The hour of the hypocrite

Historians someday will call this the Age of Trump. It has made me something of a cynic about things concerning which I was once an idealist.

Strong, vocal "pro-lifers" refuse to do simple things to protect vulnerable human lives like wearing masks or practicing social distancing and undermine efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Disturbingly, they often make arguments that overtly value the economy more highly than human life. And as an end to the COVID nightmare approaches and vaccines are on the horizon, they may well, in some cases, make common cause with the cranks of the anti-vax movement and the virus themselves to discourage people from being vaccinated and thus to keep the pandemic going. 

Conservative Christians are upset by Roe v. Wade.  Fine. I'm not a fan either. For years, I allowed abortion to be a determining factor in the way I cast my vote. But with the advent of the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court,  I've realized two things. The first is that despite that majority on the Court, it isn't going to reverse Roe. Whether we like it or not, Roe represents our society's consensus on abortion and has ever since it was handed down. And the second is that to even make reversing it a possibility, we who find it morally and socially objectionable will have to change people's minds, and hearts, and not merely collect justices theoretically willing to consider reversing it.

Many Christians have allowed the false hope of Roe's judicial reversal before that change occurs to turn them into outspoken partisans of a sociopathic serial adulterer and professional con man whose crudity and cruelty are legendary. They have become advocates of a man who lies freely, cheerfully, even when it serves no purpose. They continue their advocacy of that man even after a conservative Supreme Court majority has been achieved. Many of them have chosen to ally with a blatant, fantasy-based attempt to disenfranchise millions of Americans and steal an election whose outcome was clear and decisive and which was probably the cleanest in recent history.

Evangelicals have been snookered into making Donald Trump the public face of Jesus Christ in America. That is not merely a bad witness. That is blasphemy and an abomination, and it drives people away from Jesus.

It's droll that the current doomed comic opera attempt to undermine the result of the election is being mounted by people who claim to be "strict constructionists" and who brag to anyone who will listen about their devotion to the Constitution. Real constitutionalists disapprove of intimidating the press. They do not look favorably on people who disrupt legal and predominantly peaceful demonstrations to facilitate photo ops. They frown on religious discrimination and the scapegoating of minorities and on those who offer to pay the legal fees of those who beat up demonstrators. They do not excuse presidents who blatantly attempt to use U.S. aid as a bribe to get allies to mount baseless inquisitions into the business dealings of the sons of opponents who have already been investigated by those allies and found blameless. They do not defend his slander of his opponents or his incessant outright lies.

True patriots do not side with an unhinged and erratic president who defends an unfriendly nation that interferes in our elections. They disapprove of placing its interests above those of the United States while betraying and alienating our allies and openly admiring despots and brutal mass murderers. They do not cheer for ignorant egomaniacs who shirk America's responsibilities in the world order. They do not favor allowing bad actors to run amok and the world to become a far more dangerous place just to "own the libs."

Honest advocates of free markets do not advocate ruinous tariffs and trade-wars. Real fiscal conservatives do not support the antics of the most lavish spendthrift ever to sit in the White House. 

Perhaps it's true that hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Perhaps. But the cup of hypocrisy overflows these days for the Republican Party, conservative Christians, journalists, legislators, and ordinary Americans who have allowed themselves to become complicit in the constitutional abomination that is the Trump administration. They remain complicit even as, in leaving office, it actively destroys the American people's confidence in our very system through transparently baseless charges powered by innuendo and conspiracy-mongering.

I left the Republican Party when it embraced Donald Trump and became the new Know-Nothing party.  I will continue to consistently uphold the sanctity of human life, but I must confess that my disillusionment with the pro-life movement and its oddly selective morality is profound. Especially with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court and an originalist majority secure, I'll be more selective in my defense of it even as I continue to uphold the principles it so selectively stands for.  And I will mourn perhaps the most perhaps most disturbing thing of all: the ease with which so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ, lay and clergy alike, even within my own church body, choose to call evil good and right, evil.

There has always been an authoritarian streak in the Missouri Synod, co-existing with its genuinely evangelical streak. I will be less reluctant henceforth to call it out.

And I cannot avoid the conclusion that many of the journalists and political leaders I've admired for years, who have become time-servers and revealed themselves to be unworthy of my support and regard, know better. They are neither stupid nor crazy; they merely lack a backbone or place a greater value on  "owning the libs" than on the principles they profess or their country's welfare.

Yes, I've become disillusioned with most so-called conservatives, with the Republican Party, with the "pro-life" movement. Many of my fellow, fallible human beings make the same confession I do about my God. I haven't changed, and I don't plan to. But the crucible of the four years that is thankfully coming to an end has disillusioned me in many ways. It's opened my eyes. If I let it, it could easily make me cynical, as it doubtless has made many of my fellow Americans cynical.

This is the hour of hypocrisy, in which so much on the American right both politically and theologically has been revealed to be something other than it claimed to be, and I had taken it as being. It's hard not to be saddened, and the sense of loss is acute. But I can't help but reflect on Ronald Reagan's famous statement that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me."

I feel the same way about the "Banana Republicans." The political meaning of the word "conservative" has changed in common usage. I'll continue to be a professing and practicing confessional Lutheran, even if my institutional identification with the Missouri Synod has been lessened by the inability of so many, even on its clergy roster, to identify the truth about power, much less speak the truth to power.

But it was ever thus. When I was in the parish, I remember a conversation I had with Robert Bertram, a Seminex professor condemned by the Missouri Synod but a fellow member of the resistance fighting the rapid decline of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, to which we both belonged at the time, into theological anarchy. "Bob," I told him, "I hate being a curmudgeon."

"Read Jeremiah," he advised. "Bob, the only people God calls to be curmudgeons are the ones who hate it."

I seem called to be a curmudgeon politically as well as theologically. I remain dismayed at the difficulty so many LCMS clergy seem to have in dealing even with such relatively clear-cut issues as institutional racism and transcending political ideology in the interest of the sound and consistent application of biblical and confessional principles social issues. And am thankful that God has reserved to himself a remnant in the LCMS, in American Lutheranism generally, and in Christendom, who have not bowed the knee to the orange Baal. And even as I mourn the shipwreck Lindsey Graham and Joni Ernst and so many "conservative" journalists have made of my regard, I rejoice in the discovery that I have people like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol and Mona Charen and David French and Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney and Evan McMullin and Sarah Longwell and Jonathan Last and Tim Miller and Jonah Goldberg to stand with. I have many in the LCMS (I will not name them, lest I get them into trouble) whose intellectual integrity and consistency in applying confessional and biblical principles do not evaporate when they approach the border between the Two Kingdoms.

It continues to be my conviction that God is in control. Human frailty is no obstacle to the achievement of divine purposes. I will accept my lot as a curmudgeon, a renegade, a maverick, and rejoice in the good company in which it puts me. And going forward, I'll be a bit less willing to accept people's motivations at face value. The Age of Trump has made me much more aware that there are worse things than standing alone.

There is lying to oneself and becoming an apologist for the very things one claims to oppose.