I was planning to write about my July 4th trip up to the area where I was born in Ohio, but I think reflecting a bit more about the more recent past is more important right now. It's been the experience of my kids, growing up in the Trump years. It’s been a significant proportion of their childhood and my parenting and married years. These thoughts come up when you drive a long distance, I guess.
I'm not sure why people blame Joe Biden for the fallout of covid, except that we are dealing with a really toxic level of abuse in our culture. Some would call it fascism, some would call it terrorism, some would call it narcissism, some just call it evil, and it is all of these things. The abuse is not limited to leadership alone. It is the abusive systems that enable it to continue. There is a culture in America of not telling the truth directly and firmly, of not naming names lest those with means turn around and sue or abuse you, and in this environment, the truth, or any attempt to figure it out together, is mostly irrelevant. All that matters to folks then, is winning.
I want to take you all back to the moment I knew I could never support Trump, when I thought everyone would agree with me in my church circles. The God I love is unchanging, as we were taught, so certain standards apply. Right and wrong were firmly in place in my heart and mind, so I simply, naively, spoke the truth about Trump's character. It is wrong to mock on the basis of disability, it is wrong (and personal for me) to belittle the foreigner, it is wrong to disparage your opponents' (or alleged abuse victims') physical appearance. It is wrong to encourage people to commit acts of violence to consolidate power. Abuse is wrong.
What Trump did in handling covid was incompetent as well as arrogant, but what he did all those years leading up to January 6th was completely willful, with no concern for the rest of us. He had no respect for the country, no love, just sickness.
But Christians knew right and wrong long before a majority of them decided to minimize the evil of January 6th. We all knew lying and abusing power was wrong, and the Christians who hate Hillary so much had once had that standard, when it was her husband (not her) who did the wrong. There was a clear "lesser evil" between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump, and it was not the boastful sexual abuser, and if you couldn't vote for either, maybe you should have stayed at home. I personally made the mistake of voting for a third party, not really grasping the stakes.
We all know well what 81% of my former faith community went and did instead. They did wrong. And then 71% of them doubled down on it the next election, and many of them justified violence when they rightfully lost.
They knew the difference between right and wrong, just as I do, but they allowed themselves to demonize people they made no effort to understand or get to know. That was clear when I was told repeatedly that Democrats are evil, that sharing my horrifying experiences with miscarriage makes me a babykiller, that compassion for rape victims and an awareness of complexity and nuance, that respect for women as equal human beings to men, was wrong. They repeatedly shared hateful rhetoric about Muslim immigrants - in a way that is reminiscent of Satanic panic - with no concept nor concern for what they were doing to harm innocent families during a global refugee crisis.
Evangelicals redefined morality in a rigid and quite evil fashion between 2014 and 2016. What they believe now has little resemblance to the group that believed lying is serious sin, back with Bill Clinton. They just love to lord it over; they don't actually love.
I am writing all this down because I think it is important we remember what got us where we are now. People seem to be forgetting how awful the Trump years were.
The Trump years were constant chaos, and complete moral injury.
They separated families through banning travel from specific Muslim countries (not the murderous Saudi regime, though), taking babies - one was reportedly nursing when taken away - from their mothers, to place them in homes where children lost and could not develop their ability to communicate in their original languages with their own parents, if they were eventually reunited with them. Developmental years of children my own kids' ages, utterly destroyed, a whole traumatized generation.
And then the pandemic, and not a bit of care or concern for even American people's suffering, callous playing red states off of blue states, no real value for life, not encouraging safety precautions, sending mixed messages...and eventually scapegoating the head doctor instead of owning that “the buck stops here” as president, all while refusing to use any contingency plan the previous administration had put in place, out of spite. And in the midst of all this, the demeaning of human life that was not white, for righteous outrage at constant targeting. The violent threats leading up to voting. The abject bitter cruelty of people I had thought once were good and had worshiped with once. Their unabashed hatred towards the most vulnerable children in our country. The way they completely despise the poor. The reluctance to help struggling families and those arrogant letters claiming credit with that awful cat scratch scrawl of his, when funds were eventually disbursed.
