Snippet

America

Change

Politics

Trauma

7 November 2024

3 min read

How America reckons with its fractured reality

The first thing is always to listen. To sit. To feel.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

Two people sit at the table, one dictates as the other types. Behind a banner reads: write a postcard to the next president.i

Artist Sheryl Oring types messages to the president.

instagram/usf_npml

Yesterday, the day after the election, I preached a funeral. I heard the name of our President-elect only once. But I did speak on Jesus and Lazarus. About pain and loss.

I named our enemy, death, that robber, cheat, and swindler. And I spoke about grief—we all grieve in so many different ways. And then about tears. I shared about the man from Nazareth, whose public grief before the tomb of his friend drew hushed whispers from onlookers.

It was, you may remember, a tomb he was about to open. He knew, Jesus did, what he was about to do. And did it so that those who were there would become witnesses to precisely what God is about: defeating death. “Come out, Lazarus!” says Jesus, and he does.

The Christian faith, I told the grieving, would have us believe that even in our grief, there is a hope that hems it in. That Jesus enters our darkness and comes to rob death of its finality. I love too that Jesus says next— “Unbind him!” —turning onlookers into witnesses and participants.

This was how I spent my day. I’m not sure I could have spend it any better. Not because it was an escape from the election, but it forced some perspective on me. Because T.S. Eliot is right: “we cannot bear much reality.”

Here, political autopsies are everywhere. Some talk of the Democrat’s conceit, of denying President Biden’s liability as a candidate, bypassing the primaries, refusing to meet economic concerns. There’s talk of Trump’s genius and what looks to be the end of his legal troubles. There’s talk of the downfall of America, of ascendant and aspiring authoritarianisms. Perhaps. Especially if we take Trump at his word.

But as the funeral ends, I’m weighed down by the messages I’m starting to read. Not about the results alone. Not questions about political strategy and futures. No, these are pained voices from a Christian community in America betraying itself.

My phone messages are filled with stories of pain and loss. Friends and strangers alike, enduring the same loss, the same betrayal. The communities that taught us the faith now distort it. And none of this is new.

Howard Thurman, who mentored Martin Luther King Jr., said it back in 1946: “the tragic truth is that the church permits various hate groups in our common life to establish squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching on the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity.” This loss has been with us for generations. But these fissures and fractures are ours to bear today. And they are not unconnected from the social and political chaos of America.

Martin Luther once said, “living, dying, and being damned makes one a theologian.” This has taught me to welcome, rather than despise, accusations that question the validity of my faith. It’s also made me suspicious of the misplaced messianic hope from which such questions emerge. It’s a false hope not easily displaced.

Before I returned to the States from living in Scotland these last few years, a good friend told me honestly: “perhaps America will have to ride it out, all of it, until it’s done.” The thought seemed a far-off scenario then. But I think he’s right.

When Israel built the golden calf in the wilderness, Moses made them grind it up into powder, mixing it in their drinks. The Christian community in America, whether we realize it our not, will soon be drinking our idolatry down to the dregs with consequences beyond Christian community itself.

And people ask, “what should we do?” And I think that time is near for that question. But the first thing is always to listen. To sit. To feel. And to remember that it’s not for nothing that Jesus, who pronounced so many woes over Jerusalem, also wept over it.

This article’s image is of Sheryl Oring, an artist who invites the public to write to the next president. She has typed and sent thousands of messages to the White House every election since 2004 as part of her performance series I Wish to Say. Read more about her and the letters: Artist Invites the Public to Write Letters to the Next US President

Column

Culture

Politics

18 April 2024

4 min read

The bullies invoking Jesus as their best buddy

Trump and Putin's desire to be loved, admired and followed.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A fierce looking man walks at the head of a phalanx of suited men.

Trump strides from the White House to St John's Church, 2020.

The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m not at all sure that the parents of a teenager driven to despair, or even suicide, by online trolls, or a woman in a coercive relationship, are likely to see their tormentors as victims, making a cry for help by making the lives of others intolerable.

Bullies, it is said, have invariably been bullied themselves. A popular proverb has it that bullies never prosper, a comforting canard knocked down by some comprehensive research recently from the British Cohort Study that, of 7,000 children born in 1970, it was the nastiest, most aggressive little pieces of work that did best in life by age 46.

Social insecurity may well have driven their cruel treatment of others, but financial security has been their reward. Said one of the study’s authors, there’s ‘a strong link between aggressive behaviour at school and higher earnings later in life’.

What exemplars of that might we find on the international stage? Step forward the erstwhile and very possibly future president of the United States and the great-returner president of Russia.

They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Bullying may be too light a term for what Donald Trump has done to countless women and business associates in his life, what Vladimir Putin has done to Ukraine and other old Soviet satellites, and what both men have done to their nations’ electoral systems.

But I want to make an armchair case for the psychological insecurity of both men. That insecurity presents itself in a rather pathetic (in the literal sense) desire to be loved, to be admired and to be followed by devoted disciples.

And what role model might they come up with for that? Why, of course, they have both invoked Jesus Christ as their best buddy, who is very much on their side politically and who is really a lot like them.

Trump has endorsed excruciating (again, literally) drawings of himself sitting in the dock at court with the Christ and has published his own $60 “Bible” (one remembers the delightful self-publicist Jonathan King launching his fictional memoir, entitled Bible Two).

Putin has claimed that he’s not a little like the Nazarene calling fishermen by the sea of Galilee, as he rallies Russian youth to resist the pernicious culture of the “Satanic” West. He casts himself, along with Jesus, as the defender of “traditional values”, though the conflation of the Christ with cultural tradition is a little awry, but never mind.

There’s pragmatic political ambition in both men for co-opting the Christ to their cause. Trump wants and needs the US Christian Right on his side for re-election. Putin is promoting a rapprochement with Russian religions and already has the Russian Orthodox Church onside for his Ukrainian escapade.

But there’s something else going on here. The armchair psychologist can identify motives at work. Both Putin and Trump want not only attention. They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity

What better figure to associate themselves with than love incarnate? A demi-god aspires to be loved as God loves and is loved. It may replace a familial love that has been missing, or it may more simply be the toxic desire to be loved by those you oppress and by one’s peers – again, the instinct of the bully.

That’s closer to admiration and has vanity at its root. Witness Putin’s faintly ridiculous bared torso astride a horse as a younger man, or Trump’s vainglorious comb-over and orange-tanned skin.

Such a shame that we have no idea how the most famous figure who ever lived, whose legacy is the largest religion on earth, actually looked. Or they might try to look like that. Because, to their minds, emulation would win similar admiration.

Finally, Trump and Putin need to be followed, like bullies need their gang. Never mind that even the most devoted disciples of Christ abandoned him to his fate in his mortal life. There’s something like 2.5 billion declared followers of him today, some two millennia later. That’s some legacy and the kind that would shore up even for deepest of their insecurities.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity. The nature of Christian leadership, at its source, is unreachable. He said himself that we could not follow where he was going, because it’s a form of leadership beyond human scope – self-sacrificial, infinitely humble while also divine.

That leadership was among us and we didn’t recognise it. The leaderships of Trump and Putin, even as they claim Christ-like affinity, carve recognition and to be above us. These are not men who would lay down their power, far less their lives, for their friends.

These are bullies in the playground of politics. We must pray for their souls as we condemn their actions.