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100 Days In

100 Days In

Last updated on: April 29, 2017 at 7:50 am by Vance Morgan

100 Days In 2017-04-29T07:50:48-04:00 Vance Morgan

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images So we have arrived at Day 100 of the presidency of Donald Trump. It feels like it has been at least 100 weeks. I have to be very selective about how and when I get my news these days. I get headlines from The New York Times and the Washington Post in my in-box every morning that I quickly peruse; my television exposure is usually limited to Chuck Todd’s ‘MTP Daily” on MSNBC which is usually coming on just about when I get home from work. Yesterday I tuned in just in time to see a clip of Sean Spicer’s morning news conference in which he blamed the Trump administration’s failure to vet General Michael Flynn on the Obama administration. YOU F**KING A$$HOLE! I grumbled as I went to pour a scotch. And this was a good day.

On this day that the president has named as a “ridiculous and arbitrary” touchstone while acting as if it is extraordinarily important as he and his run about like headless chickens trying to find something that might count as an accomplishment, I find myself asking the same questions I was asking myself all through 2016. The most troubling question for me was always rooted in my continuing attempts to bring my faith, my political commitments, and my life as an ordinary human being into some sort of agreement. Since I frequently say, and have frequently written in this blog over the years, that I am a liberal because I am a Christian, the most confusing phenomenon of all for me was the extraordinary support Trump received from evangelical Christians. This particularly bugged me, because that’s the world I come from. Finding out that the president would be delivering the commencement address at Liberty University–which prides itself in and promotes itself as being the largest evangelical university in the world–reminded me of a visit by then-candidate Trump to that same university when he delivered their convocation address in January 2016.

Donald Trump at Liberty University

Interviews with students afterwards revealed strong support for Trump because of his perceived honesty, directness, outside-Washington status, business experience, and the perception that he had the best chance among the Republican candidates to defeat Hillary Clinton. Trump’s inability to identify the location of his favorite Bible verse or to even quote it accurately, his apparent lack of any commitment to traditional Christian values beyond lip service, and the fact that a conservative Christian leader the day before had described Trump as “the most immoral and ungodly man to ever run for President of the United States” seemed to matter little, if at all. One student said “I know a lot of people speak of his ego and how that’s not a Christian value — but I honestly think his ego is what gets things done. I’m okay with an egotistical president. He wants to be the best, and I think for that reason, he gets things done.” When faced with the opportunity to judge a candidate according to the values he and his chosen university profess, this student chose to punt. And here we are.

I recently read an essay from Marilynne Robinson’s recent collection The Givenness of Things that shed some new light on these matters. In “Awakening,” Robinson reflects on a contemporary phenomenon that runs rampant through our current public and political discourse—a professed “Christianity” that looks and sounds like anything but Christianity.

No doubt as a consequence of a recent vogue for feeling culturally embattled, the word “Christian” now is seen less as identifying an ethic, and more as identifying a demographic. On the one hand I do not wish to overstate the degree to which these two uses of the word “Christian” are mutually exclusive, and on the other hand I think it would be a very difficult thing to overstate how deeply incompatible they can be.

For many people, in other words, “Christianity” has become a tribal label, a marker of “us” vs. “them,” the very sort of tribalism that currently infects and threatens to permanently damage our political and social structures. Robinson notes that when the hallmarks of being a Christian are reduced to “are you in or out?” very un-Christian consequences are inevitable.

The simple, central, urgent pressure to step over the line that separates the saved from the unsaved, and after this the right, even the obligation, to turn and judge that great sinful world the redeemed have left behind—this is what I see as the essential nature of the emerging Christianity. Those who have crossed this line can be outrageously forgiving of one another and themselves, and very cruel in their denunciations of anyone else.

How is it that professed Christians can support candidates and policies that are, by any stretch of the imagination, anything but embodiments of traditional Christian values? If Marilynne Robinson is right, it is because contemporary Christianity often is not a way of life or a commitment to the principles of a historic and beautiful religion—it is rather a way to facilitate what are often the worst tendencies in human nature and behavior.

People of good faith get caught up in these things in all times and all places. In the excitement of the moment who really knows he or she might not also shout, “Give us Barabbas!”

All of this sounds rather harsh and judgmental—also not congruent with the Christian values I profess. So be it. I grow weary of hearing the name of my faith used in the service of un-Christian and inhumane policies and actions, in much the same way that sincere and serious Muslims must tire of hearing their ancient religion’s name used as a placeholder and justification for terrorism and murder. The truth of the matter is that Christianity as a lived faith runs contrary to much of our deepest, natural human wiring. The first will be last; to him who asks give; turn the other cheek; judge not. Tribal Christianity, on the other hand, appeals to the worst in our nature. As Robinson points out,

It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous us on one side, and on the other a them who are very doubtful indeed, who are, in fact, a threat to all we hold dear . . . If the claims to Christian identity we hear now are rooted in an instinctive tribalism, they are entirely inappropriate, certainly uninformed, because in its nature the religion they claim has no boundaries, no shibboleths, no genealogies or hereditary claimants.

As Robinson writes, fear and the desire for identity and a place to belong can cause people of good will and intentions to choose and accept things that are in truth the very opposite of what they claim to believe in, even with the real thing right in front of them. But fear need not rule the day. Even when millions of professed Christians helped put Barabbas in the White House.

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