The limits of ‘snarl’

Despite what was scheduled to be a debate but became what appeared to be a food fight last night between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, one thing became clear to me last night: Biden cares about the entire country. Trump does not.

That became clear to me when Trump, per usual, tried to run over not only Biden but also debate moderator Chris Wallace with lies, deflections and personal attacks.

But, as I think we’re beginning to see now, “snarl” can get you only so far.

Trump, significantly down in the polls in major swing states, has nevertheless never made any effort to unite the country, with his attacks on people of color, Muslims and especially “liberals” (which he overstatedly refers to as the “radical left”) being part and parcel of his never-ending campaign strategy.

But with the economy tanking, racial unrest rising and especially the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, he’s shown himself, as Michelle Obama said during the Democratic National Convention last month, “not … up to the job.” For that reason he’s maintained his propensity to lash out at enemies, real or perceived — he has nothing else left.

Last night’s debate sounded like a hot mess in a train wreck, and upon inspection it proved to be such (I stopped watching after 45 minutes). But there was a deeper meaning that you shouldn’t miss: This was a face-off between a bully and a decent person — and the bully is losing as things stand now.

Trying to ‘save face’

It does seem a tad daft that so many people, given the recent rise in COVID-19 cases, especially in “red” states, complain about the use of masks in public places such as stores and restaurants. They demand that they want to live normally and that their freedom is being squashed by left-wing governors more interested in pushing people around and embarrasing President Donald Trump.

But there’s a reason why you see so many people rebelling like spoiled children against directives from governors of “blue” states.

You see, it’s not about their “freedom” per se — it’s an attempt to save face, pardon the pun, on the part of many Trump supporters. Recall that Trump minimized the pandemic from the start in favor of economic prosperity, which he believed was his key to remaining in power, and they’re trying to dodge the reality that they were always wrong.

In other words, part of the reason they support him is to thumb their collective nose at the rest of the world.

Funny, but a life-and-death situation like the current coronavirus isn’t allowing that. And with the recent death of supporter and former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who tested positive for the virus after the Trump rally in June in Tulsa, Okla., the gambit that the pandemic could be dodged simply and clearly failed.

(It should be noted that COVID-19 doesn’t always kill directly — like HIV, it weakens the immune system so that other diseases can finish someone off.)

For the last four decades and even more so since Trump was elected, conservatives’ strategy was about “owning the libs”; now with the pandemic, however, the conservatives are the ones being “owned” and don’t like it. They have two choices — admit defeat or contribute to the culture of selfish immaturity, neither looking particularly promising now because the latter might lead to more deaths.

Trying to maintain the narrative — but losing control of it

It appears that the political populist right is terrified. It thought that it had found its messiah in Donald Trump, but he stumbled out of the gate and is now in free-fall due to his not only mishandling the responsibilities of the White House but also criminal activity. Some folks are even arguing that the response to COVID-19 combined with the Black Lives Matter protests represent a liberal/media conspiracy to besmirch and eventually remove him, not to mention divide the country.

That sentiment is not only ridiculous on its face but also terrifying in the long run.

For openers, the country is already divided and has been for the better part of 60 years — and it was the conservatives, not the “liberals,” who did it for the sake of power. From the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon, whose then-aide Pat Buchanan helped shepherd it through; to the late-1970s rise of Newt Gingrich, who discouraged other Republicans from fraternizing with Democrats on weekends and referring to Democrats as, among other things, “sick”; to the era of Ronald Reagan, who courted Southern racists in 1980s, leading to the endorsement by a leader in the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia; to the smears against Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, they have no authority to complain about anyone else. And that doesn’t even take into account the “religious right” and the rise of right-wing talk radio laced with outlandish conspiracy theories.

That leads to the problem at hand, which is that the right has always sought to impose its views on American society, Rush Limbaugh admitting that he wanted to “control the language.”

The vast majority of us African-Americans Christians understand this, which is why we’ll never be on board. We’re not listening to the denunciations of BLM as Marxist, since the same charge was made against Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement. We turned a deaf ear to the same charge against the African National Congress, which did have Marxists in it but only because the ANC and the South African Communist Party were officially underground entities in South Africa under apartheid — and today, the SACP is virtually nowhere to be found. And to this day, the political right has never apologized for its support of the white-minority government.

