"What would Jesus NOT Do?:" The perverse, self-defeating cult of St. Donald the Narcissist

:

Like a beaten army
Moves the Church of God,
Brother treads on brother,
Grinds him in the sod.
We are all divided;
Not one body, we;
Some lack faith
And some lack hope
And all lack charity.
Backward, Christian soldiers;
March in doubt and fear;
With the Cross of Jesus
Bringing up the rear.

--Robert McAfee Brown
The Collected Writings of St. Hereticus

Please.

Spare me the sophistic nonsense about how Donald Trump has been elected to be our president and not our pastor. Spare yourself the embarrassment of suggesting that there is any conceivable sense in which a leader who leads by demonizing and bullying the weak, by constant deception and deceit, by trashing the values of the Constitution he swore to support and defend,  by protecting the interests of the enemies of his country and by giving us consistently the worst possible example to guide us is in any sense doing "all that Scripture really requires of a ruler," and whose misrule somehow fulfills his obligation in what Luther called God's Kingdom of the Left Hand.

Donald John Trump is a habitual and shameless liar who says whatever comes into his mind with no particular concern for whether it is true or even plausible. There is no false witness he will hesitate to bear if it serves his purpose of the moment. There is no greater embarrassment than he for the nation he leads or for that portion of God's Church which perversely identifies its cause with his so closely as to barely recognize a distinction between the two. True, he offers Christians his support when it comes to various hot-button social issues. True, he portrays himself as defending them from the threat of an increasingly secular age that can somehow relativize the importance and authority of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom for each of us to practice his or her religion in keeping with his or her conscience. But at the very same time,  he accuses others of literal treason and of being "enemies of the people" for exercising the freedom of speech and freedom of the press that same First Amendment also guarantees in ways he doesn't like. In most ways, his policies rest on a foundation of fear and mean-spiritedness and scapegoating.

There is nothing new about any of that, and while the president's partisans may dispute it, only the most clueless and naive of them don't know it deep down just as well as his critics do. They just won't admit it.

Don't get me wrong. President Trump, for whatever reason, has reversed the positions he has held his entire adult life and offered Christians a seductive bribe in the realm of which Satan once boasted had been delivered to him, to give to whom he pleased. Mr. Trump has pulled off a virtual revolution in the American judiciary and notably the Supreme Court which has moved it away from a philosophy which sees the role of the courts as the informal amendment of the Constitution to taste and the usurpation of the roles of Congress and the state legislatures and toward the notion that the courts are there to interpret the law rather than to make it. Since the courts had hitherto been full of activists whose personal philosophies tend toward the left and to be less religious than most Americans, the effect of this has been to slow a tendency toward changes in the legal landscape hostile to the values of most religious Americans and even to their ability to freely practice their religion outside the walls of their own places of worship. I, too, welcome that consequence of Mr. Trump's presidency.

Many conservative Christians take it as a given that politicians generally are liars. We human beings believe what we want to believe, and most of us who can be reasonably called traditional Christians in America want desperately to believe that at worst the difference between Mr. Trump and "professional politicians" is one of degree rather than kind. The same holds true of his much-discussed narcissism. It's hard to believe, even stipulating that there are problems with even qualified clinicians diagnosing public figures whom they have never met, how easily the difference between having a larger-than-life ego and being the apparent poster child for the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for a serious and dangerous personality disorder is routinely minimized and rationalized away by believers desperate to ignore the obvious.

It seems amazing that so many evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and confessional Lutherans and Calvinists can seriously compare Donald Trump to King David or other biblical "good guys" who had personality flaws and momentary lapses. There is nothing momentary in what is problematic about Mr. Trump. While we can't look into anybody's heart, it takes less charity than gullibility to believe that Mr. Trump, who once said that he never asks God for forgiveness and never admits to being wrong, lives by trust in God's grace.

As a Lutheran, I'm suspicious of the notion that despite there being a qualitative objective difference between the life of a believer and what that life would be if he or she were an unbeliever because faith always issues in good works, it is, therefore, possible to tell whether a person is a Christian by his or her outward behavior, at least absent an ongoing public lifestyle tantamount to a renunciation of the faith.  Too many non-Christians live exemplary lives and too many sincere Christians fight an ongoing battle against personality flaws and besetting sins for that to be the case, and in the last analysis faith and behavior, while closely related, are not the same thing. But while being agnostic about the condition of another person's soul is generally commendable, there comes a point at which some degree of skepticism is in order when one's faith is being flaunted as a political credential.

