Francois Ntone

A Divided Country

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, some are raising the concern that the idea of unity under Christ may be at risk.  Overall, America appears to be more divided than ever.  Supporters of the new president, Donald Trump, are celebrating his victory and are hopeful that he will bring change that will benefit them.  Many of them who have seen a deterioration of their economic situation over the last few decades sincerely hope that Trump will bring back manufacturing jobs that presumably have been lost to other countries.  They do not trust Washington and see Trump as one who “tells it like it is” and one who has promised to speak on their behalf at a time other politicians have forgotten about them.  They welcome his theme of putting America first.  Some even share the more extreme views he expressed during his campaign, such as his attacks against non-whites, Muslims, and his blaming of crime in America on illegal immigration.  In fact, even white supremacists have indicated that they see in Trump a leader who may bring about the kind of change they would like to see.

Trump’s supporters were of course happy to witness a smooth transition from Obama’s presidency to his presidency.  They have been calling for respect for the institution of the presidency, and want the rest of the country to just give Trump a chance, given their confidence that he will “make America great again”.  Occasionally Trump’s surrogates have even made the strange argument that it is unfair to judge him by things he said during the campaign.  Trump’s side argues that he never presented himself as a politician who carefully measures his words.  Instead, the brashness he brought to the political debate has been refreshing, a sign of honesty, and part of the reason he won the election in the first place.  Therefore, to his supporters, the nation as a whole stated its approval of his style by giving him the presidency, and those who now insist on expressing their opposition are standing against the democratic process.

On the other side of the political spectrum are those who see Trump’s victory as the triumph of a worldview that contradicts American core values.  Indeed, they see America as a nation of immigrants that draws strength from its diversity, and where all people should be treated with dignity.  They are deeply offended by the divisive rhetoric used by Trump during the campaign against women, minorities, non-Christian religions, etc.   They strongly feel that normalization of such views in itself is a betrayal of America: a man who, by his own words, has made it clear that he stands with one segment of the population against the rest of the nation is, by definition, not everybody’s president.   In addition, they point to Trump’s continuous disregard of facts, his disrespect of women, his narcissistic nature and his apparent inability to engage in thoughtful discourse (as shown in his uncontrolled impulse to deal with important issues by tweeting), as character flaws that are dangerous to the future of the nation and the world.  Therefore demonstrations have been taking place throughout the nation (and the world) by those who wish to make a statement while the inauguration is taking place.

Trump’s inaugural address was not, in any way, an attempt to bring the two sides together.  I have heard commentators, both from the left and the right, describe it as a “call to arms” directed at his base.  Therefore those on the right saw it as very appropriate and energizing, while those on the left saw it as the most unusual inauguration address they had ever heard.

Democrats and Republicans

The views described above roughly represent the divisions between democrats and republicans.  Given the new reality of a trump presidency, the question is: how are the two main political parties going to work with Trump?

While the republicans overall support a Trump presidency, it is clear that they will have to deal with their own internal divisions.  Indeed, it has been amazing to watch the changes in positions adopted by republican leaders such as Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, etc.  How these republican leaders can reconcile their current support of Trump with the statements they previously made about him is beyond anything my simple mind can comprehend.  But of course I am not a politician.  As a non-politician, I cannot help pointing out the inconsistencies that I keep noticing on the republican side, inconsistencies that I can only describe as signs of moral flaws.

When Barrack Obama was elected president, it is known that republican leaders led by Mitch McConnell got together and vowed to do everything in their power to make him a one-term president.  As they put their strategy into practice, they became known as “the party of no”.  They opposed every proposal made by Obama.  They even opposed their own proposals when Obama adopted them in the spirit of negotiation (John Boehner made it clear that he despised the word negotiation).  From a political perspective, the strategy worked for them.  But what does that say about intellectual honesty?  My guess is such a concept has absolutely no relevance to them today.

