CHRIST-APP by philtierneyblog

8.    Trump Belittles Others and Seeks Revenge

Trump doesn’t merely renounce grace and forgiveness. He embraces and advocates revenge, retribution and punishment of those who bother, offend or are disloyal to him.

Jesus taught us how to treat people. He taught us not to call other people names, not to seek revenge and not to mistreat perceived enemies.

Do you remember Jesus saying anything about calling another person a “fool?” Jesus said it’s like murder. “You have heard it said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” (Matthew 5: 21f)

Trump defames people by name every day, multiple times every day. He has even been found guilty by a jury for defaming a woman he was found guilty of raping, E. Jean Carroll. Trump called her crazy. He claimed she was motivated by avarice and politics. The jury penalized him in the amount of more than 82 million dollars.

Do you recall Jesus saying anything about turning the other cheek? He said this in the Sermon on the Mount: ^“If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also.” (Luke 6: 29)

Instead, Trump has called himself a “counter puncher.” A counter puncher is someone who hits back. He certainly counter punched his longtime associate, Michael Cohen. And he certainly counter punched anyone who sued him for not paying his bills from them for work done. He counter-sued craftsmen until they couldn’t afford further legal recourse. Some even went bankrupt.

Do you recall Jesus saying anything about lawsuits? This is what He said: “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift. Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way.” (Matthew 5: 23-25)

Trump has been involved in more than 4,000 law suits against others. Many of them have been motivated by attempts to avoid paying bills. That is opposite from Jesus’s way.

Do you remember Jesus saying anything about loving your enemies and doing good to those that hurt you? He said, “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”(Luke 6: 27-28)

Trump has consistently sought revenge. He even removed American troops from Germany simply because Chancellor Merkel declined an invitation to the G7 over COVID concerns at the time. He called her a “kraut.” He also threatened to remove federal funding from cities that didn’t do what he told them to do. He told his followers not to worry about COVID because it was only hurting people in Democratic states. That fed into certain Christians’ hatred of Democrats and liberals. They were tempted to see it as God’s punishment of their enemies.

Trump has treated others in ways opposite from the ways Jesus taught, and has encouraged his supporters to do the same. Trump has called Americans of a different party, traitors, and has said that they should be imprisoned or executed for treason. Christians who follow Trump and urge others to support him promote what is opposite from Jesus’s teachings about how to treat other people.

There has been something odd about all this. It’s not about how Trump thinks, speaks and acts. He seems to have been trained to be that way by his father. He seems always to have acted in such ways. I’m referring to something having changed within some of the most prominent Christian leaders and celebrities in America. Some of them started doing the same sort of thing decades ago. They started to conceive of and speak about those who are not Christians or who think different from them as evil and under demonic influence. They began to regard those different from themselves as enemies, but enemies to be vanquished rather than enemies that Jesus taught His followers to love.

Some pastors have recently reported that members of their congregations criticize them for being “woke” when they preach about Jesus’s core teachings. Those pastors have further reported that when they’ve explained that loving enemies and turning the other cheek is what Jesus taught us to do. Their critics have said, “Jesus was too weak, then.” Do you suppose such “Christians” are following Jesus or Trump?

A sort of malice has been around for quite a while among American Christians. For example, initially, Evangelicals responded to AIDS/HIV as God’s judgement on homosexuals, even though it began in Africa among heterosexuals. Believing that the disease was God’s judgment on homosexuals, many American Christians didn’t want “their tax dollars” to be used to help relieve the effects of the disease.

Christian broadcasters have expressed long-standing malice toward those who are different. Perhaps jokingly, Pat Robertson indicated that his 700 Club audience should pray for Ruth Bader Ginsberg to die. Similarly, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson publicly stated, on that same television network, that 9/11 was God’s punishment of America for its permissiveness toward homosexuals and abortion. It was President G.W. Bush, who stopped them from saying such malicious things. Some

Some American Christians also said that COVID was God’s wrath against homosexuality and liberalism in America. Ralph Drollinger, an Evangelical minister and founder of Capitol Ministries, which provides Bible studies and discipleship training for government leaders, led White House Bible studies for the Trump administration. He called COVID “God’s consequential judgment on followers of the cult of environmentalism and people with a proclivity to homosexuality.”  

