leaders take responsibility. The buck stops with them. They know that it’s not about what happens first.

It’s about what happens next. It’s not about what you do wrong. It’s about what you do about what you do wrong. It’s about that second effort. Real Christians (not the fake ones out for power and glory under their definitions) know that Jesus said that to follow Him, you must go the first mile to fulfil your obligations but do even better on the second mile. Trump, like his false-Christian posers, says “look at me, look at me” walking the “second mile” for show, after robbing you blind on the first mile done in the shadows.

Trumpish- adj.- To be one who takes and never gives. To accept credit even when knowing it belongs to another and never accept responsibility for negative events. To hold grudges and villainize anyone or anything that might shed light on one’s schemes or failures or shortcomings.

We want to teach our kids to be nice, not just to those who can give us something back but to everyone. Churchill said that “You can know a man’s character by observing what he will do for someone who can do him absolutely no good in return.” He also said that “someone who is nice to you but mean to the waiter is a mean person.” We also know that the strongest person is the gentlest person. Cruelty is a sign of weakness, not strength. Bullies, despots, and dictators, those whom Trump admires the most believe the opposite. We try to teach our children that the most admirable behavior and the most admirable people not only get the least recognition, they seek the least recognition. Martin Luther King probably didn’t know he was alluding to himself when he observed that , “10,000 men proclaim themselves into obscurity while one man neglects himself into immortality.” Hopefully, we will never celebrate a “Donald Trump Day” as a national holiday. It is probably in the works as we speak.

Trumpish- adj.- One who sees grace as weakness or foolishness and cruelty as strength. To consider the charitable person a rube, worthy of disdain. To consider one who has sacrificed anything to be a loser, including and especially those who have given all.

If we have faith in God, we try to teach our children about that faith, but what about religion that replaces faith in God with faith in political power? Judas Iscariot followed Jesus as a member of a political group called The Zealots because he thought that Jesus was their ticket to political power over the Romans. Sorry, there was a little misunderstanding there. When he realized that Jesus was talking about another Kingdom, he sold him out. That is what certain “Christian” leaders have done with Trump. For some, Christianity truly means seeking Christ, but for others, the “Christian” mantle is merely a vehicle for advancing one’s personal quest for power and/or preservation of the pre-eminence of a white, rural, often marginally educated majority. They have sold out Jesus in favor of political power through Trump. Paul said that “they will know we are Christians by our love”. No real Christian could have anything to do with Trump’s doctrine of fear and hatred. No real Christian would ever lock a child in a cage away from his or her mother and father in order to “Make America Great Again”. If one makes any claim to apostleship with Christ, subjugating Christ to political greatness is an admission of apostacy. People in America who identify themselves as “Christian” need to consider that voting for such a person has something to do with their souls and salvation.

Trumpish, adj.- To place one’s self above any greater power. To consider any greater power to be subservient to one’s own plan and desire. To accept the “victorious Christian” belief that by saying a few words once in your life, you can then lie cheat and steal as you see fit.

Being trumpish has nothing to do with any true ideology. How could it? Trump has no ideology other than a need to be in power and admired every minute. His ideology is himself. The diagnostic features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (from the psychiatric literature) are:

A grandiose sense of self-importance
Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or
ideal love
1 When, in the original Greek of John’s Gospel, Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be “Born Again” to follow Him, he used the “aorist” tense of the word “born”, which is the tense of continuing action. In other words, Jesus was telling him that he must be CONTINUALLY born again and renounce earthly lusts and sins every day, to CONTINUALLY renounce selfishness, not to be born again once as a license to continue one’s fallen ways.)

