Prophets

Evangelical prophets, I’m going to assume, are sincere. I assume this because the line between sincerity and insincerity is not always clear. A concern with monetary advancement might be considered a manifest sign of insincerity in a religious figure except that for some of the people I have listened to money seems to have a sacramental aura about it. It seems an object of intense religious feeling. The same thing holds with sexuality. One might say that sexual scandal is another sign of ‘insincerity’ except that, as Harold Bloom once pointed out, libidinal energy (releasing and channeling it) is at the heart of American religious experience. American Christians seek divine eros and seeking divine eros they fall readily and easily into the other kind. The Word made flesh is a sexualized body and a homosexual encounter in a washroom is not a far step from an erotically charged Pentecostal service with gyrating dancers and ecstatic rock music. To be brief, sex and money are THE temptation for a religion of pure immanence. And this, dear Evangelicals, is why I am not your enemy. I understand your desire for an ecstatic experience of divine immanence because at various points in my life I have shared it. HOWEVER all of us have to realize that our greatest desire is also our deepest temptation. Though I am as far as can be from being a Lutheran the greatest temptation for a Christian is to replace a theology of the cross with a theology of glory (one should always pay special attention to one’s theological foes!). The worst part of this substitution comes with the third temptation of a religion of immanence and that is an addiction to power and idolatry of the powerful. God says that he is powerful but he never says that he is power. He only says that he is love and this is because all power that is not rooted in love is weakness. Yet you are fatally attracted to a man who only ever wins and promises to satiate you with constant victory and indeed ‘victory , victory, victory’ is what one of your prophets has famously chanted. Clearly you have not mastered sex, money and power but have been mastered by them. Please do not be offended by this for it is nothing but the human condition itself to fall prey to these things.

Lazy secular critics, of course, will assume that any manifestation of Christianity at all MUST be a manifestation of puritan repression but puritan repression does not characterize current American Christianity adequately and probably never has. Evangelical culture is as drenched in sex as general North American culture though its modes of sublimation may at first glance seem alien. It has always been thus. The poems of Mistress Anne Bradstreet strike a new and distinct note (she can’t wait for her husband to get home and bone her) where Christian wives are concerned (ACTUAL historical puritans were rather less repressed than we assume). At any rate Evangelical culture only does what ANY culture does and that is channel eros in one direction as opposed to another. The dominant liberal culture, for instance, demands that we channel libidinal energy away from unwanted or compelled expressions towards consensual ones involving people over a certain age. One might well argue that this is a better place to draw the line as opposed to where other cultures place it but this is a debate about the application NOT the principle itself. We all sublimate at least SOME sexuality and the human race is unlikely to find permanent agreement on where the exact line is to be drawn. Some will always be more restrictive and others more tolerant. All this is to say that unlike bitter ex Evangelicals like Mr. Frank Schaeffer Jr. I do not think you are brain damaged and mentally ill as your behavior is simply human behavior such as can be recognized throughout history. Plus, if millions of people do what they do because of brain damage or insanity what on earth is supposed to follow from that practically? So,I am not shocked or offended by things like your culture of 'purity'. You have an unhappy consciousness about sex but, a quick check of the many advice columns reveals, so does the general secular culture. We are all befuddled by that strange drive that links us both to God and beast. 

                But, having said this, I also have to make clear that you are very, very wrong about one thing. That or I and much of the Christian tradition with me have gone completely off the rails (which you are certainly free to think). The way I see it you are making a simple and readily diagnosed error. You are seeking an apocalyptic moment in the purely mundane. This is causing you to project heroic, even godlike, qualities onto a man who, to use his own preferred terminology, is a weakling and a loser. Now, how do I know he is a weakling and a loser? Because I can hear him speak and I can read his tweets. This leaves no doubt in my mind whatsoever that, whatever polemical distortions might be present, the ‘fake news’ has the basic picture correct. Donald J. Trump is a fool with a crippling inferiority complex and a man full of narcissistic rage at the world. He is not a priest king in the mode of Constantine the Great or an empire builder like King Cyrus. He cuts a ridiculous figure next to these ancient rulers. Now, of course, you will tell me that God chooses unworthy vessels and you may well be correct about that. However, what evidence do we have that this is the case in this instance? As far as I can tell the private visions of your prophets. There is literally NOTHING I can see in this obvious confidence man that suggests ANY kind of divine anointing (not even the bare minimum of public repentance for his patterns of gross behavior). By their fruits you shall know them and there are no fruits here; only gestures toward Christian supremacy that are empty and pro forma. It all rests on believing your prophets but the view that the private visions of mystics and prophets are binding on other Christians has no status in tradition and is surely tyrannous. Until I share your mystical visions of Trump translated like Elijah to the courts of heaven I have to say that I cannot accept them as any kind of evidence.

