Trump's triumph is not the end of the world, nor the dawn of a new age

Donald Trump may not be as bad as many fear and not as good as many hope

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Silhoutted by a sun rise, a helicopter flies over The White House

Marine One Flying over The White House, Inauguration Day, 2017.

Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading reactions to Donald Trump's election win across different news outlets over the last couple of days has been an education in the contemporary political landscape.

For left-leaning media the future is dark. An Atlantic opinion piece laments that “we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.” The Guardian called it “an extraordinary, devastating moment in the history of the United States.” It is a secular version of the sermon: “The End Is Nigh”.

Yet turn to the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, or anything on the right, and you find a mixture of gloating (“Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites!”) and optimism that a new day is dawning. Trump himself hailed the advent of a ‘golden age’ for the American people. Having been mired in misery since the Conservatives’ routing in the UK general election here is a welcome bit of good news for those on the right.

On either side the apocalyptic note is hard to miss. A Telegraph writer says: “2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles.” A Guardian writer says that “there is nothing but bad news for Europe in Donald Trump’s US election victory. The only question is just how bad it will get.”

Immediately after elections there’s always a bit of this apocalyptic tone. When Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party dismantled the ‘red wall’, winning traditionally secure Labour seats in 2019, the rhetoric was that this was a generational change, a fundamental re-alignment in UK politics to the right. Labour, surely, was finished. Five years later, after Keir Starmer’s landslide and the routing of the Tories, it all looks very different – at least here in the UK.

Politicians always, in the long run, fail... The question is how badly they fail and whether they are able to do some good along the way until they do so.

Tony Blair fell from grace due to misleading us all over the Iraq war. David Cameron fell because he lost a referendum over Brexit. Boris Johnson was ousted because he allowed parties in Downing Street while the rest of the country was locked down. George W. Bush pursued a disastrous campaign for regime change in the middle east. Barack Obama started with great hope, won a second term, but didn’t change gun laws and was widely thought to have weakened the US through a failed foreign policy. Joe Biden is thought to have failed because he let inflation grow rampant and allowed American borders become too porous.

Donald Trump will fail too. He may, as he promised, deliver an improved economy. He may stem illegal immigration. That, after all, is why many voted for him. But eventually he will disappoint. So would Kamala Harris if she had won. So will Keir Starmer. And that is not to criticise these particular leaders. Like football managers, they all get sacked in the end, and there are very few who like Sir Alex Ferguson, or Jed Bartlett, get to wave farewell to the crowds at the time of their own choosing. Even then, Fergie’s legacy was tainted by his inability to create a legacy, and Bartlett was, despite our misty-eyed nostalgia, a fictional President.

It’s always tempting to reach for apocalyptic language at times like this. Yet the real meaning of ‘apocalypse’ is ‘revelation’, or ‘unveiling’. Taking the longer view, perhaps the real apocalyptic moment at times like these is the unveiling of the true place of politics – as important, but not ultimately important. These moments reveal the inadequacy of all human kingdoms, and our longing for a different kingdom, a kingdom of ‘righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ as the Bible has it, things that no government or election result can ever deliver.

Politics matters because the way we live together matters. Yet what politics at its best can provide – a well-functioning economy, law and order, managing good international relations - only go so far in enabling a flourishing life. Like returning to a familiar drug that we think we can once and for all make us happy, despite the numerous times it has failed before, we still somehow believe that politics can solve all our problems. “Trump will fix it” said the banners – though in fact that is what every politician promises. Jesus warned: “Many will come in my name and say ‘I am he’, and lead many astray.”

Most probably, Donald Trump will not be as bad as many fear, and not as good as many hope. Because politics is never the final word. As American theologian, Matthew Burdette put it recently: “The solution to our politics is not a political solution. Voting for the right or the wrong candidate will not change the situation: the devil is happily bipartisan, so long as politics is our idol. No, what is needed is fundamentally and thoroughly spiritual. Only when we can say with the prophet Isaiah that “the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales,” that is, only when we can see against the horizon of the ultimate how small are our worries, will these relative, penultimate things like politics be set right and take on their true meaning in our lives.”

Article

America

Creed

Justice

5 November 2024

6 min read

Is it okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right?

Here's what a mean street preacher really taught me.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Behind a passer by a street peacher holds up a large yellow sign with a message on it.

Street preachers on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

LaTerrian McIntosh on Unsplash.