Such Christian leaders as Drollinger, Robertson, Falwell and many others often find God’s wrath and judgment as the reason for disasters that befall Americans. Those Christian “leaders” try to avoid the problem of theodicy (why bad things happen), altogether. They do so by picking their own political or philosophical enemies and identifying them as the cause of catastrophes. They highlight God’s judgment of their chosen scapegoats. That provides them with self-proclaimed verification that God is on their side, morally and politically. It also provides sanctimonious excuse to take satisfaction in the calamities of others by blaming their identified scapegoats for their sufferings. That strategy, in turn, justifies their call to vanquish their identified enemies. Those may be effective rhetorical tactics, but they’re not the way Jesus operated.  

This current version of American Christianity is not recognizable to me. It’s not that it hasn’t existed before. It has, but that it hasn’t been nearly as widespread or politically well-integrated. Something has changed since the Christian center of gravity shifted. The Christian message has swerved to become much more rigid, judgmental and far less gracious in recent decades. And that, in turn, has easily become linked with Trump’s retributive ways. 

It’s not Jesus’s way, though. Let me explain. There was a disaster in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus’s ministry. It took place at the Pool of Siloam, located just outside the southeastern wall of Jerusalem. It was a place for refreshment for travelers, mitzvah (ritual purification) and healing. One day, its colonnades and tower fell on people gathered there and eighteen died. When that sort of thing happens people of faith ask the theological question, why. Their question isn’t so much why it happened as why God let it happen.  

Jesus commented on that local disaster. He said, “…do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no!” (Luke 13: 4f) Notice what Jesus didn’t say. Jesus didn’t say that it was the fault of leaders on the Sanhedrin or the Roman authorities for mismanagement of public structures. He didn’t say it was the fault of prostitution or hypocrisy among the Pharisees and Sadducees for opposing Him or moral impurity or the sins of the people gathered there. He said it had nothing to do with guilt at all. He went on to add that His audience should take it as an incentive to live in harmony with God, presumably because accidents happen and it’s good to be spiritually prepared.

According to Jesus, disasters aren’t God’s judgement of sin. They are not incidents of God’s wrath. They are not events to use to target enemies and those you disagree with. Disasters and diseases happen. Prepare yourselves spiritually. Those Christians, who use tragedies to promote their favorite moral and political causes or to blame their preferred opponents are acting nefariously. At best, it’s superstitious. Superstition isn’t Christian faith. At worst, it’s using God as a tool to advance personal perspectives, which is nefarious. But it may also be culturally driven. None of these is Jesus’ way.

Something has gone wrong with too many white American Christian celebrities. Something mean-spirited has awakened within them. I’ve wondered where it originated. I suppose it could be a number of things.

I think I understand at least a few sources of the malice. In general, the profile of Christians in America has changed during the past fifty years. Christian churches have changed in major ways. Society changed and it was no longer socially necessary to attend church in large swathes of America. Many mainline Protestant denominations were indisposed to evangelize their communities. Many mainline Protestant denominations adopted social stances that alienated large segments of their membership. Many churchgoers stopped fearing hell and those that still did turned to more strictly traditional churches.

Christian affiliation has changed significantly. Fifty years ago, 30% of Americans were members of mainline Protestant churches. Today, 12% of Americans belong to such churches. Simultaneously, many American Catholics have left the Church. 40% of those who were raised Catholic have left the Church. Meanwhile, fifty years ago, about 3.5% of Americans identified themselves as Evangelicals and 2% as Charismatics (neo-Pentecostal). Today, almost 30% of Americans report they’re Evangelicals. About half live in southern states and about 45% are Charismatic. American Charismatic Christians make up half of all Charismatic Christians in the world and so have a significant influence of Christians in other countries.  