More to the point, however, we don’t accept that the current crises stem from anything but Trump’s criminal incompetence in dealing with the pandemic and overt racism. Doubling down on rhetoric thus doesn’t help the cause, nor does it solve any problems.

In other words, what the right wants everyone to believe we don’t accept as true, and that’s increasingly the case around the country. It’s why the right, and the Republican Party it controls, is in trouble across the country.

The imminent revival, part 15 — “Black Lives Matter”

I’ve believed and said for quite some time that spiritual revival was coming. And with the recent outpouring of support for the “Black Lives Matter” movement, seven years old but renewed with the death of George Floyd last month in Minneapolis, that time may be at hand.

If that sounds crazy, consider that revival never happens in isolation or among the powerful — it often comes from the streets. And the choking death of Floyd at the hands — or more accurately, under the knee — of now-former officer Derek Chauvin, has galvanized the nation like nothing in a half-century.

Why do I say we’re ripe for revival? Well, the Christian Gospel is designed to speak to “the least of these,” not the high-and-mighty who have no need of things to change.

And this is where the “religious right” and its sympathizers and sycophants have always missed the boat. They believe that once they established themselves as the authority in this country things would turn around morally; the ideology Independent Network Charismatic teaches that it could happen should Christians climb and take over “seven mountains of culture.”

Now, some folks have denounced BLM not simply due to its support for black lives but also those in the LGBTQ community. I’m not feeling that, for the simple reason that they too have been marginalized for similar reasons — and if you really want to go there, most gays have already understood the pain of rejection and, as Philip Yancey wrote in “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”, judgment.

Even the cliché “Hate the sin but love the sinner” comes out as judgment, in large part because such folks haven’t completely dealt with their own sins, which they consider “lesser than.” Of course, in the final analysis it doesn’t work quite like that.

On top of that, Scripture calls Christians to “mourn with those who mourn.” Many of us have refused to do so, saying that we can only when the demonstrators behave properly. That misses the point because, really, in effect we’re telling people not to express their rage and, even more arrogantly, not even to feel it. The irony is that, were such victims known Christians being persecuted for their faith, we would complain that no one is supporting us. (Perhaps our refusal to stand with those who aren’t like us is the reason.)

Anyway, the folks demonstrating in the streets I now see as an invitation from the Holy Spirit to join in and pray, contend and work for justice for all of God’s creation, to “seek the welfare of the city.” If that happens, we’ll have more revival than we know what to do with.

Losing control

I first became aware of the “religious right” in 1980 while attending a megachurch in suburban Atlanta, and from the start it seemed to be focusing on defeating enemies rather than acting positively to promote religious values in public life. If you subscribe to its media, and I did for a while, you would have heard the latest outrage against “Christians,” specifically why we needed to stand up for our rights by electing folks to office so that they could send friendly judges to the various benches, the bottom line marginalizing perceived enemies. That’s probably the primary reason many evangelical Christians supported Donald Trump for president four years ago.

The religious right hasn’t been very successful on stemming what it might consider moral decay despite all the money its groups have raised over the past four decades as it is. But several things that have taken place just this year have caused me to suspect that they’ve lost control completely and thus run the risk of being marginalized in their own right.

We witnessed the worldwide spread of COVID-19 — the “coronavirus” — coupled with denial that Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis caused many more deaths in the United States than it should have; right now, a number of Trump-supporting state governors are trying to lift quarantines in their respective states to get the economy going again — and seeing a spike in positive cases as a result. That was followed with the exploding “Black Lives Matter” protests that some are even now convinced represent a media/left-wing conspiracy to divide the country (as if such division didn’t already exist). Then you had Trump’s stunt of clearing peaceful protesters in order to hold a Bible in front of a church, likely cheered by some but condemned, rightfully, by most.

But perhaps even most devastating was yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did indeed protect LGBTQ individuals from employment discrimination. After all, one reason religious right groups supported Trump in the first place was in the hope that such folks would be driven into the closet to stay. (To that, evangelist Franklin Graham made an angry remark about “religious freedom.” It was more likely that he was thinking, We didn’t get what we thought we had paid for.)

The first mistake, of course, was in believing that secular conservatives were friends of the Gospel in the first place — they do what they do because they want votes, not because they share those values. But ultimately and more importantly, disappointment will be your reward when you seek power at the expense of your soul, not least because you end up losing both.

