The greeting struck me as peculiar. “Happy Holy Week” is more than a little strange. Something didn’t smell right.
Rev. Al Sharpton response to the “God Bless the USA Bible”
Preying on Praying
Only a person ignorant or defiant of the heart-wrenching events of Jesus’ last days — Peter’s deceitful denials (“I do not know the man”) in the High Priest’s courtyard; the self-serving betrayals and abandonment of Jesus’ closest ‘friends’ and students; Jesus braiding a whip and driving out the money-changers in a fit of rage, turning over the money-changers’ tables for making his Father’s house into a den of robbers; Judas Iscariot, the apostle entrusted with the group’s purse, exchanging intelligence identifying Jesus’ whereabouts; an apostle drawing a dagger at his arrest, cutting off the High Priest servant’s ear, followed by Jesus’ rebuke of the way of violence; the release of one Jesus (Jesus Barabbas), the nationalist insurrectionist prisoner awaiting execution in place of the other (Jesus of Nazareth) in whom Pilate finds no guilt); Jesus’ final meal in an upper room of an unidentified dwelling; the invitation to “Take, eat. This is my body, broken for you” — would wish Christians a happy Holy Week.
Mark Twain Advice
I feel a bit like Mark Twain the day he responded to a sanctimonious businessman notoriously for his unscrupulous business practices.
“Before I die,” said the shyster, “I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud from the top.”
“I have a better idea,” said Twain. “You could stay home in Boston and keep them.”
The Way to Easter
You can get to the Easter Bunny without walking through the events of Holy Week, but you can’t get to Easter without walking through the valley of the shadow of death. It’s all there in Christian Scripture. It makes no difference how many Bibles you have —”I have many you” have” or how much you love it — “It’s my favorite book”— if you’ve never opened one.
Rev. Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge, author of "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (2017 Wipf and Stock Publishers), 49 two to four-page meditations on faith and public life, Brooklyn Park, MN, April 4, 2024.
“God Made Trump” is a masterpiece of cunning. Borrowing creation images from the Book of Genesis 1-3 and the Good Shepherd of fPsalm 23, Ezekiel 34:2-34, John 10:1-2), the three-minute video posted on Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, goes like this:
“And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker,' so God gave us Trump," the narrator says in the same style that the Book of Genesis in the Bible is written, while a video of Earth from space flashes to a photo of a young Trump.
"God said, 'I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office, and stay past midnight at a meeting of the state, so God made Trump," the narrator says.
Trump is shown interacting with world leaders, signing executive orders, posing for photos with his supporters, hugging the American flag, and walking onto Air Force One, with former First Lady Melania Trump as the narrator describes God's "need" for the former president.
"God said, 'I need somebody who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves when they attack," says the narrator, while the viewer sees a wolf baring its teeth and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), "a man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won't ever leave or forsake them."
Personal Reflection: ‘God’ and ‘the gods’
The Reform tradition of Christianity in which I stand views the Bible as a pair of spectacles through which to see God, the world, and oneself more clearly. Looking more clearly at “God Made Trump,” you will see something missing — the letter ‘s’, as in, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” We live among the gods that become God for us. A fitting title would be “The gods Made Trump.”
James Tissot, “The Good Shepherd.”
Mr. Magoo
“God Made Trump” is a rip off that takes off our glasses and turns it viewers into Mr. Magoo. It takes advantage of impaired eyesight. It blurs the ability to differentiate between hype and reality, fraud and truth, pretence and piety, subterfuge and honesty. We are all easily confused. “A little learning,” wrote Alexander Pope, “is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”
Impostors of God
A cursory reading of the biblical creation and Good Shepherd stories is a shallow draught. A deeper drink guides the reader into what Karl Barth called “the strange new world of the Bible,” in which we see more clearly. Though monotheists, atheists, and agnostics are of diverse opinions about the one God, they agree that there is not more than one, i.e., the gods do not exist. Those who claim the Bible as their source of truth and life should know better.
Constitutional lawyer, lay theologian William Stringfellow describes the gods as “imposters of God,” which the great theologian and philosopher of culture Paul Tillich saw as substitutes for the “God above god” (life’s Ultimate Concern) and the gods of real but penultimate concern among which all of us live in daily life, e.g. religion, work, money, family, status, sex, patriotism, which, although part of the fabric of human life, become substitutes for that which concerns us ultimately. Living anxiously among the gods leaves us restless – “Our hearts are restless,” said St. Augustine, “until they find their rest in Thee.”
Jacket of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange LandPaul Johannes Tillich (1886-1965)
Serious study of the Bible leads a reader to notice something missing in “God Made Trump.” The gods of the First Commandment have been deleted – “I am the LORD your God. You shall have no other gods before Me. No longer are their other gods before God. Cut in half, the First Commandment is castrated, but, in reality, only the gods remain.
Seen through the eyes of the First Commandment, Stringfellow, and Tillich, the real question is not whether God made Trump; the question is two-fold: “Which gods made Trump?” and “Which gods are making us in their images?
The Incarnation of the gods
On June 14th, 1946, the gods look looked up and said, “Let us make a creature in our images who will incarnate all of us,” and, so they did. For six days the gods who aspired to be God laid aside their competitive urges to work together as a consortium. They would be godlier than “the God above god” (Paul Tillich), Maker of heaven and earth, whose fatal flaw was to grant the gods freedom to do their mischief.
So, the gods of Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth laid aside their several powers for the sake of greater effectiveness. They put their heads together to craft an Immaculate Conception suited to their purposes.
Their creation would be the Incarnation of themselves and would embody all that the less-blessed creatures wanted for themselves: freedom from anxiety, absolute certainty, security, safety, and wealth. So, the gods found a virgin in Queens, and Mary Anne gave birth to her fourth-born child and named him Donald. The things the lesser creatures envied and desired for themselves – his unshakeable self-confidence, freedom to have any woman he wanted, his mastery of the arts of entertainment, prevarication, hypocrisy and greed, exemption from legal restraint and pangs of conscience, fearlessness in the valley of the shadow of death and prosecution, and palaces of silver and gold – would be theirs, just like him.
“God Made Trump” is an adaptation of “God Made a Farmer,” Paul Harvey’s speech to the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention that paid tribute to the American farmer’s dedication to caring for the land, plowing the fields, caring for animals. “God Made a Farmer” honored the farmer without idolizing him. It did not make wrongful use of the Name of God.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian and social critic, author of “Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness” (2017 Wipf and Stock), 49 short commentaries on faith and life. Writing from Brooklyn Park, MN, Feb. 7, 2024.
This 2020 commentary has stayed hidden in Views' draft file for reasons perhaps as obvious as the reasons for posting it now.
Every deed in the grand manner on this earth will in general be the fulfillment of a desire which had long since been present in millions of people, a longing silently harbored by many. Yes, it can come about that centuries wish and yearn for the solution of a certain question, because they are sighing beneath the intolerable burden of an existing condition and the fulfillment of this general longing does not materialize.
These words are not Donald Trump’s. “The intolerable burden that yearns for a solution” did not refer to the continuing dispossession of America’s First People, or the descendants of men, women children whose labor produced the wealth of their white kidnappers.
They are the words of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, the book Ivana Trump said her husband kept in his bedroom.
Nations which no longer find any heroic solution for such distress can be designated as impotent, while we see the vitality of a people, and the predestination for life guaranteed by this vitality, most strikingly demonstrated when, for a people’s liberation from a great oppression, or for the elimination of a bitter distress, or for the satisfaction of its soul, restless because it has grown insecure – Fate some day bestows upon it the man endowed for this purpose, who finally brings the long yearned-for fulfillment.
Adolf Hitler, Chapter 8, The Strong Man Is Mightier Alone, Mein Kamp
A Man Endowed for this Purpose: To Save the Nation
The president is a moral predator who feeds on fear of “the other.” Predators show no respect or compassion. Not for the sick and dying during the new coronavirus pandemic. Not for African Americans disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Not for at-risk first responders: doctors, nurses, orderlies, and hospital custodians and kitchen staffs begging for more masks and ventilators. Not for journalists who bring facts to disinformation press conferences. They show no respect for anyone or anything and hold nothing as sacred. They pose with Bibles in front of churches, but never read them.
Is it unreasonable to suppose that a president at risk of losing his fight to keep his tax returns from public scrutiny, fearful of losing his bid for re-election in November, and facing multiple criminal charges after leaving office would use the playbooks his first ex-wife and ghost writer alleged to have been by his bedside?
Hermann Goebbels, Minister without Portfolio Joseph Göring, Minister of Public Enlightenment and PropagandaErnst Röhm, SA co-founder and Chief of Staff
The Supreme Judge of the ________People
As news of the covert operation began to leak, Reich “Minister Without Portfolio” Joseph Göring ordered police stations to burn “all documents concerning the action of the past two days.” Newspapers were told not to publish the names of the dead. Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goring took to the airwaves to announce to the nation that Hitler had prevented traitors from overthrowing the government and throwing the country into turmoil. Eleven days later (July 13, 1934) Hitler gave the nationally broadcast speech to the Reichstag (the German equivalent of the U.S. Congress) in which he conflated the nation and himself. The strong man who made Germany great again proclaimed himself “the Supreme Judge of the German people” and threatened opponents as traitors.
If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this. In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life. Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.
Adolf Hitler speech to the Reichstag, July 13, 1934.
Concerned with potential objection from the Reichstag and the courts, Hitler acted quickly to push official approval by the Reichstag the expansion of his powers. The change was approved immediately and retroactively, serving as official justification for the massacre of the Night of the Long Knives. On July 3rd his administration’s cabinet approve a measure that declared, “The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defense by the State.”
The Blossoms of Disrespect
Had journalists asked former civil rights and peacemaking activist William Sloane Coffin what he would say about the self-proclaiming law-and-order U.S. president and his loyal partisans in Congress, I imagine he might repeat what he said years ago of public figures who insist their language bears no responsibility for hate and violence.
“Trent Lott, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell– all insist their words contribute nothing to an atmosphere that might legitimate anti-gay violence. Don’t they know that the seed of disrespect often blossoms into hatred?”
William Sloane Coffin Jr., Credo (WJK)
All who seek a respectful future do well to remember how quickly good gets twisted into evil, and how even a society’s best intentions for a just society can fall prey to the law of unintended consequences: the end of a Constitutional democratic republic by little men with little mustaches and deranged men with orange hair.
The terroristic threats of Ms. Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, in Fulton County, Georgia did not come directly from Rudy Giuliani. “America’s Mayor” of 9/11 fame did not tell anyone in particular to do anything in any particular way at any particular time or place. He neither directed nor suggested the phone calls, emails, and text messages that threatened the two Georgia election workers he claimed were “surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.” They were “engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.”
It was, in fact, America’s Mayor who was engaged in surreptitious illegal activity. Mr. Giuliani admitted under oath that his story about the USB port was false but, moments later, speaking publicly to reporters outside the courtroom, he switched back to the old story, saying it was real. He had just shot himself in the foot, handing fresh evidence to the prosecution’s case and undermining his lawyers’ defense strategy. Rudy Giuliani seemed confused.
Perhaps it’s his age. He’s lost a step or two. Maybe dementia, maybe not. Maybe just the memory loss that comes with getting older. Whatever lay behind the switch from admission to denial, the result was the same. Under oath, he was guilty; outside the courtroom, in the court of public opinion, he claimed innocence, and said his statements were protected under the First Amendment right to free speech.
Could America’s Mayor be held accountable for the terroristic threats that sent a mother and daughter to live in fear for their lives? Appearing before the House special committee on January 6, what happened and what didn’t happen was summed up in two questions and answers. Question: “Ms. Moss, what was it that passed between you and your mother that day?” Answer: “A ginger mint.” Describing how their lives have been affected, the answer was clear. “I don’t feel safe anywhere.”
Stochastic Terrorism
There is a name for what took place in Georgia and what is happening now across the country. Stochastic terrorism, as Author David Neiwert defined it in a 2018 interview with Salon, is a form of domestic terrorism that evades being held responsible for the violence it prompts by others.
Scripted violence is where a person who has a national platform describes the kind of violence that they want to be carried out. He identifies the targets and leaves it up to the listeners to carry out this violence. It is a form of terrorism. It is an act and a social phenomenon where there is an agreement to inflict massive violence on a whole segment of society. Again, this violence is led by people in high-profile positions in the media and the government. They’re the ones who do the scripting, and it is ordinary people who carry it out.
“Proud Boys, if you’re listening, stay back and stand down.” The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers stayed back and stood down until the president’s tweet invited patriotic American to the Capitol January 6 to “Stop the Steal”. “Be there! It will be wild!”
“There’s a lot of people here willing to take orders. If the orders are given, the people will rise up.” “Our president wants us here,” says a man from a livestream video standing within the Capitol building, “we wait and take orders from our president.’” “We have to have peace,” says President Trump to the January 6 marauders, “So go home, we love you, you’re very special.”
Most people storming the US Capitol on January 6 were “ordinary people” led to confuse violence with protest, insurrection with patriotism, scapegoating with allegiance to the constitution and the rule of law –- unwitting agents of a scheme of violence scripted “by people in high-profile positions in the media and government,” sometimes against others in high-profile positions. “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” “Stop the steal! Stop the Steal!”
Within hours the noose came down; the threat of domestic terrorism did not. Indicted and scheduled for trial in Florida, New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C., the former president mocks court orders to refrain from targeting judges, prosecutors, court staff, grand jury members, witnesses, potential witnesses, and poisoning the jury pool. Four of the 19 criminal codefendants in the Georgia RICO case (Scott Hall, Kenneth Cheseboro, Sydney Powell, and Jenna Ellis) have pleaded guilty and become witnesses for the prosecution. In Washington, D.C., former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has agreed to immunity after testifying before the federal grand jury in the case prosecuted by DOJ special counsel Jack Smith regarding efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, the defeated former president stays on script promoting the sham of innocence and claiming his First Amendment rights have been violated by gag orders issued to protect others from harm, while misleading “ordinary people” to confuse the right to free speech with a duty to take it upon themselves to carry out Mr. Trump’s will in whatever ways they choose to make America great again
The genius of stochastic terrorism is that it bumps up against laws re: incitement to riot but doesn’t step across the line that holds people accountable. The way stochastic terrorism talks is a bit like the serpent in the Garden of Eden story. It sows the seeds of confusion and chaos. When Michael Cohen, President Trump’s long-time fixer and lawyer, testified before congress, he said that Donald Trump doesn’t talk like other people. “Donald speaks in code,” he said. Like a Mob boss, he doesn’t speak directly. He tells you what he wants without telling you.
Stochastic terrorism does not end in a courtroom. It walks the streets. It huddles in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. It speaks of law and order while eroding public trust in the legitimacy of the courts and the rule of law. It puts the squeeze on a Speaker of the House, ensuring his failure, and turns the Speaker’s gavel over to a little-known Christian nationalist, a member of the insurrection pack who cheers for the Alpha wolf as he rides the wave of stochastic terrorism to the Oval Office.
— Gordon C. Stewart, Views from the Edge, Dec. 14, 2023
While brewing the coffee this morning, I remembered writing a commentary on the power of language. “The Language of Demagoguery” first appeared on Views from the Edge in 2012, long before the word ‘weaponization’ muscled its way into American public discourse. Here’s the piece. Though no longer in the pulpit, It still speaks for me.
Words are POWERFUL! Sometimes those who preach wonder whether our words matter. But reading this paragraph in Timothy Egan’s NYT, “Deconstructing a Demagogue,”reminded me of just how powerful they are:
Back in 1994, while plotting his takeover of the House, [Newt] Gingrich circulated a memo on how to use words as a weapon. It was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Republicans were advised to use certain words in describing opponents — sick, pathetic, lie, decay, failure, destroy. That was the year, of course, when Gingrich showed there was no floor to his descent into a dignity-free zone, equating Democratic Party values with the drowning of two young children by their mother, Susan Smith, in South Carolina.
Today, if you listen carefully to any Gingrich takedown, you’ll usually hear words from the control memo.
Timothy Egan, “Deconstructing a Demagogue,” New York Times, 01/26/2012
And that’s just the beginning of the story of how language is used and abused for purposes of social manipulation. Gingrich knew that language is “A Key Mechanism of Control.” Those who are well-schooled in theology and politics know that language is the primary mechanism of mind control: truth becomes falsehood and falsehood becomes truth; beauty becomes ugliness and ugliness becomes beauty; goodness becomes evil and evil becomes goodness, twisted by the language of innuendo and word association.
Growing Cynicism
The cynicism that pervades the American electorate is due, in part, to this demagogic use of language. Words are precious things. Holy things. Sacred things. When they get twisted, they become vulgar and profane, one might even say ‘demonic’ in the sense in which Paul Tillich defined ‘demonic’: the twisting of the good. “The claim of something finite to infinity or to divine greatness is the characteristic of the demonic” (Paul Tillich, “Life and It’s Ambiguities,” Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, p. 102).
Paul Tillich, “The Courage to Be”
Words are sacred. And those who abuse them enter into the darkness of the demonic twisting that led James Russell Lowell to write the hymn lyrics I sang as a child:
Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood…. Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet t’is truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong , Yet that scaffold sways the future, And, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadows, Keeping watch above His own.
Hymn “Once to every man and nation,” James Russell Lowell
Gordon C. Stewart public theologian, Brooklyn Park, MN, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), December 5, 2023.
It’s been six months since publishing “Liar, Liar, Pants of Fire!”. Today the same Jim Jordan who couldn’t keep his story straight is a candidate to succeed ousted Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. If elected he will become third in the line of succession to become the President of the United States.
Body language: pants on fire
Mr. Jordan’s conflicting answers to the repeated question whether and when he talked with the president on Jan. 6, 2021 are featured in this video. Watch the body language that accompanies his rapid-fire responses to the question of whether and when he had spoken to the President on January 6.
CNN post showing Rep. Jim Jordan’s differing answers about the January 6, 2021 insurrection
The Jim Jordan we see in this video stammered, and his stammering was accompanied by something I found more telling — his body language. He was hitching his pants up.
Promoting a radical political agenda
New York City “has lost its way when it comes to fighting crime and upholding the law. Here in Manhattan, the scales of Justice are weighted down by politics. For the district attorney justice isn’t blind — it’s about advancing opportunities to promote a political agenda — a radical political agenda.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, Chair of US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee
Getting it right while getting it wrong
The radical political agenda was not Br. Bragg’s. It was his own. Jim Jordan is campaigning to succeed the only Speaker in American history to be ousted from office. If elected, Speaker Jordan will be the first yet-to-be-indicted Jan. 6 co-conspirator who couldn’t remember whether he spoke with the President the morning of January 6. Until he suddenly remembered.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve said that if, God forbid, what happened in Germany would ever happen in America, I would stand up and speak out. It’s always been part of who I am. I made that commitment early on as a fledgling Christian who saw the flag and cross as the warp and woof of the same cloth. To be a disciple of Jesus was to be an American patriot, to take up my cross on behalf of democracy and freedom. As I saw it then, there was little, if any, distinction between standing for the Hallelujah Chorus on Easter and standing for the national anthem on the Fourth of July. Every school day began standing with hands over our hearts to face the flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished the pledge, we took our seats for the Bible reading and a prayer. Once a week we ducked under our desks in fear the Russians would hit Marple Elementary School with a nuclear strike.
American Civil Religion
That was a long time ago, but not so long ago to have forgotten. Flawed though it was, there an unspoken code which Robert Bellah later called the “American civil religion,” a societal consensus that knit us together in one commonwealth, an aspirational commitment to goodness, however strong the forces that threatened to shred it.
Humility was a virtue; arrogance was not. Pride goeth before the fall — don’t get too big for your britches — the foolish man built his house upon the sand, and the rains came down and the floods came up….When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down in the place of honor . . . For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Honesty was a virtue; lying was not. Revenge was not a virtue. Blessed are the merciful . . . . You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you . . . . Glamour, greed, and wealth were not virtues. Blessed are the meek . . . .Your rich men are full of violence; your inhabitants speak lies, and their tongue is deceitful.Blessed are the poor. The rich man went away sorrowfully. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the poor…. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume, and thieves break in and steal… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; you cannot serve both God and wealth.
The Golden Mean between Extremes
Robert Fulgrum’s Everything I Learned in Kindergarten gives insight into a social ethic akin to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, by which, in the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia), one navigates the “golden mean” between the opposites. The virtue of courage, for example, is the middle way between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity is the golden mean between the extremes of stinginess and profligacy. Confidence avoids the opposing extremes of arrogance and self-loathing.
Robert Fulgrum’s Everything I Learned in Kindergarten offers practical insight into a social ethic like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, by which, in the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia), one navigates the “golden mean” between the opposites. The virtue of courage, for example, is the middle way between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity is the golden mean between the extremes of stinginess and profligacy. Confidence avoids the opposing extremes of self-loathing and arrogance.
A Social Consensus
This moral consensus is rooted in classical Greek and Roman philosophy and culture every bit as much as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition and scripture. A Thesaurus lists the following adjectives to describe the most egregious extremes of unacceptable behavior and character to be avoided:
big-headed
boastful
braggin
cocky
conceited
condescending
egomaniacal
haughty
high and mighty
hoity-toity
nose in the air
ostentatious
patronizing
pretentious
self-admiring
self-centered
snippy
snooty
snotty
stuck-up
superior
uppity
vain.
The social code at Marple Elementary
At Marple Elementary we feared bullies, but we did not respect them. Though we were often rude, crude, cruel, and mean, we knew better. We were taught that all of us are responsible to each other. We were accountable for our behavior. We were taught to be good sports. We didn’t like sore losers. Getting revenge was not a virtue.
“I am your revenge”
What is happening to us? “I am your revenge.” When did vengeance become a virtue, while truth-telling, honesty, and personal accountability went out of style? How did it become acceptable to insult another person with belittling nicknames? How did attacks on courts, judges, prosecutors, and grand juries (ordinary people exercising their civic duty without favor or prejudice) become accepted practice in American daily life? How did it happen that the party of Abraham Lincoln has become the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Goetz, and a Freedom Caucus cowering in fear of the bully? How did criminal indictment become a Medal of Honor?
Legitimacy and a Mist that Vanishes
“I’m a legitimate person. I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s all a hoax.” Legitimacy is the question now. Can it honestly be said that a former president and the Grand Old Party are still legitimate players in a constitutional republic? I’m old now, but not too old to forget the promise I made as a child.
“What is your life?” asked the writer of the Epistle of James. “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes…. As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.” (from the Letter of James 3:13-17 NRSV.)
Marple Elementary School vanished. The wrecking ball of time demolished it, but some of its old students are still here to fulfill the promise we made to our young selves. If ever there was a time to stand up and speak out, that moment is now.
Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Minister (HR), author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (49 two-four page meditations of faith and public events), host of Views from the Edge: To See More Clearly (gordoncstewart.com); Brooklyn Park, MN, September 13, 2023.
“Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence.” Leonardo da Vinci
Breaking the Silence
“I think he absolutely needs to tell all Americans to stand down and allow the judicial system to take its course,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), member of the House Freedom Caucus that continues to keep silent about the Big Lie. “We trust judges, we trust juries, we trust appellate courts. This isn’t over until it’s over…. I think that sending a very clear message, and also having a surrogate send a very clear message, that violence will not be tolerated, is appropriate.”
Rep. KEN BUCK (R -CO), SPEAKING WITH ANDREA MITCHELL
The Poetry of Politics
Poets often shine a different light into the darkness. Adrienne Rich is one of them. In her poem “Rape” she takes us inside the minds of a victim and a rapist.
You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you: … he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.
ADRIENNE RICH, “RAPE,” DIVING INTO THE WRECK: POEMS 1971–1972
The Politics of Rape
In America today a rapist who knows, or thinks he knows, what Americans secretly want, has been indicted on criminal charges four times. No one wants to be raped. Ever! Yet, there is something about American culture that leaves us vulnerable to charmers and thieves who pose as Robin Hood.
The indictments of Donald Trump allege that rape has been committed repeatedly. Members of Congress who fail to “stand down” prove themselves unfaithful to their oaths of office. In spoken words and scheming silence they become accomplices who know, or think they know, what the country secretly want. Some might call it the politics of silence. The politics of silence is the politics of sedition. The politics of sedition is the politics of rape.
Gordon C. Stewart, Public Theologian, social commentator, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, August 30, 2023.
“Truth Social,” Donald Trump’s social media platform, and Donald Trump’s use of it have two things in common. As a platform, Truth Social is neither truthful nor social. It’s a propaganda machine — untruthful and anti-social. Donald Trump’s self-serving posts are the same, untruthful and antisocial. They reflect the defense strategy Roy Cohn taught him years ago. “Never defend! Always attack! Attack, attack, attack!” Roy Cohn fried whatever and whomever stood in his way.
Two featured news headlines — “Trump reverts to scorched-earth political strategy as he runs for ’24” (NYT), and “In U.S., Phoenix tops them all; climate change threatens health” (Associated Press)— strike me this morning as two sides of the same coin. The US Constitution and Earth are being scorched by an indicted former president and his party. Denial may have worked before now, but it’s harder to ignore when Phoenix and Death Valley hit record-breaking temperatures while the forests are ablaze in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada; the Northeast U.S. is awash with flooding and the scenes are most everywhere around the globe.
It’s time to listen to Bill Nye, the Science Guy
“Do you believe climate change is real? Is human impact making the earth less inhabitable?” should be the FIRST questions a voter asks a candidate. “Yes or No?” If the answer is No, or the candidate does a tap dance, it’s time to turn our backs, and find a candidate who answers “Yes.”
Seven detestable things
This direct question to candidates goes hand in hand with the seven detestable things named in the Book of Proverbs:
• haughty eyes; • a lying tongue; • hands that shed innocent blood; • a heart that devises wicked schemes; • feet that are quick to rush into evil; • a false witness who pours out lies; and • a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
The Faith and Freedom Coalition
At the Gala dinner at the Washington Hilton that ended this year’s Faith and Freedom Coalition Annual Conference (23–24 June 2023), the featured speaker brought his haughty eyes, lying tongue, heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that quickly rush into evil, and mouth that pours out lies to arouse the adrenaline of a crowd that claims to know their Bibles.
“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me,” he declares, “I consider it a great badge of courage. I am being indicted for you….” The faithful lift their Bibles and flags in rapturous worship and praise.
Deception, denial, scorched-earth, and scorched Earth
When a candidate blames his criminal indictments and climate change as hoaxes cooked up by “Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists,“ Roy Cohn would be proud. But a scorched-earth defense by offense is not only morally offensive; it is a pattern of deception that is scorching the Earth itself.
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf & Stock),49 brief meditations on faith and life, Brooklyn Park, MN, July 19, 2023.
It’s stranger than strange, yet, perhaps, not strange at all, for a human being to describe himself as legitimate. “I don’t do things wrong. I do things right. I’m a legitimate person,” said former president DJT on June 27 in self-defense when his integrity had been called into question following release of a self-incriminating audio tape.
What is a legitimate person? What makes a person illegitimate? What might it mean to call oneself a legitimate person? The synonyms for “legitimate” are interesting, but they are less helpful than some of the antonyms: counterfeit, deceptive, dishonest, false, illegal, invalid, unfitting, unreal, unreliable, unsuitable, untrustworthy, unlawful.
Who will rescue me from myself?
There are neither legitimate nor illegitimate persons, according to my faith tradition. Even the best of us lives in the throes of tragic estrangement. No one is exempt. The Apostle Paul — Saul of Tarsus who’d been knocked off his horse and blinded on his way to Damascus to commit domestic terrorism — expressed in his Epistle to the Romans the horrifying truth he had come to see in himself.
Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not: the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want — that is what I do…. In my inmost self I dearly love God’s law, but I see that acting on my body there is a different law which battles against the law in my mind. So I am brought to be a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body.What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Epistle to the Romans 7:19-24 New Jerusalem Bible
Breaking the paradigm of reward and punishment
While studying Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Martin Luther saw that the genitive in Justitia Dei (“the justice of God”) was not passive but active, his heart and mind set aside the mistaken view of God as the Judge waiting to reward or punish us according to our own righteousness and embraced the Judge who is gracious toward the defendant who throws himself on the mercy of the court, and, as in the parable of the prodigal son, is met by the grieving parent who has waited patiently for the beloved child’s return and reunion.
“The trouble with our times is not the multiplication of sinners, it is the disappearance of sin.”
“Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”
Étienne Gilson (1884 – 1978).
“I’m a legitimate person” is not a declaration of innocence. It’s a cry for rescue from the horror within one’s own self — the terrifying sense of illegitimacy — the threat that leaves one weeping in a solitary confinement of his own making.
“Life moves against itself through aggression, hate, and despair.”
– Erich Fromm (1900 –1980)
Law and Grace
In my less frequent pastoral moments I hear in the former president’s declaration of legitimacy the stammering cry of a wounded child who put his hand in the cookie jar but was never called to account. When the protest — “I didn’t put my hand in the cookie jar!”— is declared, and the lie is believed, or the truth swept aside with a shrug, the child is split between the instinct of self-preservation and the instinct of self-destruction. There remains a life-long denial, oozing from the cracks between truth and falsehood, a protest of legitimacy —“I don’t do things wrong. I do things right. I’m a legitimate person.” The adult child has yet to learn that none of us is legitimate or illegitimate and that there is a floor of mercy and acceptance waiting to save us from ourselves.
A return to Paul Tillich
In this moment I return to the wisdom of Paul Tillich that broke through the darkness of a despondent college student who had all but concluded that the faith tradition in which I had been raised was a hoax. I
I pray now for a similar wave of light for other sinners like me.
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.”
— Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” The Shaking of the Foundations” (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).
No one can claim to be legitimate. None of us can claim we don’t do things that are wrong. No one does only right. The division of life into right and wrong is an early stage of childhood development in which the judge either rewards good behavior or punishes when you’ve put your hand in the cookie jar.
Blessed are they who live long enough to get knocked off their horses, and trust that there is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness, Brooklyn Park, MN, July 15, 2023
Views from the Edge 