Some of those who left Catholic and mainline Protestant churches became Evangelical or Charismatic Christians. Otherwise, the significant increase in the number of Evangelical and Charismatic Christians has been the result of effective evangelism and ministries that meet people’s needs. In any case, being Christian is core to most Christians’ identity. People’s Christian identity can include cultural components that don’t actually have anything to do with Jesus or the Bible, though. Consider the cultural elements that were imposed on indigenous populations by Christian missionaries in the 19^th century, for example.

The Christian faith has always been susceptible to absorbing and merging with the culture of the places where Christians live. Since the center of gravity in American Christianity has shifted south, American Christianity is liable to absorb and fuse with southern culture. Christ is above, beyond and separate from any culture, though.

Let me tell you a couple of stories. 

Back in my Evangelical college days, more than fifty years ago, one of Billy Graham’s daughters was a classmate of mine. Her boyfriend, at the time, lived in my dorm. Like her, he was from North Carolina. He chose to live in a single dorm room. On display on his dorm room wall was a full-sized Confederate Battle flag along with a saber and a gun. Beside his bed was a King James Bible.

Whenever had occasion to speak, he called me a damn Yankee. The vast preponderance of us were Yankees, of course, since the college was in New England. At first, I took it as good humor. As time went on, I simply ignored it. In the end, I came to suspect that his name-calling was more serious than I wanted to think. I sensed an attitude of malice.

I’ve served a couple of churches and a university in the South for a total of about 12 years. Most people were charming and polite.  And yet, some Christians in the South seemed a bit different. They were much more political than I found elsewhere. Whether the issues were worship music or what form of English to be used in prayer, internal politics flared. An us/them mentality was prone to fester. Resentments and animosities expressed themselves.

For centuries, Christianity in the South has been different. Southern Christians prevented Northern evangelists from preaching in their states during the First and Second Great Awakenings. In fact, during the 1800’s, Southern sheriffs drove Northern evangelists out of their counties or arrested them. It turned out that slave owners wanted their slaves evangelized because it made them more obedient and harder workers. But they did not want them to learn to read. They believed that learning to read the Bible or to write would make them “uppity.” They thought it cause them to think for themselves. They feared it could intensify their hope for freedom and might even lead to slave rebellion. And so, they controlled and contorted the Christian messages their slaves heard. They also contorted their own understanding of Jesus’s way, in the process.

One of my Southern friends, also a minister, had a wry sense of humor. He used to tell me that Southern Christians were different. I asked him what he meant. He asked me to imagine something. He told me to imagine what it would do to people’s minds and spirits when they tortured slaves in the cellar, while sipping tea in the parlor or singing hymns at church. He told me the severe incongruity of that life, during more than 200 years, caused people to twist their minds. “Our good Christian people cherry-picked verses from the Bible to try to justify what was evil.” 

He explained, “We told ourselves that African slaves weren’t fully human. We told ourselves that our slaves were descended from Noah’s son, Ham, and were being punished for their ancestor’s sin. We told ourselves that they deserved to be slaves. So, our refined ladies could sip tea in the parlor, listening to piano music, while tuning out the screams of slaves being beaten or raped outside. It’s a mind game, but it also twisted the soul.” He told me that it caused Southern Christians to vigorously emphasize personal morality, but to disregard the social implications of love and justice in the Bible, altogether. 

Sadly, Southern Christians were made to feel inferior for centuries. During the antebellum period, Southern Christians were made to feel morally inferior by the harsh criticism of Northern Evangelicals, who were usually abolitionists. Southern Christians were humiliated by the loss of the Civil War. After the war, Southern Christians were embittered by Northern dominance during Reconstruction. Southern Christians were made to feel intellectually inferior and resentful of the intellectualism of the late 19th and early 20th century. Southern “fundamentalists” were made to feel that others were evil because of their acceptance of scientific thought, like Darwinism. The sense that others were immoral, even evil, fueled the Moral Majority. That humiliation, bitterness, resentment, distrust, anger and frustration, is now shared among many contemporary Evangelicals with regard to their intellectual credibility, especially in the South. 