A prophecy against Donald J. Trump

Mr. President, from the time you campaigned for the White House you have acted shamefully and maliciously. You have used the powers of the presidency to bolster your “brand.” You exploited the longstanding divisions in this country for the sake of power, supported blatant racism, used derogatory names for people in both major parties who opposed you, denounced allies and consorted with foreign dictators.  All these were bad in their own right. 

But with your stunt of forcibly moving peaceful demonstrators away from the rectory of a boarded-up Episcopal church and taking a photo in front of it holding up a Bible, perhaps to signal to your “evangelical” supporters that God was on, shall we say, “your side,” you crossed a line. And because of that action, He Himself is going to take you out.

For if you ever read that book that you were holding up, you’d understand that He demands more than lip service to an ideological agenda and won’t countenance the nationalism to which you and others subscribe as congruent with Christian faith and practice. Basically, you violated the Third Commandment.

The real issue is that you refuse to humble yourself, deflecting blame for bad things even when you caused them and accepting credit for good even when you had nothing to do with them. You have always demanded to be worshiped instead of directing your heart to the only One Who is worthy of such — in essence, you’re trying to usurp His throne.

You yourself must know that we’re going through unprecedented times, what with major changes in the environment, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic — which you originally referred to as a “Democratic hoax” — and now demands for justice and riots in the streets of major cities due to the asphyxiation death of an African-American man courtesy of a white policeman in Minneapolis.

But in the cases of the latter two, you responded by insulting state governors, insisting that those who have put their states on lockdown should open them up even though it isn’t clear that the crisis has passed, largely because you fear the electoral consequences of the stalled economy, and those that haven’t put down the unrest in their cities by calling them “weak.” That isn’t leadership; that’s arrogant bullying.

You haven’t even shown much compassion, if any at all, toward the over 100,000 Americans who have lost their lives to the coronavirus or George Floyd, the name of the man who died at the hands of that cop (who, as I write, is facing second-degree murder charges).

And that context makes your photo-op even more egregious.

Because I am not God, I will not offer a timeline as to when He will remove you from the pedestal on which you have placed yourself — quoting former president Barack Obama, that’s “above my pay grade.” But you have mocked, blasphemed and vexed Him, and He would not be true to Himself or His Word if He didn’t do so. 

One of my favorite passages in that book you held up is Micah 6:8, the New International Version of which reads: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” 

Hear this word, Mr. President: Absent true repentance, you are doomed.

One difference between 9/11 and COVID-19

Last week former president George W. Bush narrated a “Call to Unity” video produced by the George W. Bush Presidential Center that was encouraging Americans to remain strong in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. President Donald Trump, in response, complained that Bush, were he interested in promoting unity, didn’t back him during the impeachment trial earlier this year.

As though one had anything to do with the other.

That may lead to another question that I know that some people are thinking: Why aren’t people rallying around President Trump the way they did around Bush immediately after 9/11? The better question is, however, why would they do so?

When Trump was campaigning two of his primary promises were to ban immigration from a number of majority-Muslim countries, thinking that doing so would counter terrorism; and building an impractical wall between Mexico and the United States to keep Mexicans from coming in. Meanwhile, President Bush has a Latina sister-in-law and said, emphatically, “We are not at war with Islam.”

More to the point, however, Bush notably didn’t endorse Trump for president four years ago and was caught muttering after Trump's inauguration that Trump’s inauguration speech contained “some weird s___.” (It should be noted that Bush, a devout Christian, likely doesn’t use that kind of language regularly.)

Bottom line, Trump and his supporters didn’t, and probably still don’t, understand that you can’t run a campaign on ethnic and religious division and expect everyone to be united behind you whenever a major crisis hits. That’s why, when it comes to the U.S.’s response to COVID-19, he’s continually being second-guessed.

You may recall that he was originally denying that there would be a major problem in the first place, saying falsely that widespread testing and protective gear for front-line workers were readily available and insisting that the pandemic would blow over in a matter of weeks with few fatalities. Basically, he’s always been far less concerned about what was good for the country than how he’s regarded in the here and now — which might explain his outburst — as well as his own financial well-being.

Now, Bush got a lot wrong when he was in the White House, most notably about invading Iraq, and history will not look on him favorably for that. But Bush never attempted to use the split that already exists in this country for partisan gain the way Trump has always done. That makes Bush at least credible in delivering a message of hope at a time when we may need it.