Belief that one is special and can only be understood by or associate with special people or institutions
A need for excessive admiration
A sense of entitlement (to special treatment)
Exploitation of others
A lack of empathy
Envy of others or the belief that one is the object of envy
Arrogant, haughty behavior or attitudes (DSM IV )
Sounds familiar. One can be trumpish on the fringe right or the fringe left. It is hard to be trumpish from the middle of a spectrum, because to be in the middle requires a willingness and desire to listen to other people with other ideas. One does not have to be a complete, certifiable narcissist, like Mr. Trump, to fall into some of these errors. We must all guard against this, regardless of our ideological beliefs.
Trumpish- adj.- To be utterly dismissive of any opinion but one’s own. To seek one’s own preservation and amplification over all else. To be like a stopped clock, having an opinion every minute but only be right twice a day. To cherish ignorance as essential and eschew knowledge as an impediment to fierce dogmatism. To cherish ignorance as fuel for dogmatic certainty.
Ignorance comes with its cousins: fear and superstition. We try to teach our children to resist such things. To Trump, fear and superstition are essential to fuel hatred, especially hatred of any “otherness”. To actually understand something requires work. To be ignorant is much easier. It allows the uncritical gullibility of simply believing anything that like-minded “ignorati” (e.g. a mob) believes. “Good” people in Salem Massachusetts believed that some women were witches, so they determined to just burn them at the stake. If a mob is frustrated by “foreigners” who are smart and hard-working and might out-compete the ignorati, then just call them rapists and murderers and be done with them. If experts are telling you something that threatens your power or convenience, then just suppose that anyone with knowledge is part of an elite conspiracy. If a mob wants to believe that only the mob gets to be patriotic, then sure, claim that mantle as the mob’s alone.
Trump wants everyone to be fearful of anything they haven’t accomplished or don’t understand. In its purist form, this is to be afraid of everything and deem that everything must be destroyed. How else can we get back to a “great America” where just being white and more numerous was all that was necessary to be in charge. If your mob can’t actually be more numerous, just make sure they are more numerous at the voting booth. That is after all how we “Make Mobs Great Again”. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of “Enlightenment” (propaganda), said that the principle of manipulating the masses was to tell them that what you want them to do (hate Jews, foreigners, Gypsies or in present times Latinos, Muslims, blacks,

Trumpish- adj. – To stoke fear in others. To gather the fearful together and seek strength in numbers against enemies real or imagined. To use fear as a means of manipulating others to give one authority or power. To either seek to be the bully who gathers the weak and fearful as minions or to accept a role as one of those minions.

We try to teach our kids to be brave and think for themselves. Most of us would not want our children to be in a gang or a mob. We have a society of laws that we ALL agree to follow. People join gangs and mobs because they lack the courage to act on their own and because they want to enjoy rights that are only for members of the gang. Why think when you can borrow the thoughts of others. One of the most successful politicians of the 20th Century said that, “It is lucky for leaders when men do not think.” That was Adolf Hitler. Why pay the price of defending personal values when you can succeed better just following the strongest crowd, even if that crowd is stronger only at the expense of the vulnerable. Such a follower looks for a strongman to make all the calls. He or she sees the leader as strong because that leader first gives him others to fear and claims his title by bullying those others. Churchill observed that such a follower knows this but hopes that if he appeases the alligator, maybe it won’t eat him, or will at least eat him last. Such a minion can be called Patriotic if the leader claims that mantle as his alone. Oscar Wilde pointed out that “patriotism is the virtue of the vicious”. Eric Hoffer, who escaped the Nazi’s and became a leading philosopher in America, studied followers of mobs and movements in his seminal book “The True Believer”. To be a true believer, one must sacrifice individual values. To accept the cost of discipleship of the strongman, one must relinquish discipleship of anything else.

Trumpish- adj.- To be fearful of the other and the unknown and seek safety in sameness. To sacrifice thought and conviction for the safety of a group (or a mob). To choose to follow a leader who will say that others are the cause of one’s fear and who therefore deserve to be vanquished.