A few months ago, my cousin was visiting my hometown of Seattle for work. We planned to meet one evening for a Mariners baseball game during her visit. I suggested that we meet near the wonderful Ken Griffey Jr. statue near the stadium gates. What I hadn’t realized was that this was the precise spot a street evangelist had also decided to station himself in order to share (mostly shout) his message of judgement and destruction the same evening. Kind of like a pre-game verbal hors d'oeuvres. I arrived at the meeting point a few minutes before my cousin, giving me ample time to hear the preacher preach.

Now, I grew up in church, and, in fact, am myself a speaker and writer on topics involving faith and God. In other words, I’ve had over 40 years to experience the church’s, umm, “quirks”. I’d like to think that very little coming from the mouths of faith preachers could shock me. Alas, I was wrong.

As I began to listen to the preacher, lines like “weeping and gnashing of teeth” scorched through the preacher’s megaphone. Yep, nothing new there. The preacher used the word “judgment” a lot. Actually, impressively a lot. I’ve never before heard the words “God” and “judgment” used in conjunction more times within a two-minute span. There was a raging intensity to the sermon, but still in the range of normal for street preaching.

Then, my cousin texted me that she was outside the ballpark but might have gotten the location wrong. I realized she and I were at two different locations. While I texted my cousin back, I tuned out the preacher’s message. That is until I heard him shout through his megaphone, “He hates you.” I stopped texting. I looked up at the preacher. Did he just say that God the Almighty hated all of us outside the ballpark? Families, little boys and girls, and elderly? Did God hate all of us lining up for the game? It was “bark at the park” night so even the dogs were casualties in the preacher’s line of fire. If nothing else was gleaned from the man’s message, it seemed, we were all to understand that God hates us.

Minutes later, when my cousin and I finally found each other, I told her that she had had the good fortune of missing out on the street preacher informing her that God hates her. She replied, “Oh, I have plenty of others who tell me that!”

Sadly, many of us have received that negative message from different sources in our world and too often from people sharing some association with God.

In America, as election season comes to the boil, I’ve noticed (and maybe you have too) the not-so-subtle attitude that it’s okay to say mean things about another person as long as that person is on “the other side”. A verbal dig here, an eyeroll there, name-calling and slanderous nick-naming the enemy for the sake of ridicule have become all too common, if not a soft virtue in political discourse. It has become hard to discern where the moral line is, or if such a thing still exists within political dialogue.

Conversations like the following happen so frequently following a political debate or interview, they’ve become cliché: “I almost cannot believe he said that!” Response: “Well, yes, that was pretty bad. But he’s right, isn’t he?” Translation: it’s okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right.

Evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

The meaning of the word ‘evangelical’ here in America is a complex thing, to be sure. But perhaps one of the reasons it is understood as a political word more than a religious one is because the combative and rude nature of discourse seen in politics has become increasingly acceptable even in Christian settings. As a friend of mine said to me years ago, “It feels as though Christians have turned rudeness into a spiritual gift.”

The thing is, you probably don’t know the preacher I heard in downtown Seattle, but you’ve probably heard or know a person who makes Christian claims in the same kind of rude ways. The result is that evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to audiences on topics of faith and God for around 20 years now and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met who feel unlovable, already hated, and unforgivable for the decisions they’ve made in life.

So when I hear a preacher shouting a message through a bullhorn in the name of God and I hear not words of hope, peace, grace, love, and forgiveness, but strictly judgement and burning, I fail to see how this God can be the one who came to earth out of love for people in the person of Jesus Christ.

It’s true that the Bible does depict God enacting justice and judgement. But equally true is that the Bible not only displays, but out-and-out defines God as being love. My concern with the street preacher’s message is that although he might have communicated the justice of God (albeit in a warped way that would make old-time revivalists look tame), his message left little room for hearing about and feeling the love of God.

If there is anything we need to hear today, it is the message that God, in his very nature, is love. One particular writer of antiquity, and a close friend of Jesus Christ, once penned a letter to first century churches. In attempting to explain what God is like and what people of faith should be like he wrote: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

For those of us who have never been to a church, we only need to watch or attend an American football game to see a sign with the words John 3:16. That reference, taken from one of Christ’s biographies states that, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.”

This is a message we need to hear. It’s something we need to let into our bones—that those of us who feel beyond the reach of love, are in fact loved by God.

In a strange way, I can’t help but admire the guts those street preachers have, banging out an unpopular message to strangers in crowds. The problem lies in the fact that often their message, so boldly proclaimed, is God’s disappointment, disapproval, or outright hate for people.

Because this is the truth and too important to miss: God doesn’t hate you. He loves you. He always has and he always will.