Whether Mr. Trump's relationship with the truth, his questionable ethics, or his habitual lack of charity and even civility cross the line Lutheran orthodoxy draws between "besetting" sins of weakness and "ruling" sins of ethical apostasy (his sexual past is, after all, in the past) is something, in my view, none of us has any business judging. Suffice it to say that comparisons of Mr. Trump to David and other fallible saints are a little too facile. Evangelical leaders insist that God put Donald Trump in office, and as presumptuous as that might sound so some ears, in one sense they're clearly right;  St. Paul's thesis in Romans 13 amounts to the assertion that all rulers are agents of God, including evil ones; the ruler he specifically has in mind is Nero. But others (myself included) would point out that sometimes God sends us bad rulers as a judgment, and that St. Paul's admonition necessarily applies differently to citizens of a democracy to whom rulers are legally accountable than to residents of the Roman Empire who might or might not be citizens at all and who legally had only those rights which Caesar saw fit to grant them.

Nevertheless, somehow, many evangelical Christians identify Donald Trump with the cause of the Kingdom in a way which raises my eyebrows, and the eyebrows of others. After all, despite a lifetime on the wrong side of the argument, Mr. Trump has been the most outspokenly pro-life president we have had since Roe v. Wade was handed down. The appointments the next president would make to the Supreme Court was the one telling argument for supporting the outrageously unqualified, ethically compromised, obviously uninformed agent of division and ill-will whom the Republican Party nominated in 2016. That he was nominated at all was only because his cadre of marginal and idiosyncratic voters constituted a larger bloc than that of any one of the other excessively numerous but far better-qualified candidates. And the impact of the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh nominations cannot be denied. Although the mainstream media, counting the socially liberal Justice Anthony Kennedy as a conservative, somehow claimed for years that the Supreme Court had a conservative majority despite society-shaking liberal decisions like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges,  not only does the Court now have a conservative majority in practice as well as in theory but the modification (though almost certainly not the repeal) of Roe is for the first time an actual possibility. And the change in the court has been reflected in the record numbers of conservative judges Mr. Trump has appointed throughout the Federal judiciary.

That much must be conceded, and I concede it freely. But at what price? Christianity Today was condemned by Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and other pro-Trump leaders of the evangelical movement for calling for Mr. Trump's removal on ethical grounds on the incredible basis that to do so somehow constituted a poor witness to Jesus Christ.

Let's pause for a moment and ponder that suggestion. Is it really plausible that because Donald Trump has effectively advocated a position compatible with traditional Christian ethical beliefs on certain matters of public policy, it doesn't matter that he has built a political movement out of playing on people's fears, demonizing specific groups of people based on falsehoods like the notion that illegal immigrants commit violent crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans; that he bears false witness not only against his opponents and critics but against just about anyone who rubs him the wrong way on practically a daily basis; that a persuasive case can be made that insofar as his position on freedom of the press, freedom speech, and even on freedom of religion (as regards his attempt to ban most Muslims entering the United States) he has advocated positions which make mincemeat of his oath to support and defend the Constitution; that whether or not he is personally a racist (something I doubt; I don't think he is conscious enough of race to care that much about it either way) he has made a custom of siding with white supremicists and is seen by them as their advocate and hero; that in violation of the law and of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution he continues to use his position for personal profit (Trump hotels have not even become popular places for visiting dignitaries seeking to curry favor with the administration to stay, but also to hold various diplomatic functions, and he is currently dealing with litigation over that fact in the courts); and that he has without room for any serious dispute governed with a mean-spiritedness and vindictiveness unparalleled in modern American history?

Even more fundamentally, are his obligations as a leader before God really exhausted by his taking the proper positions on specific controversial social issues, without regard for whether he is governing wisely, justly, or well in other areas? And then, there is that non-stop, never-ending barrage of daily character assassinations on Twitter, his casual and heedless misrepresentations of fact, and what can only be described as outright lies.

Yeah, I know he talks a good game about protecting Christians from an increasingly hostile culture.
Yeah, the other political party has largely embraced a revisionist view of the First Amendment as guaranteeing only freedom of worship and has become not simply the party of secularism, but one largely embracing the historically bizarre notion that to advance a social position originating from religious convictions ipso facto violates the separation of church and state, ignoring the fact that the movement to abolish the slave trade, the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement,  the movement against child labor, and virtually every meaningful social reform in American history has either originated in or at least been driven by the religious convictions of Christians.

Sure, he stands in the breach against a distortion of the values of the Founders and the express words of the Constitution which would dilute freedom of religion into mere freedom of worship, to make the weasely distinction popularized by President Obama.

Yes, I know all those things. But do these things truly mean that holding him accountable for his advocating and doing for so much that is in direct contradiction with the ethos of Christianity and to the law or even for his policy failures, is really, as those prominent dissenters from that Christianity Today editorial suggest, a poorer witness to Jesus Christ than making a malicious demagogue, a pathological liar, a hero of the Klan and the American Nazi Party, a con artist with a longstanding reputation as an unethical businessman and who has paid substantial fines since becoming president for unethical business practices, who is presently involved in litigation over his allegedly illegal use of his position for personal gain, who makes the weak and the powerless the object of bullying and the scapegoat for our nation's problems and who mocks the less fortunate among us while bearing indiscriminate and unrepented false witness against all and sundry to all intents and purposes the popular face of Jesus Christ?