We teach our children to study and value learning. Many in the current base that admires Trump’s disdain for “the intellectual elite” have in their own lives fought for their children to “do better than we did” by getting educated. And yet, like the “Know-Nothings”, a political coalition in the mid-1800s (that led up to the Civil War), Trump leads a coalition that is required to dismiss anything that comes from any kind of an expert. We are to follow his every inane retweet from conspiracy theorists, but not follow our incredible national intelligence community or healthcare heroes such as Dr. Fauci or other experts in their fields. We are to believe that Joe Biden is being led by “people you’ve never heard of” to coordinate riots because someone in Idaho saw a group in black clothing coming off of a plane in Idaho. We are to believe a game show host interviewed on Fox News pontificating about Covid but not the World Health Organization, a group of hard-working, apolitical scientists and physicians fighting to coordinate the global fight against all sorts of disease. So, what are we to do? Encourage our children to work and learn from people who try to work and learn empirical, provable knowledge? Or, do we tell them to spurn that and just follow the ever-churning sea of kooks and conspiracy theorists on the Internet, the Trumps, and Kanye’s, the Kardashians, the glitterati, and every other sort of self-styled cultural oracle. Why learn, why strive, why try to make the world better and more peaceful when you can join the crowd and make a quick buck scamming others?

Trumpish- adj.- To be one who spurns hard-earned knowledge of things that can actually be proven. To castigate those who have learned or accomplished anything of value. To value volume over substance, and aggression over understanding.

Regardless of who wins the election, there will still be many people who not only value what Trump manifests but seek it aggressively and with force and violence (either physical or otherwise). They have always been there. They believe conspiracies because they are convenient and because they are ridiculous to the more knowledgeable. They believe that conspiracies are proof that the more knowledgeable are either wrong or hiding something. They believe that tabloid journalism, like the National Enquirer and Fox News and Breitbart, are the actually legitimate but that evidence-based journalism is not. In Trump, they now have a face and an infamously powerful voice. At least now we can better tell who this fringe is. The question we must continually ask ourselves is, “is that who we are”?

Regardless of who wins the election, we will have to deal with this faction. Do we teach our children to join in, like the young boy in the movie “42” about Jackie Robinson who learned to yell “Nigger, we don’t want you here!” because he saw his dad yelling it? Or, do we teach our children to spurn such hatred, internet scams, get-rich-quick schemes, cringe-worthy behavior from athletes, entertainers, Internet personalities, and now a President in favor of learning real things culled out over the centuries as true and beautiful. Do we teach them and show them art, and peace, and beauty and athletic accomplishment, or do we teach them to emulate the Trumps and the Putins, and the Hitlers, and the Stalins, and the Kim Jung Uns, and various glitterati and Internet trolls who spurn those things in favor of money and power and oppression and suppression.

We have an opportunity in this negative role model of Trump to lead them in right directions. We need to be resolved. We need to keep leading our children toward truth and knowledge and accomplishment and faith. When we cannot find the right words, we now have the perfect touchstone, “Just don’t be trumpish”. They’ll know just what we mean, and hopefully that will help guide them away from the pettiness and evil that always lurks.

Finally, once again, we also need to remember that being “trumpish” has nothing to do with political ideology. It is just as easy to be those things from the extreme left as the extreme right. The key word there is probably “extreme”. Various sages over the years have been correct that “the greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism”. Andre Gide, an 18th century French author advised to “follow those seeking the truth, but avoid those who (say they’ve) found it.” Time tested truth is true and it doesn’t change, but our view of it is sometimes clouded. Paul was right in Corinthians, we do look through a cloudy glass. Truth is something that continues to be so even after it ceases to benefit us. To find truth and beauty, that which helps us to have a peaceful and just society, we MUST look at the whole reality. We must consider our perceptions as well as others’. That means that we MUST listen to the “other side”. Extreme views think they’ve found a truth that requires exclusion of the “other side”. From there, it is a slippery slope down into seeking absolute power, into the belief that “if we just have all the power, we can figure things out later.” That is despotism no matter who is doing it. That is Hitler, Stalin, Amin, Putin, Trump, and many, many others. We need to teach our children to learn and also to listen, regardless of who is in power. And for our part, we need to chose leaders who are decent and fair, and mature, and who seek and value knowledge. The American political spectrum is arbitrary and independent of the spectrum from decency to indecency. We must choose decency first. Before even considering what they believe, we need to consider how they believe it. We need to choose decency and intellectual honesty and selflessness over dogmatism of any type. We need to choose people who are not trumpish, for our sake and for the sake of our children.

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Christianity and Trump

Trumpish- adj.: