TRUMP: WWJD?

Omnipotentblog just finished reading “The Immoral Majority” by Ben Howe. Evangelical Christians, he proclaims, have sold their soul to the devil who has taken the form of Donald Trump. Howe, himself an evangelical conservative, claims that political power has become an idol. As a child, he asked his father why so many people weren’t Christian. His father replied, “because so many Christians are jerks.” And there is the central theme: Christians are jerks. If they like Trump.



The book was painful to read, mainly because of the constant eye-rolling. Yet, Howe was infuriating not only because of his frequent non sequiturs, shabby logic, and clear-as-mud writing, but because some of what he wrote was true. It is hard to hear painful truths about one’s own tribe. The author, seemingly sincere in his lamentations, had plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick, much of it supplied by the likes of Jerry Fallwell Jr. and the phalanx of high-profile pastors surrounding Trump.



Howe skewers those who put Trump on a messiah pedestal, evoking the “anointed” Persian King Darius as another ungodly man who did the bidding of a sovereign God. Howe rightly points out that God could advance His cause through Hillary Clinton just as easily. Howe also calls attention to the rank hypocrisy of those like James Dobson who savaged Bill Clinton for sexual promiscuity but respond to Trump’s base appetites with a resounding “meh.” He also lashes out at those who claim Trump is a genuinely God-fearing man, with his favorite verses in “Two Corinthians”, his talk of “the little wine and the little crackers”, and his astonishing claim he never felt the need to repent.

  "He's not the messiah. He's a very naughty boy."

HEADLINE:

“Trump Requests Pastor Change Bread and Wine to Champagne and Crab Cakes, Says It Will Class Up the Joint.”



Howe is somewhat reminiscent of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard looked at society and recoiled at the hypocrisy and corruption. He viewed Christendom itself as the mortal enemy of authentic Christ-centered living. In Kierkegaard’s developmental theory, the pleasure-seeking “aesthetic life” seeks to use human wiles to transform the boring into the interesting. It is carnal, a stage of immaturity to be passed on the way to an “ethical” and “religious” life. There is much to love about Kierkegaard but this bears resemblance to the old gnostic heresy that the material is evil and the spiritual is good. 20^th Century theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected this. Bonhoeffer asked who can cultivate music, friendship, games and enjoyment of life? “Certainly not the ‘ethical’ man, but only the Christian,” whose cost of discipleship is attended by Christian liberty.



You might say, “Omnipotentblog, why you always bringin’ up boring philosophers and people nobody knows?” To which I reply, “It’s my blog and I’ll bore if I want to, bore if I want to, bore if I want to.” The point is to make a…point…about Christian engagement with the culture. Like Kierkegaard’s Denmark, America was once largely Christian. Surprisingly, the overall decline in religiosity and identification has come wholly amongst non-churchgoers. Church attendance has actually remained steady. The secular left, crowing from its cultural heights, has gone on the attack, shutting down bakeries and screaming at teenaged drive through employees for daring to believe, nay, associate with people who believe the Bible. The loss of the culture and its protections is frightening. One response is to close the shutters, lock the doors and sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in our living rooms but in a very quiet voice. The “Benedict Option” makes this argument, saying it’s time to become entrenched and disengage. Bollocks.


In “Dynamic Christianity vs. the Benedict Option,” an excellent piece, Rachel Lu writes that the world desperately needs the influence of Christianity and she implores Christians to be the salt and light of the world. She writes, “Jesus was not a politician but his political savvy was on full display on the final day of his mortal life.” Interrogated by the Sanhedrin, he toyed with the Pharisees. They knew he had previously called them snakes and vipers, telling his followers to obey them but not to emulate their example. Interrogated by the Roman governor Pilate, he was coy, at times reasoning with him and at others remaining silent.


Interpreting Jesus’ engagement with the Jewish government is tricky. His attacks on the authorities had primarily religious motivations but in a theocracy, this cannot be extricated from the general welfare. His famous dictate to “render unto Ceasar” was a command to submit to earthly authorities and also a reminder that His kingdom (and ours) is not of this world, a disappointment to the many Jews who desperately hoped the messiah was a temporal one who would overthrow Rome. Jesus’ episodes of political engagement are, like much in the Bible, somewhat up to interpretation. What He certainly did not do, was shy away from calling out sin. He turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple, grabbed a whip and went Indiana Jones on them.



What does this mean for Christians responding to Trump?  We should be reminded to not be “unequally yoked” with unbelievers. And concerning protecting ourselves from destruction, Howe rejects grasping at short term political victories at the cost of long-term losses. He is also correct in pointing out the lesson of the cross, that losing in the political realm is not the same as losing in the spiritual.



Would Jesus be a Republican? The Bible is frustratingly silent on governing: no advice on tax policy, social welfare, or democracy. Yet, Christians should care about policy, about the moral elements of poverty, justice and the rule of law, the sanctity and health of the family, unborn human life and other issues upon which conservative Christians feel the survival of the nation depends. How should we feel about Trump? Well, if one’s conscience agrees with what Trump is doing, one is morally bound to support him. The rub is that the man’s temperament and character seem so vile it should at least prick the conscience. It is tempting, seemingly almost imperative, to cheerlead this troubled protector of Christendom to victory. But here’s a simple truth: In doing so, Christians must remain….Christian. So if one simply adds up the math of Trump’s policies and persuasions through a Christian lens, I assert without waver that Trump is the lesser of two evils. To be a mega MAGA fan, however, a doughy-eyed rabid supporter, is to hurt the true cause, the only one that really matters. To be hated for upholding the truth of the gospel, sexual purity, the distinction of the sexes, and other controversial notions, is to obey Christ. To be hated for attaching yourself to a cretinous wanker is not.



BONUS MATERIAL: I wrote an 8 page piece some time ago arguing that the Bible contradicts modern progressivism and supports conservatism. If you want to read it, I will send it. Or, if my millions of readers clamor for it, I’ll post it.

JUDGING AMERICA Part II

“The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are…Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”



You see, if not for slavery, the nation and its strength would not exist.



In leaked audio from an emergency townhall meeting with staff members, NYT executive editor Dean Baquet admitted the failure of his paper in pushing one narrative, the false Russian collusion story. Rather than just reporting the news, he announced the creation of another narrative.

“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story…this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that…requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years.”

1619’ers argue that slavery provided the capital for the industrial revolution, propelling the nation to its current exalted status. It is uncontroversial to say slavery was big business. Northern textile factories certainly benefitted. Between 1800 and 1860, “King Cotton” was the primary driver of the Antebellum South’s wealth. American exports accounted for 66% of the world’s cotton. However, in “Did Slavery Make America Richer?”, Vincent Geloso uses copious data to assert that slavery’s windfall has been greatly exaggerated. Almost no cotton was grown in the United States in 1787. Geloso claims that per capita growth was actually greater in the North between 1800 and 1860. Regardless, the whole argument is unnecessary. The error is the conflation of Southern wealth with the entire nation. What is true is that America could not have defeated the British without Southern colonies’ support. However, the Northern economy grew independently. Northern victory was not due solely to overwhelming manpower but industrial might. The agrarian South had few factories, 1/3 of the rail and an economy based on a singular cash crop. They simply couldn’t keep up with the endless supply of arms, ammunition and supplies the North turned out by the trainload.



360,000 dead and massive debt retarded Northern growth for a decade. While slavery created great wealth between the invention of the cotton gin (invented to make the lives of slaves easier, ironically) and 1859, the Civil War destroyed the South’s economy miring the entire region in deep poverty for nearly a century. Nearly all Southern banks were ruined. The hog population in South Carolina shrunk from 965,000 to 150,000. Cotton production would not recover until 1879. Most Southern capital was invested in slaves. It vanished instantly with the 13^th Amendment.



America was a fledgling power in 1865. Our rise to superpower status was built on many things but not slavery. Did slaves make Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fortune in shipping and rail or build the Transcontinental railroad? Did slavery create Rockefeller’s enormous wealth or build the oil industry? Were slaves Carnegie’s steelworkers, J.P. Morgan’s bank tellers or Thomas Edison’s go-fers? Were slaves responsible for electrification, refrigeration or cars? No.



I am going to make another, somewhat disconnected argument in this piece as I build the series on the premise that the DNA of America was never uniquely corrupted. Our current greatness is not due to oppression, but the beauty and uniqueness of the American idea.



Some argue that American slavery was a special kind of violence against Africans. They argue that slavery was a more gentle affair across the Atlantic. Simply put, it was not. The section below is largely lifted verbatim from an excellent source. It is succinct and well-written and, well, why reinvent the wheel?

361,000 slaves were imported into English speaking North America by 1808…From the time of the Arab conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, approximately 14 million black slaves were imported into the area that extends from Morocco through Iran.

Why had the Middle East not become overwhelmingly black and mulatto? One reason was extremely high slave mortality. As the Encyclopedia of Islam notes, “The high mortality rate which overtook these coloured men in Persia prevented them forming an important element of the population.” I will provide two examples of this—one from North Africa, the other from Iraq: “Of the Saharan salt mines it is said that no slave lived for more than five years;” and “the black slave gangs that toiled in the salt flats of Basra [Iraq] . . . numbering some tens of thousands . . . were fed, we are told, on a few handfuls of flour, semolina, and dates.”

In addition, casual mating was not permitted and marriage was discouraged. Consequently, of the 3,000 female slaves emancipated in Zanzibar in 1860, only five percent had ever had a child. Many of the children born to slave women were murdered. In 1856, the Anti-Slave Reporter observed that in Constantinople, the murder of the babies of black slave women was practiced “as a matter of course and without the least remorse.” As a result, in Constantinople, “it was commonplace for Turkish gentlemen to have numerous [black] concubines, [but] it was rare to see a mulatto.”

(Also)…many were castrated. Castration was lethal for the large majority of slaves on whom it was inflicted, especially blacks. White eunuchs were produced by merely cutting off their testicles, but blacks were subjected “to the most radical form of castration . . . level with the abdomen . . . based on the assumption that blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite;” “every [black] eunuch represented at the very least 200 Sudanese done to death;” and at the beginning of the tenth century the caliph of Baghdad alone had 7,000 black eunuchs.

In “No Property in Man”, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sketches a picture of abolitionist founders defeating the enshrinement of slavery in the Constitution. The first draft, explicitly pro-slavery, was voted down 10-1. The final document’s compromises with slavery “were substantial” but Madison’s notes, published posthumously in 1840, detailed the abolitionists’ dogged resistance, sowing the seeds of abolition by future congresses. The mission failed. The fault, however, rests not with the Convention.



In a famous 4^th of July speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass savaged America for the brutality of slavery. He also expressed great hope. The “eternal principles,” the “saving principles” in the Constitution, that “glorious document”, were real “and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it”. He later stated, “I base my sense of the certain overthrow of slavery, in part, upon the nature of the American Government, the Constitution, the tendencies of the age, and the character of the American people…. I know of no soil better adapted to the growth of reform than American soil. I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes in the settled order of things, for the development of right ideas of liberty and humanity, are more favorable than here in these United States.”



The old narrative of American greatness is under great challenge today. Perhaps it is time for honest reexamination but to do so requires honesty and facts. We should always strive towards a “more perfect union.” Yet, if a scarred runaway slave can see through such hypocrisy and brutality to believe in the founders’ promissory note of liberty, why can’t we do the same in 2019?

JUDGING AMERICA Part I

Four young congresswomen known ominously as “The Squad” are getting a lot of attention right now. Talented, attractive crackpots, they represent a mindset that, until recently, was only held by cranks and college professors. But I repeat myself. To them, the birth of America and Rosemary’s Baby are essentially the same story. To anyone with sense, this seems, well, stupid. But history shows that whole nations can go mad. The liberty we now enjoy is unnatural and against all human history. We take it for granted at our own peril. And now, arguments that were once self-evident must be pulled from dusty shelves and fed like mother’s milk to babies who believe that 2 + 2 = 4 is “white people math”.



When America is condemned as uniquely oppressive, the obvious question is “compared to whom?” Let us tackle the question by first looking at the two most resonant issues: slavery and Native American genocide.



When the Constitution was ratified, slavery was legal in eight states. Some argue this tolerance of slavery is like an Original Sin which can never be expiated. Far from eager acceptance, the debate over slavery during the convention was acrimonious. Compromises were made without which the embryonic nation would have been stillborn. Of these were the greatly misunderstood 3/5 compromise, which Madison introduced to limit slave states’ power, and the banning of the Atlantic slave trade in 20 years.



A few nations and locales abolished slavery around the 14^th and 15^th centuries but bans were never permanent until the modern era. The first modern sovereign state to abolish slavery permanently was Vermont in 1777. In Great Britain, abolitionist sentiment mirrored northern states’ discomfort with slavery. Yet, despite Britain’s economic dependence on slavery largely consisting of house maids and landscapers, they did not abolish slavery until 1833. Peter the Great in Russia and the Chinese Qing Dynasty abolished slavery in 1723 but the bans did not last or were not enforced. Several European nations banished the slave trade by 1820 but only Spain had full abolition by then. Mexico and Central America abolished slavery in 1824, France in 1848. After the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, France threatened to invade. Haitians agreed to extortionist “reparations” amounting to ten times their GDP. Payments finally ended in 1947. Slavery was abolished in most Western countries in the 19^th century but continued to be ubiquitous worldwide well into the 20^th. Most African and Middle Eastern nations ended slavery between 1900 and 1950. It was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962, Oman in 1970, and equality-loving Mauritania in 1981, which finally criminalized it in 2007.



Few of these nations had purely agrarian economies almost wholly dependent on slavery. The Antebellum South is held up as an archetype of human evil but abolition was an unfathomably difficult proposition. It meant certain impoverishment and the obliteration of their culture. Yet, slavery was morally corrupting in a way that extended far beyond their treatment of blacks. White southerners’ blindness to this cost them dearly for generations.

While there are plenty of examples in history, defining genocide can be thorny. There are few issues more hotly debated than whether America’s shameful treatment of natives qualifies. The U.S. violated treaty after treaty, committed massacres and exiled tribes to unfamiliar lands. 90% of indigenous peoples may have died from contact with Europeans. While tragic, the historical record shows no intent to eradicate or destroy whole peoples. In other words, no genocide. The vast majority of these deaths were from diseases to which they had little natural defense.

We must also draw a distinction between the brutality of early Spanish colonists and later American settlers. Despite later government policies, many American settlers tried earnestly to coexist with natives. Early American literature is saturated in racial and cultural superiority but also with awe and reverence for natives. Feelings were mixed and sentiments were not monolithic. Despite attempts to link Manifest Destiny with Nazi ideology, they are not the same.  

There is also the matter of the moral nature of Indians themselves. The trope of Rousseau’s “noble savage” suffers under the weight of historical evidence. Intertribal warfare was pervasive and the dogma of natives’ harmony with the earth is more complicated. Often overusing and abusing lands, the effect was sometimes devastating and permanent. Tribes cleared whole forests with slash and burn techniques. Anasazis nearly caused the extinction of native Junipers. Their collapse was also due to some familiar issues: “…recent ideas include extremist politics and religion, and an unsustainable stratification between the rich and poor—the ancient equivalent of income inequality that so infuriated the masses, they couldn’t take it anymore and left.”

Murders and kidnappings of white settlers were common. “The Last of the Mohicans” was inspired by the real-life events of Daniel Boone rescuing his daughter from Cherokee-Shawnee raiders. Many tribes participated in the slave trade, selling native captives to white slave traders before Africans became the preferred commodity. Many tribes themselves owned African slaves. Cherokees owned slaves at a higher rate than Southern whites and brought them on the Trail of Tears. The 1842 Cherokee slave revolt inspired rebellions in other tribes. In a sad, greedy irony, Cherokee Nation elders, mumbling something about getting their own dang casinos, expelled descendants of Cherokee slaves from membership in 2007.

Controversy surrounds Aztec human sacrifice but recent scholarship suggests it was as bloody as Spanish conquistadors portrayed. One historian stated Aztecs were “a culture obsessed with death: they believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing. When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.”

Steven Pinker calls the advancement of freedoms in the world “The Rights Revolution”. For all of human history, slavery was uncontroversial and there were no such things as voting, free speech, or fair trials. Women had the right to shut up. Criticism of kings, who ruled by Divine Right, meant imprisonment or execution. Ancient man was ruled by an ethic of conquest. Nearly every people group on earth has a history of attacking, killing and raping their neighbors. What changed was the Enlightenment. The Protestant Reformation gave people the idea that individuals could decide for themselves what was good and right. By the 18^th century, Western thinkers determined that the rights of individuals were inherent and that man should be governed by reason. America was born from these ideals. If America’s founding and by proxy, the ideals that formed it are attacked, what foundation is there for the rights of women, gays, or minority groups of any stripe?  

The point of all this what-about-ism is not to excuse America’s crimes but to wrap them in a blanket of context without which there is no truth or understanding. America has many sins but why not speak of the virtues as well? The question should always be, “Compared to whom?” The sins of America are the sins of humanity itself. For some, this is hard to accept. Truth often is.