(This is the second installment of a three article series I have written because of the constitutional crisis Donald Trump has already created for our country after only one week in office. This is an urgent situation I fear too many people are treating as “just politics.” It is much more than that, as I tried to say in the first of these three blogs. If you haven’t read that one, I encourage you to do so before reading this one. Also, please share the posts to expand the conversation. Thank you.)
The Failure of American Christianity
Let’s be clear. Donald Trump has not been chosen by God to make America great again. Nor did God save him from an assassin’s bullet. He was saved by dumb luck.
Rather than being a sign that he is the instrument to bring God back to America, as one partisan evangelical recently wrote on the FB page of my hometown of Lynchburg Virginia, Trump’s election was and is a clear sign of the failure of American Christianity to make the nation a better place.
Trump’s attack on DEI as a scheme of people like me he calls “left wing lunatics” to destroy the country is one example of why his election should be seen this way.
DEI stands for diversity, equity, inclusion. It’s a program with a simple purpose, to promote fairness and equality for all people in government, businesses, and other organizations as a way to correct and offset the impact of historical discriminatory practices and policies.
Whatever weaknesses and flaws DEI efforts may have, and such initiatives always do, Christians should be the first people to offer praise and support for them.
Not so. Some of the most vocal critics of DEI are partisan evangelicals because they believe it leads to GLBTQ and transgender Americans having equal rights with everyone else. Since they believe such people represent a moral perversion of the way God made human beings, they want all DEI programs stopped.
Trump has shown in his first week back in office that he is more than willing to accommodate their wishes. Nothing suggests he cares one way or the other about DEI, but it has been made into a controversial issue Trump has found works for him among his supporters.
That is why they joined Trump in criticizing Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde for the sermon she preached at the National Cathedral prayer service last week that Trump attended,
Christians who actually understand the Bible recognized the witness to the Christian gospel she made in both what she said and how she said it, but the faux Christianity of partisan evangelicalism led its followers to join Trump in trying to shame her.
Their criticism reveals all we need to know about how theologically and biblically uninformed they are. She called for unity in our nation without the need for uniformity. She described the foundations on which such unity rests: (1) respect for the inherent dignity of all human beings; (2) honesty, the will to tell the truth; (3) humility, the recognition that we are all human, make mistakes, and can be wrong.
That is as basic to being Christian as it gets, but without saying so she drew a stark contrast to Donald Trump who shows no respect for anyone who differs with him or is different from him, makes telling lies a daily ritual, and lacks even a modest dose of humility.
Because of what she said in the context of what kind of person Trump is and the policies he is already implementing, a fair conclusion is that partisan evangelicals say they were offended by her message because Trump was, and Trump was because she asked him to be merciful as God is merciful, something he, of course did not understand.
This kind of blind allegiance to Trump is stunning in light of the fatal decision of the German Christian movement to blindly support Hitler, leaving the credibility of German Christianity in shambles.
The roots of this unholy alliance we are seeing today in America actually goes back further than the German experience, all the way in fact to the beginning of the faith when the Jesus Movement became the religion of the Roman Empire and lost its integrity, only to recover it in bits and pieces throughout history as individuals and small groups broke from the church because of its corruption.
But none of these individuals or groups were ever powerful enough to change the trajectory of Christianity itself, even when they came to America to escape persecution, ending up repeating the mistakes they had rebelled against once they gained dominance.
Two hundred and forty-eight years later our country that has been called a city on a hill, a light shining in darkness, has elected Donald Trump as its president even though his words and actions are as non-Christian and often un-Christian as any can be.
How else can Trump’s election be seen except as a sign of Christianity failing in its mission to call America to love kindness, do justice, and walk humbly before God?
That’s our mission. It is to help people in positions of power to live up to the ideals on which America was founded and then lead citizens to do the same thing. In short, the mission of Christianity is not to make America Christian. It is to help make our nation the best America it can be.
Partisan evangelicals are working against that mission by speaking and acting like Trump does. That’s one of the reasons I no longer call myself a Christian. I am Christian, not a Christian, which means I focus on the values I hold that determine how I live, not the things I believe. What partisan evangelicals believe is bad enough, but what they say and do are so much worse.
One of the reasons our country is in such a crisis is the “Christian”support Trump has for the divisions he is causing, especially through the “culture wars” that have been primarily of evangelical doing.
The credibility of the Christian tradition cannot be rehabilitated unless and until all Christians stop supporting politicians like Donald Trump and the policies they promote.
Until then we will continue to witness the decline of the American empire at the hands of the Republican Party that has abandoned all integrity and decency and at the same time the decline of American Christianity at the hands of partisan evangelicals who have also abandoned all integrity and decency.
There is no longer any time for delay in taking a stand against Trump and against all those who support him, most especially partisan evangelicals. Together they are tearing our country apart and blaming us for it.
Trump should be a living reminder to all Americans and especially anyone who is Christian that nothing good comes from mixing religion and partisan politics. Evangelicals have been doing it for the last 45 years, the result of which is that a man like Donald Trump is now in the White House.
How it all ends has yet to be determined, but this is the moment when the decision is being made. The choice is between supporting a morally and politically corrupt man who unilaterally and autocratically wants to rule America or opposing him.
Public sentiment matters, especially to Trump. He pays attention to polls. We must make sure he doesn’t like what he sees.
Saving the nation and saving Christianity are not the same thing, nor necessarily the same concern for many Americans. That is fine. The only task that should matter to every citizen of our land is saving the nation from Donald Trump.
Saving Christianity will be in the hands of the few genuinely Christian people who will be left if the nation is saved from Trump.
How that can happen and what the nation will look if it does is tomorrow’s final installment.
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