This republican strategy was particularly applied to the debate about Obamacare.  It is well known that Obama was in favor of a single payer option.  But the final form taken by Obamacare was based on Romneycare and incorporated the best republican ideas.  Such a system required an individual mandate as the insurance companies had made it clear that they would need a bigger pool of applicants to offset the costs associated with accepting people with preexisting conditions.  But pretty soon, the republicans managed to blame the individual mandate on Obama, and painted him as an autocrat bent on reducing individual freedoms.

Today, the republicans have taken control of Congress and the presidency, and things are not so simple anymore, as they prepare to repeal Obamacare but do not have a replacement to meet the needs of the 20 million people who are insured under it.  Ironically, they now have to show that they have a replacement that works better, even though, in reality, they have historically been against the whole concept of universal health care.  As for those folks who voted for Trump at least partially to state their opposition to Obamacare, even though they were insured under it, they are now finding out that a simple repeal can only hurt them.  One can only hope that they did not vote against it merely because it carried Obama’s name.

Another area where republican behavior is difficult to explain is related to investing on infrastructure projects.  Even today, the republicans maintain that Obama’s stimulus was a failure.  Therefore, they blocked for many years Obama’s attempts to further stimulate the economy through infrastructure projects.  However both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made investing in infrastructure a key element in their plans to create jobs.  It will be interesting to see how the republican Congress now decides all of a sudden that infrastructure jobs are important.  But again, who cares about intellectual honesty?  And who cares if their behavior under Obama actually hurt the country at a time people were desperately looking for jobs?

As for Trump himself, fact checkers struggle to keep track of the overwhelming number of false statements he made during his campaign.  It is clear that he has led the country into a new era where intellectual honesty no longer matters.  But it is also clear that when he and his supporters demand that his legitimacy be recognized, his opponents only need to ask why, for many years, he led the birther movement which used a false narrative to question Obama’s legitimacy.

Both republicans and democrats tend to play politics.  And today, one may debate whether lawmakers who decided to boycott Trump’s inauguration did the right thing or not.  However, when it comes to intellectual honesty, I see a difference between democrats and republicans.  Today, democrats openly express their criticism of Trump and when they are asked whether they will work with him, they declare that they will work with him where there is common ground, such as infrastructure projects, and will resist him on matters on principle.  That is a far cry from the republican strategy of even rejecting republican ideas just to make Obama fail.  It also indicates that democrats consider the welfare of the nation more important than political victories.

Christian Responses and Unity Under Christ

The Christian world in America is just as divided as the rest of the country regarding Trump’s presidency.  The Christian Right, of course, generally supported him during the presidential campaign, and has presented him as the candidate who will defend conservative views on abortion, same sex marriage, military readiness, religious freedoms and anti-socialism.  Franklin Graham saw “the hand of God” in Trump’s victory.  White evangelicals had previously gone out of their way to explain that they recognized Trump’s character flaws but saw him as their only choice, given their dislike of Hillary Clinton.  By suggesting that God himself intervened to get Trump elected, Franklin obviously fully legitimizes his victory and fully normalizes him.  Interestingly, Franklin has been publically saying that he did not encourage people to vote one way or the other.  In reality, as I discussed elsewhere, his statements in the September issue of Decision, his organization’s publication, implied that voting for Trump was a matter of life and death.

A major reason for Franklin’s support of Trump is his hope that Trump will push for a conservative Supreme Court.  I suppose he is not particularly concerned about the fact that 20 million people are at risk of losing their medical insurance if Obamacare is repealed.  Recently, a man named Bruce Horst shared his story on Facebook.  Until 2010, he had been a conservative evangelical Christian for all his adult life.  He had also been self-employed and had made a decent living, but had been uninsurable because of a preexisting condition, which had been a source of considerable anxiety for him.  He eventually left his church for the following reason: from his reading of Matthew 25, he was convinced that Jesus is to judge people on how they took care of “the least of these”.  However, he came to the realization that his fellow evangelicals did not have the same conviction.  In particular, they considered the entire idea of offering health care to people like him as an act against their own interests.  Bruce Horst writes:

“I understand that Congress is about to take away the healthcare coverage of about 18 million of our fellow Americans.  And they are doing this at the insistence of Conservative Christians.  I have friends who are alive today because of Obamacare.  Probably all of us do.  To me, this proves my Christian friends are not pro-life, but instead they have been told they are as a matter of manipulation, probably to keep them putting money in the offering plate, or voting for the ‘right’ candidate.  One thing is clear to me, they are not really pro-life.