Those dynamics of bitterness have bred an emphasis on a retributive God. There’s an emphasis on God judging those considered to be evil, to protect the faithful and vanquish the powers that be. I envision that a seedbed of malice was instilled in southern Christians dominated by damn Yankees. They were unable to resist, except surreptitiously or by hoping for God’s retribution against enemies. That’s one of the reasons so many contemporary, white, American Christians seem bitter and prone to look for God’s retribution. Then they justify embittered political positions by cherry-pick verses or passages from the Old Testament, applying them out of context. 

Recently, we had a living illustration of the outcome of those dynamics. It was demonstrated by numerous white American Christians in relation to the COVID pandemic. Some Christian celebrities like Jerry Falwell, Jr., stated that the pandemic was a hoax, perpetrated by Trump’s enemies. And so, they rejected it and chose to believe Trump instead of scientific information.

While some rejected its reality, others believed that COVID was inflicted by the punitive God. He would punish liberals and protect the faithful. Such Christians wanted to demonstrate their faith by resisting government pandemic guidelines and refusing vaccines and masks. They made every effort to keep their religious institutions open, churches and schools. They resisted social distancing, because they distrusted scientific data and the government. They regarded gathering for worship as a sign of faith in the face of pandemic, but overlooked the call of Christ-like love to keep others safe by wearing masks and social distancing. 

When the antagonist in the wilderness story tempted Jesus to throw Himself off the Temple in Jerusalem, he quoted scripture. The antagonist said, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus replied, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” What did Jesus mean by that? He didn’t mean testing Jesus to do something spectacular. He meant testing God to protect by doing something unnecessarily and flagrantly dangerous. Faith was never to be exercised by needlessly putting oneself in danger to test God.  

Christians who regarded wearing protective face masks as a cultish sign of unfaithfulness and acquiescence to government control missed the point. Wearing a face mask was less about protecting oneself than about protecting others from a dangerous virus that one might be carrying. Love involves personal responsibility and sacrifice more defending one’s personal rights. Love involves protecting others, not protecting one’s liberties. 

What is to be said about such attitudes?  If the COVID pandemic wasn’t real, why did so many people go to hospital or die from it? If demonstrating faith by gathering for worship is what God wanted, why did so many churchgoers become sick from it? If not wearing a face mask merely demonstrated personal (religious) liberty, why was it found to be a major factor in the spread of the disease?  If scientists are untrustworthy, why were they correct in their projections? If the pandemic was God’s consequential judgment on America, why did it also affect the people in all the other countries? If it was God’s judgment of environmentalists and homosexuals, as Drollinger claimed, why did COVID ravage the residents of senior living facilities, meat processors, correctional facilities and poorer neighborhoods, where fewer environmentalists or homosexuals actually lived or worked? If it was collateral judgment of Democratic states, why did it rage in Republican states? If Christians want to follow Trump’s guidance rather than physicians,’ why did they not inject bleach or take hydroxychloraquine pills, instead of following doctors’ orders?

This is why religious-political amalgamations, why cultural Christianity, are not always Christian faith, let alone Jesus’ Way. Conservative, white, American cultural Christian ideology has been inclined to cherry-pick, twist, contort and squeeze information or reject it to fit into and advance preexisting cultural dogmas. 

Like the medieval Inquisition, that looks inappropriately intolerant superstitious and defensive. That sort of religious-political ideology or cultural Christianity rejected, out of hand, that the earth revolved around the sun, that the force of gravity existed, that organisms adapted to survive, that the climate is changing due to human activity, and that COVID exists or it would hurt the faithful. 

Followers of Trump may need to deny concrete reality, but followers of Jesus do not. All truth, including empirical fact, is God’s truth. Trusting God, following Jesus and loving others enables Christians to employ new information, experiences, situations and events. It then is better able to apply trusting God, following Jesus and loving others even more effectively. As always, you choose: Jesus’s way of cultural Christianity? Jesus or Trump?