Can American evangelicals really be ignorant of the scandal that gives, of the degree to which not simply our embrace of aspects of the president's program (I, too, approve of his position on abortion and of the revolution he has wrought in the judiciary), but our unqualified identification of it with the cause of Christ alienates people from Jesus and undermines the Church's primary mission of evangelism and even the social renewal we think we're supporting?

Is that an effective Christian witness? What about the people in whose eyes Jesus and the Gospel are discredited because of the evangelical movement's dogmatic embrace of Donald Trump? How many souls will be lost because of it?

And what about Mr. Trump's own soul? What about our witness to him? Is he really exempt from the Church's mandate to call sinners to repentance? Do we not care that by failing to clearly distinguish between the things about him which are commendable and the things which, however politically inconvenient to him it might be, we are called upon to criticize we are showing less than the charity we owe to Mr. Trump himself? Are we fulfilling our obligation even to him by acting as if it is possible to be a Christian without not only admitting that we are wrong daily but living in constant supplication for God's forgiveness?

How are we not misrepresenting the Faith itself by giving that impression?

The case for support of Donald Trump as a Christian duty is a lie, and many are the lies told on its behalf- lies too many Christians readily believe. This article documents four of them. I urge you to read it, and if you are a conservative Christian, to prayerfully consider it.

For me, precisely my faith prevents me from supporting this man no matter what his position on abortion. I have followed Donald Trump's career for many years. Unlike nearly all of his supporters, I was acquainted with his behavior, public positions, personality, and reputation for decades before he announced his candidacy, and from the outset, I have belonged to an increasingly small but I believe uniquely consistent group of social and political conservatives colloquially called "Never Trump." Actually, I acknowledge and respect a distinction made by Ben Shapiro, a non-Christian conservative whom I admire and who also opposed Mr. Trump's candidacy, by preferring the label "Sometimes Trump." In my case, it would be more accurate to call myself "Occasionally" or perhaps "Rarely" or "Seldom Trump." But I try to go out of my way to commend and support him when he does something that deserves it.

On balance, though, I simply cannot avoid the conclusion that not only my faith but my belief in the principles of the Founding Fathers require opposition to the man. True, that puts me in an isolated and awkward position, in conflict with most of those whose philosophy I largely agree just as much as to our common opponents. But I cannot accept the premise that my opposition to the increasing spiritual and ethical anarchy of the age would be helped by compromising my principles, as many people I have always respected and admired on the right, have done whether they are willing to acknowledge it or not by failing to distinguish between what I must support in Mr. Trump's program and personna and what I believe that I am equally obliged to oppose.

"When presented with a choice between two evils," Charles Haddon Spurgeon advised, "choose neither." That's what I did in 2016 when I voted for Evan McMullin when so many people whose revulsion toward Hillary Clinton I shared were rationalizing their way into voting for Mr. Trump on the ground that he was the lesser evil. Sorry, but there comes a point in which even what could be seen as a lesser evil is in itself so radically unacceptable that to choose it is a compromise one simply ought not to make.

Why, even now, is there not an insurgency among Christian conservatives, a primary challenge to Mr. Trump by Ted Cruz or Vice-President Pence or some other Republican of impeccably conservative credentials every bit as favorable to the good things Mr. Trump advocates as he is but rejecting the lies, the bullying, the hypocrisy? Can my fellow social conservatives truly not see that the very absence of such a challenge is evidence of the degree to which they have compromised what they profess- I think even now, sincerely- to believe?

God does not ask us to win. We are not called to be successful in promoting the cause of goodness in the secular realm. We are not asked to wheel and deal to fulfill our calling as subjects of God's Kingdom of the Left Hand. We are asked, rather, to be faithful. We are asked to support what is right and oppose what is wrong regardless of party label or herd instinct, without fear or favor. We are called, not to power, but to the cross. And we confess that God's power is made perfect in our weakness, not in our playing of the political game.

There is a place for compromise, for realpolitik. There is a time for taking half a loaf rather than getting none. Ironically, this is an age in which the very people who are all in for Mr. Trump speak disparagingly of that kind of compromise. But there is never a time for the kind of compromise of principle required to identify the cause of Donald Trump with that of the Kingdom of God the way so much of the American evangelical movement has done.

When the Lord asked His rhetorical question about what it profits a man to gain the whole world while losing his own soul, I really think the Supreme Court is a part of the world He was talking about. And can it really be that we have forgotten that our God is the God of history, that He is in control, that the destinies of nations are in His hands, that doing right and trusting God for the outcome is the most pragmatic thing we can possibly do, and that we are called not only to be as wise as serpents but also as harmless as doves?

Supporting Donald Trump is not harmless. And confounding his cause with that of Jesus is not being faithful.