(photo credit: Hamil Harris; image @https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/1/6/some-history-behind-the-christian-flags-at-the-pro-trump-capitol-coup)
12 April 1861. 7 December 1941. 11 September 2001. Three "days of infamy," to use the parlance of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the second of those dates. To these three I would add a fourth: yesterday, the 6th of January 2021, when a mob of seditious thugs, incited to insurrection by the President of the United States, swarmed and invaded the Capitol building itself in a vain attempt to overthrow the will of the people and hinder Congress from certifying the legitimate victory of Joe Biden over their hero, Donald Trump.
This event, predictable as it may have been to anybody remotely attuned to the words and actions of this President, was nonetheless as surreal as it was horrifying. The picture of a man carrying a large Confederate flag outside the Senate chambers, with a portrait of John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery antebellum Senator and Vice President from South Carolina, behind him, was both disheartening and enraging. No picture, I thought, could better symbolize the racism and, yes, fascism that animates the beating heart of MAGA-hatted Trump loyalists. Nevertheless, disappointing as it was to see such a thing, one could not or should not have been surprised by it. Racists will be racists, just as surely as leopards will always have their spots (Jeremiah 13:23).
To me, however, the most disturbing aspect of yesterday's failed insurrection was the presence of signs such as "Jesus Saves" and the blasphemous "Jesus 2020" banner pictured above. I am a Christian. So, yes, I believe that Jesus "saves." But, I must ask for the thousandth time, what does Jesus have to do with American Presidential elections? (For my thoughts on this issue two election cycles ago, see here and here.) America, like all other nations, has a veritable graveyard, not in a closet, but in its living room for all to see. It is not, nor was it ever, a "Christian nation," let alone a Theocracy. The kingdom of God and any kingdom of this world, including the United States of America, are confused or fused only at great peril and with great misunderstanding.
What interests me at this time, however, is the (to me) very curious phenomenon of so-called white "evangelical" Christians, people who glory in their devotion to the authority of the Bible and to the morality articulated therein, supporting Donald Trump. These are people who, prior to the arrival of Trump, ostensibly believed that "character matters," and thus believed Bill Clinton was, in light of his tawdry affair with Monica Lewinsky, thereby unworthy of the office to which he had been elected. Yet this is a demographic of people who voted upwards of 80% for Donald Trump, not only in 2016, but in 2020 as well, after four years of his unceasing lies, cruelty, undeniable racism, deference to foreign authoritarians, impeachable corruption, and self-interested malfeasance and nonfeasance in the face of a pandemic that has already claimed 360,00 American lives. Indeed, as Messiah University historian John Fea noted today, most of the Congressional objectors to the Electoral College tally were evangelicals.
How does one explain this? I understand that, for some Christians, abortion is the single issue that trumps all others (though I wonder how many of them consider either the fact that the biblical evidence for a hardline position is somewhat slimmer than they have been led to believe, or that many nuanced pro-Lifers such as myself believe the issue is better addressed as a moral than as a legal matter). I understand, but wonder how other, more prominent biblical concerns, such as justice and treatment of the poor, can be so easily shunted aside. To be sure, some, recognizing this, have rationalized their support for Trump by invoking the figure of Cyrus the Great, the 6th-century BCE Persian king deemed God's "servant" in Isaiah 45 for decreeing the return of some Jews to the land. Such an analogy is theologically illegitimate at many levels, not least because America hardly occupies an analogous, covenanted position to Israel/Judah in the purposes of God. Indeed, on this reasoning, every ruler in every country could be deemed a "Cyrus," given the view of Paul the Apostle that "the authorities that exist have been established by God" (Romans 13:1). One must look elsewhere.