I don’t know what Congress is going to do with healthcare in the next few days.  I would love to be surprised to find that President Trump has convinced Congress to extend healthcare coverage to all, and I would be among the first to be grateful for this.  While even if this does occur, if my Christian friends insist that healthcare only be given to people based on their ability to pay for such care, I would have to believe that the Jesus of the Bible would say to them, ‘depart from me, I never knew you.’  Just like he did in the book of Matthew.”

During the rocky introduction of Obamacare, Catholic bishops contributed substantially to its lack of popularity by presenting it as an attack against religious freedoms.  It is therefore surprising that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on January 18, released a letter warning Congress not to repeal Obamacare without a replacement, as this would leave millions of people uncovered.  I give the bishops credit for changing their tune after realizing the importance of the Affordable Care Act for the lives of millions of Americans.  But at the same time, I cannot help wondering why they so violently attacked it in the first place.  Again, I ask: how can any follower of Christ be opposed to an effort to provide healthcare to those who need it and cannot afford it?  This kind of hypocrisy is the reason why Bruce Horst left his church.

After the 2016 presidential election, I saw many African American Christians go through a period of grief unlike anything I have seen before.  It was a general malaise associated with a feeling that decades of racial progress are about to be nullified.  Such Christians eventually tended to retreat into their faith, their hope that God will be with them no matter what.

More generally, Christian leaders such as Jim Wallis, who are aware that the Gospel of Christ calls for social justice and diversity, are calling for resistance.  The resistance is to take the form of increased political and social engagement, remembering Jesus’ words in Matthew 25.

Of interest is an opinion written on December 30 by Mark Galli in Christianity Today.  Galli, I think, was writing to evangelical Christians, and was calling for unity, recognizing that some would claim that Trump’s election “set back the cause of the Gospel 50 years”, while others would be “equally sure the Gospel would have been set back by a different election outcome”.  To justify his call to unity, Galli explains that the early Christians lived in a world where they had to proclaim the Gospel under persecution.  They called to repentance men everywhere, without regard for social status. But Galli adds that “They called men and women to repent not of their politics but of their sins, and to join the radical fellowship of the Lord in whose name they were baptized and broke bread together—Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, men and women.”

The suggestion that politics and sin have nothing to do with each other seems rather strange to me.  To explain it, Galli states that the early Christians had in their fellowship Greek and Jewish supremacists, oppressors and oppressed, chauvinists and feminists.  I can only hope that Galli is not implying there is no need to repent from being a supremacist, an oppressor or a chauvinist because, supposedly, these are political positions rather than sins.  But he continues his explanation with the following:

“And when, from time to time, they started dividing by identity or social class, they got an earful from James (James 2) or Paul (Eph. 2–3). They probably got this idea from their Lord, who had welcomed into his fellowship both a revolutionary (Simon the Zealot) and a collaborator with the oppressors (tax collector Matthew).”

It took me a while to wrap my mind around this one.  Galli recognizes that James and Paul were strongly against divisions by identity and social class within the fellowship of believers.  In other words, they stood for social equality.  But Galli equates this to Jesus’ acceptance of a revolutionary in his company.  In reality, there is no comparison between the two situations: expecting rich and poor to be treated equally was consistent with Jesus’ teaching about rules of conduct in the kingdom of God, and much of his teaching was about restoring dignity for the poor and the disenfranchised.  But his acceptance of Simon the Zealot did not mean that Simon could continue, under his guidance, to be a revolutionary bent on violence.  As for expectations Jesus would have had regarding tax collectors, the story of Zacchaeus shows that repentance was expected of him because he “was lost” (Luke 19:8-10).  Zacchaeus volunteered to take the first step in that direction by making amends for his previous behavior before Jesus even asked him.  And regarding Matthew, a mere look at Matthew 9:9-13 provides further insight into Jesus’ thinking.  In that passage, Jesus is criticized for dining at Matthew’s house with tax collectors and sinners.  He responds as follows:

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’  For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Clearly Jesus sees tax collectors as sinners who need a doctor, and he is their doctor.  Galli is right when he says that Jesus did not hesitate to associate with people of all walks of life.  But he wanted to transform them, bring them into the light.  His intention was not to surround himself with people who would be free to maintain their previous morally questionable conduct, as long as he had their adoration.  In that sense, Galli’s statements are very misleading.

Galli further explains his position when he says:

“To be sure, when it comes to core theological affirmations, we can rightly expect the church to be united in one voice. But the early church quickly recognized that members would also have strong opinions about secondary matters, where no explicit biblical teaching exists and where we must exercise prudential judgment. That’s fine, Paul said. ‘Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters’ (Rom. 14:1).  If someone wants to divide the church over such matters, he added, “keep away from them’ (16:17).”

To Galli, apparently the one thing that should unite Christians is what he calls “core theological affirmations”.  In other words, he defines a Christian as a person who has declared his acceptance of certain theological statements.  Beyond that, issues of moral conduct such as oppressing others, or other political misconduct, are of much less importance.  But Galli fails to explain that when Paul talks about disputable matters, he is specifically referring to eating meat or celebrating certain festivals.  Anybody can see that these are matters of secondary importance.  But as pointed out by Bruce Horst, Jesus made it clear in Matthew 25 that he considers the way we treat “the least of these” a more critical matter than our theological constructions.

By saying “we evangelical Christians”, Galli clearly defines his audience.  He calls for unity under Christ, which seems like a noble goal.  However, unity under Christ implies adherence to his teaching.  If his church is divided into those who follow his teaching and those who do not, then unity is not possible.  When Pope Francis, reacting to Trump’s attacks against Mexican immigrants, stated that Christians build bridges, not walls, he was right, and Trump’s position was not a Christian one.  The two positions simply cannot be reconciled.

In an opinion she wrote in January 2017 in Christianity Today, with the title “How Trump’s Inauguration Will Catalyze Christian Witness”, Katelyn Beaty offers a view that is more consistent with the Christian way.  She writes:

“Christians who denounced Trump might feel especially powerless this season, realizing that their warnings didn’t sway enough voters at the polls. But Trump’s win has inspired many to redouble their commitment to hospitality, compassion, solidarity with the poor, generous giving, and emboldened verbal proclamation of the gospel.”

Beaty, who recognizes that Trump’s behavior disqualifies him from being considered as a Christian leader, states that the above considerations should also apply to Christians who voted for Trump while holding their noses or only to stop his opponent.  To illustrate her statement, she points to historical examples of Christian action.  She refers to Christians under harsh Roman rule in the second and third centuries, who cared for the sick and the dying in times of plagues.  She mentions the Christians of Le Chambon, in France, who provided shelter to 5000 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.  She also mentions Africans in America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, living under “state-sanctioned slavery and overt white supremacy” who “found liberation and promise of freedom in the biblical assurance that Christ had come to set the captives free.”  In relation to today’s situation, she declares:

“And in our own day, individual Christians, churches, and organizations will go on sheltering refugees, adopting abandoned children, advocating for the dignity of women, standing with the poor and oppressed, and inviting more and more into the ‘life that is truly life’ found in the Son of God. To a dying world, such practices seem small and naively weak, especially compared with political leaders like Trump who boast in their own economic and military strength.  But to those with eyes to see, the small practices of the gospel are enough to turn the world upside-down.”

As I read these words, there is no doubt in my mind that they are consistent with the teaching of Jesus and his apostles.  Any call to unity under Christ that does not recognize that does not stand on solid ground.