One of the hallmarks of
Christian faith is charity, which is unfortunate for me, because, as a
cradle Christian (and, lately, a recovering agnostic), I’ve been feeling
less than charitable since Donald Trump won the presidential election. I
don’t mean that I’m not in the spirit of giving to charities — I’ll be
writing out a whopper of a check to the American Civil Liberties Union
presently.
I
am, however, having trouble giving the gift of slack to Christians who
voted for Trump. According to a preliminary study of exit poll data by
Pew Research Group, Trump won 52 percent of the Catholic vote, 58
percent of the Protestant vote, and, broken down further by race, a
whopping 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote.
If you’re a Christian who voted for Trump, I understand your concerns — jobs, the economy, health care, national security, frustration with the political status quo. What I don’t understand is your heart. All factors considered, were Trump’s calls for massive deportation of immigrants, along with his anti-Semitic dog whistling, racist commentary, documented history of misogyny and his mocking of the vulnerable, worth overlooking in favor of his shaky promises to make things better in your world? If, as Christians, we’re supposed to love our neighbor, a vote for Trump seems a little suspect. Am I wrong? If so, tell me how.
When
asked whether he thought his incendiary campaign rhetoric had gone too
far, Trump responded, “No. I won.” What a guy. Now he’s staffing up with
his own (unqualified) family and a website publisher who’s been accused
of beating his wife and channeling white-supremacist ideology. In the
space of two weeks, it feels as if we’ve shifted from a democracy to a
triage center. Jesus wept.
Not all Christians were pro-Trump, of
course. My sister, who has been a Presbyterian minister for almost 30
years, texted me when she found out in the wee morning hours of Nov.
9 that Trump had won, “God help us.” The New York Times feature last Sunday on post-election sermons features more than one pastor in clear distress. Minister Mihee Kim-Kort wrote on her blog, “We lost something on November 9th. More than an election. Something – call it humanity, compassion, hope – faltered and perished, and something in me, too.”
Still, to put it in theological terms, I’m pissed. I can’t stand the
postelection suffering around me — more than one person I know has
broken out in shingles from stress. Migraines and insomnia are the norm.
Virtually everyone I know is walking around in a state of panic, dread
and low-level rage. Including me.
Things that have made me angry:
People smiling and saying, “Everything will be OK.” Anyone who suggests
that we “get over it” or “wait and see what he does.” I was even angry
at Anne Lamott because I thought her heartfelt postelection Facebook message was
too soft. Our wise, comforting, radical-caregiving sister Annie! Being
mad at Anne Lamott is like drop kicking a teddy bear. I need to get a
grip.
It helps to maintain awareness that even among us huggy, lovey, Jesus-y types, resistance is afoot. In The Washington Post, Sarah Pulliam Bailey reported
on a deepening divide within the evangelical Christian community,
exacerbated by the election. She quoted Eugene Cho, the pastor of an
evangelical church in Seattle: “The election has made things more
hostile or given permission to people to be more aggressive on both
sides.”
She also reported that Cho, who pledged to never endorse a
candidate from the pulpit, joined a group of evangelicals who
condemning Trump, arguing that his campaign “affirms racist elements in
white culture.” The letter, which was also backed by about 80 other
pastors and faith leaders, Pulliam wrote, “decried Trump’s comments on
women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees and the disabled.”
Some
evangelicals, disheartened by the strong turnout for Trump among their
purported fellow believers, are prepared to jump ship entirely. Writer
and activist Preston Yancey tweeted on election night: “So I guess I’m
not an evangelical. Because I’m not whatever the hell this is.”
If it reassures me, perhaps it’s similarly comforting to nonreligious folk to know that while some Christians see Trump as America’s Great White Hope, the rest of us see an Anglo-Saxon pharisee with a spray tan. The fantastic tweet stream of the Rev. Broderick Greer, an Episcopalian priest, is a glorious model of righteous fire: “If it’s not good news for refugees, LGBTQ folks, and women — and people living at all of those intersections — it’s not the gospel of Jesus,” reads one tweet. Another declares, “To plaster ‘Jesus’ on heterosexism, sexism, racism, classism, militarism, or transantagonism is to betray all that he did and is.”
Calls to conformity are among the great pitfalls of
organized religion, and it didn’t take more than a day after Trump’s win
for a number of Christians on social media to issue a mandate to seek
unity. Aristotle Papanikolaou, co-director of the Orthodox Christian
Studies Center at Fordham University, issued a thoughtful rebuttal
to the exhortation to blindly unite. “What Christians must avoid most
is . . . a politics of dualism, a politics of us vs. them, a politics of
demonization,” he wrote.