One is hard-pressed to attribute support of Trump to simple ignorance alone. Yesterday on Facebook, I somewhat uncharitably referred to yesterday's rioters as "lame-brained," and was justly called out for it. Yet one is hard-pressed to deny that ignorance, both empirical and theological, lies at the bottom of this support. Moreover, at least at the level of empirical evidence, this ignorance is nothing if not a willful ignorance. Anyone who believes a word coming out of Trump's mouth must ignore the 30,000 lies, fact-checked ad nauseum, that he has uttered the past four years. Even prior to this, remember that Trump had been in the limelight for four decades. His history of self-aggrandizement, grandiosity, racist real estate practices, womanizing (cheating on his multiple wives, including with a porn star he paid off to keep quiet, bragging about "grabbing them by the p*ssy"), philistinism and six (!) bankruptcies were all public knowledge. His conduct in office--whether acceptance and cover-up of Russian help in getting elected in the first place, his racist cruelty to refugees and would-be immigrants, his impeachment for extorting the Ukrainian president to harm Joe Biden's electoral prospects, his shameful response to the COVID pandemic--cannot simply be attributed to "Fake News" or disinformation by "Democrat" [sic!] politicians or the "liberal" media. Acceptance of (what Joe Biden would call) Trumpian "malarkey" is, like it or not, ignorant. And this ignorance is both willful and, hence, culpable. Indeed, such culpable ignorance manifests a fatal lack of both intellectual and moral discernment, one which has besmirched the name of the very Lord evangelicals claim to follow.
But what, ultimately, lies behind this gullibility and failure of discernment? In short, I would suggest that this ignorance is fundamentally a motivated ignorance. By that I mean that the type of die-hard Trumpian support of so many white evangelical Christians is due to their unexamined presuppositions, preunderstandings, and prejudices (my former students will, I hope, remember this constant emphasis in my teaching). Simply put, at least for the past 40 years, after Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right coalesced in their allegiance to Ronald Reagan and the GOP, it has been an article of unexamined faith that "conservative" Christian religious convictions must be married to so-called "conservative" (read: "right wing") political convictions. Thus, by definition, even a confessed Christian such as Barack Obama, because he was a political liberal, must be seen as suspicious at best, and malicious at worst. Donald Trump, though manifestly irreligious and empirically corrupt, is to be preferred to the Methodist Hillary Clinton or the devout Roman Catholic Joe Biden.
Now the recognition of motivated points of view is nothing new. Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of the postmodern critique of modernism's hubristic positivism. We all have presuppositional grids through which we interpret everything we experience in the world. That can't be helped. Nor is it a bad thing. But one cannot simply reduce interpretation of evidence to simple solipsism, such that each person is entitled to his or her "alternative facts," as Kellyanne Conway put it. In other words, as I have argued previously, one must make every effort to examine one's presuppositions, and humbly allow the preponderance of evidence to alter them. Evidence must trump ideology (pun intended).
Changing one's mind can be as difficult as changing one's behavior, especially in matters of group identity. Doing so, as I can attest, can cause great existential angst and professional peril. Years ago I recounted my own somewhat painful journey from an early, inherited/assumed Republicanism to a theologically-motivated switch to the Democratic Party more than 30 years ago. That did not mean then, nor does it mean now, that I follow in lockstep with every element of the Democratic platform. It does mean, however, that fundamental matters of justice and loving one's neighbor as myself are the determinative factors in my affiliation.
I am aware, of course, that not all--indeed, not many--of my Christian brothers and sisters will agree with my stance. And that's fine. Personal experience and innate temperament interact with our rational faculties to create our own points of view. And thus I have great respect for principled conservatives with whom I may disagree, both among friends and authors/columnists whom I read regularly.
But that is not at issue in MAGA-hatted Christian Trumpism, such as we saw yesterday in Washington. Enthusiastic support for Donald Trump the politician is hard to explain, given the history of the past four years, abortion notwithstanding. Support for Trump the man--the egomaniacal, mendacious authoritarian-wannabe--is even less so. But following him and committing oneself to his cause--the New Testament scholar in me recalls the favorite Johannine construct pisteuein eis--to the point of treasonous sedition, like we saw yesterday in our nation's capitol, is a dead end road. Associating Donald Trump with Jesus is itself bizarre. No politician in American history, Richard Nixon included, diverges so far from the example of our Lord than does Trump. Beyond that, however, the very act of sedition in the name of Jesus is blasphemous. It runs counter to everything Jesus ever taught or embodied. And it invalidates any claim to be a genuine follower of the Prince of Peace who laid down his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).
This is a serious matter. Such unexamined support for the unsupportable is the scandal of today's evangelical church. In the midst of his polemic against his fellow Jews in Romans 2, Paul the Apostle, quoting Isaiah 52:5, writes these scathing words: "You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written, 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you'."
Let the one who has ears to hear listen.
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