                But, of course, your idolatrous Trump worship is founded on something more than the fallacy of projecting kingly qualities on to a Chauncey Gardener figure. You are actually mistaken about time in a way that sends you looking for Peter Sellers’s character in Being There.  Time is the great leveler of goods and of evils. Throughout the ebb and flow of time rulers and movements and nations and institutions rise and fall. They do this because they are relative, finite goods and relative finite evils. There is no God king or divine nation because that is simply not what kings and nations are. The ultimate good is not the possession of any ideology or movement and the value of life or the glory of creation are not nullified by the rise and fall of any empire or monarch. The stakes in history are not and cannot be absolute. Christians can ask for any miracle they want but to expect or even subtly or not so subtly demand a miracle to save any given leader or politician, as if the very providence of God were at stake, is simply foolish. The eschatological kingdom is one we share in by anticipation in the liturgy of the church. It is not a manifest, external moment NOW and the attempt to make it such will collapse into the folly of deifying the present and making idols of the imperfections of humans and their institutions. This is as much as to say that the Kingdom of God is within you and if there IS an eschatological moment in time it is the moment in which charity is released to do its work in the world.

Thus, if Trump cannot be absolute good (why call thou me good?) Biden cannot be absolute evil. Victory over relative evil is not a worldly possession, it is given or withheld by providence as God sees fit in his purposes which are not ours as you yourselves constantly say. Further, it is in the purview of any individual Christian to choose their poisons where the world is concerned. There is no party that any Christian is obligated to support over any other though we should all make choices informed by charity not fear or greed. There is however, as far as I can see, NO party of movement in North America that has a simple monopoly on charity and that is why we are free to have our political preferences. Since you are protestants by and large let me quote from a very protestant poet: “For merit lives from man to man and not, oh Lord, from man to thee.” When we judge between human things we do not judge between God and Satan but between man and man. We judge on a relative and finite scale of goods and evils. I judge the best overall polity to be a social democratic one. You are free to think differently. THIS is a human difference and that is why neither of us can be cast from the community of Christians taken in the broad sense. THIS is because we are balancing goods and evils against each other in a human way and neither of us can claim to embody the fullness of divine judgment in our own particular determinations. Politics is not and of its nature cannot be a scene of absolute judgment.  You have upset what is, after all, a very delicate balance: that between transcendence and immanence. I have almost certainly upset this balance too as it is a very difficult one but there is no reason we might, both of us, do better together.      

This, it seems to me, is why you have suddenly found the sacred in the almost self-evidently profane to the malicious glee of your critics and to the disgust of the young. You do not judge distances correctly. The distance you do not judge correctly is that between God and the world. Not judging that distance correctly you have turned a populist political movement into a second church that negates many values of the first one. You have turned a finite point in history (and history is the realm of ambiguity- which is why moralists and puritans shun it) into one on which the very existence of God is asserted to hang on the results of one election in one country at one point of time. Partly this is because you are under the spell of the one thing that has perhaps come closest to an absolute moment in history; the Holocaust. You think it is time to choose not between Trump and Biden but between God and Satan because you are in the grip of a persecution mania that may, for all I know, be founded on a twisted envy of the Jewish people. You think you are in a moment where everything is at stake and all is to be decided. You think there is absolute temporal victory and absolute temporal defeat. You loudly assert that God guarantees the former always but your anxiety about concentration camps where your Bibles will be confiscated indicates to me that you feel deep doubt on the matter. Where worldly battles are concerned I think Bob Marley was correct: “He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day”. There is always a tomorrow to save yourself for (or some THING if self-sacrifice is really demanded) and frankly, if you devoted yourselves to making this tomorrow a kinder one I think your place in the nation will be more secure as fears grounded in paranoia and suspicion become self-fulfilling prophecies.  You, however, seem convinced by the internet that absolute evil is on the verge of organizing itself on earth. Belief in the possibility of absolute evil realizing itself in history is the Gnostic heresy which much of your apocalyptic obsession reduces to. This, though, is a matter for another day.