The Trump period was traumatic, and then to top it all, there was January 6th. And then, instead of uniting against that violent threat, those who should have repented, decided to double down and push the threat even further from any semblance of unity and dignity and normality to where we are now, where they still think they have the right to blame us for resisting their overthrow of the Constitution. MAGA literally threw down the flag they lectured us all on respecting, to put up that fool’s rag on the US Capitol. We saw them do it live.
And the evangelicals will still be far more upset about folks swearing or me saying “fool”, even though the use of language is fair and accurate, given all the events described, than they are about his abuses, or theirs. They will never repent. They have made that very clear. The majority of them support that fascist even now. But we were taught that judgment starts with the house of God; that we are to be the most penitent, not those outside. I guess they don’t really believe they are sinners. It is all a big lie, with nothing to do with life or love or liberty.
I write all this because I think we easily forget the times we have been through. We forget quickly, how much of a betrayal we went through, seeing people we thought were good go all in for an abuser. Things have been so much better under the Biden administration's leadership. He isn’t blowing up Twitter or the world. There is a sense of dignity and normality. The abuser is always going to abuse, and the fact that any American would still play along with it is criminal, an attack on our country. I have had the freedom to say things “out loud” during this time, in a way that was much more dangerous emotionally and perhaps even physically, during the Trump years.
And yet the abusive fool just will not go away!
This Independence Day, I drove through the countryside around my birthplace, and I saw some of the most obnoxious church signs, and I realized: these Christians stateside were always this way. They haven’t changed as much as all that. Those signs were there when I was a kid, too. They really do want power over us. They don't care about anyone but themselves and their money. They think themselves superior to everyone else. They genuinely do not care about the lives of anyone overseas, not even the many Christians coming into our country out of desperation. They are not superior. In fact, if anyone needs Jesus' love, it is them.
For all their ten Commandments, these MAGA cultists have forgotten that the whole law is upheld if we live a life of love. Where has that gone? You do not truly love your neighbor if you delight in mocking them:
"Do atheists get coverage for an act of God?"
"Turn to God, America."
"The donkey and the elephant won't save, Jesus does."
The problem is, those that want to claim they are apolitical are the same ones holding those stupid yellow Jesus Saves signs while other Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, threatening lives.
If the churches are this far from God, who can blame America?
Yet I don't actually think America is so far from God as the Heritage Foundation Christians are. Americans protested peacefully in multiple cities after Trump won - remember the pink hats?
Free people have a community the hard pews of fundamentalism can't replace. Free Americans unite in a real love.
I'm not writing much about my trip itself, because while I was driving through that beautiful country, I was reflecting on, processing and grieving, all of this.
I should have been able to be understood by a church community that had basic moral standards; I should not have been made unwelcome in my own family by people who just want to abuse everyone else. I truly believed all the truths they taught me about love, but when it came down to it, being an honest person is unacceptable to people who just want to continue covering up their own abuse.
They don't want to face our past and heal; they want to kill, steal and destroy. They don't want to come to the light and live honestly; they don’t want to accept their trans neighbors as equally human; they don't care if people die, as long as they have their traditions. Change is part of growth, but they don't want all of us to have life and have it to the full.
They want us to submit to them, not live free as Americans. They lied to us when they said their God is love; their only god is the emptiness of narcissism. Trump suits.
Jesus wept.
So maybe, just maybe, this time around, we don't need to be so impacted by their threats. That’s just what they do from their bitter hearts. It is who they are, and it shows what they truly believe. If they want to continue in this murderous way, they will empty their own pews, because there are still some Christians who value life and liberty. You clearly can't be pro life and hope for a civil war to destroy God's enemies, when amazing grace is available.
You can't follow a God who is love and lust after vengeance on your fellow citizens and neighbors. Christians aren't just called to love our neighbors; we are called to do the impossible and love our enemies.
While I am called to love, there is absolutely a time to shake the dust off of feet. I'm not going to have anything to do with people I can't trust with my life or others’ lives. No more, and Never Again.
We all need to take a moment to remember the past. Grieve the losses. Admit the concerns. Then we need to keep on doing what is right, peacefully exercising our freedom to rebuke the right for being so deplorably wrong.
"Pro Life" can threaten US all they want; free people will continue to live free.
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