One of the most disturbing things about Donald Trump’s election victory is the fact that so many Christians enthusiastically supported him. When the votes were counted, 81 percent of white born-again evangelicals and 60 percent of white Roman Catholics helped put a man in office whose lifestyle, values, and policies are just about as far removed from Christianity as can be imagined.
Christians can certainly disagree on some issues without rupturing the Body of Christ. Unity doesn’t mean uniformity, and the faith should celebrate the richness that diversity of expression brings. But this doesn’t mean that anything goes, especially when it comes to marrying faith to partisan politics. There is a line that can’t be crossed without betraying the Christian message.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Nazi-martyred theologian whose witness is on many peoples’ minds lately, said it well.
There are, he wrote, two levels of Christian responsibility. The more fundamental one is a “basic answering,” a fundamental response to the question of what makes life meaningful and what should serve as one’s ethical north star. For Christians, despite our diversity, there’s only one possible response: “the reality which is given us in Jesus Christ,” as Bonhoeffer wrote in his Ethics. Our orientation to the world, our moral center of gravity, is “our total and realistic response to God.”
But Bonhoeffer adds “...and our neighbor” to the end of that sentence. This gestures at the second level of Christian responsibility: our particular responses to others. We are to serve as Christ’s “deputies,” just as Jesus was the Father’s deputy, when it comes to caring for and ministering to our neighbors, our fellow humans. Specific situations call, of course, for specific “realistic” responses. But all of the responses should be informed by a “total” commitment to the “reality given us in Jesus Christ,” a reality that prescribes loving-kindness as the touchstone in our relationships.
And this means that there are certain absolutely nonnegotiable principles for Christians.
We are to honor the God-likeness of all persons, even in ones who seem to have buried their divine DNA under a rubble of self-love and mindlessness; to do our best to act out of a sense of deep compassion rather than anger, much less hatred; courageously to resist individual and collective actions and policies contrary to our Christian bottom line, even if they promise short-term fixes; to strive to forgive wrong-doers while at the same time being scrupulously honest with them about their transgressions; to always keep in mind the plank in our own eyes, remembering that others oughtn’t to be exclusively judged by the worst thing they do; to be willing - and, if we’re able, with God’s help, even eager - to sacrifice comfort, reputation, and livelihood in order to remain true to Christ; and to never, lest we fall into despair, cynicism, and bitterness, lose sight of the hope, trust, and love embedded in the Christian message.
Perhaps the hardest task that we Christians who oppose Trump have before us is reaching out to our fellow Christians who support him, listening to them without a sense of superiority, speaking with them to gently but unblushingly get across our perspective, praying with them, and kindly but firmly inviting them to put Christ’s love before the blare and bluster of partisan politics. Our efforts may well, in fact, turn out to be the U.S. expression of the so-called New Evangelization, the effort to revitalize the faith not so much for the sake of converting non-Christians as to renew people who already profess the faith but pretty much neglect it in their daily lives.
At the same time, we Christians have to comport ourselves in both our personal lifestyles and our public stances in such a way as to model for the rest of the country what it means to be members of a Christian resistance, one based not on power struggles, ideological commitments, or sheer rage, but on deep fidelity to the God of love and peace.
We also need to forthrightly acknowledge and repent our own complicity in this mess. We were too silent, too self-satisfied, too self-absorbed, to stand in opposition, as we should’ve, to the several-decades-now hijacking of the faith by those who mutated Christianity into a partisan whip.
Important as individual witness is, it’s also imperative that we act in concert with one another. Christianity is about community, about membership in the Body of Christ, about the covenants created and sustained by love.
So I have a modest proposal.
Christians who believe that they’re called by their baptismal vows to resist Trump and what he stands for might think about lending support to one another by forming local, grassroots-level witness groups. I suggest calling them “Isaiah 6:8 Groups,” after the prophet Isaiah’s courageous, “Here I am, Lord; send me!” These groups should meet regularly, both to sustain members in what is likely to become an increasingly hostile climate, to pray with one another, and to seek ways, under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, to witness to the two Christian responsibilities outlined by Bonhoeffer. As local groups begin to emerge, they can make contact with others in their region; regions can eventually coordinate nationally.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Workers movement, often said that Christians are called to create the new in the shell of the old. Don’t worry so much about tearing down corrupt institutions, she said. That way too often leads to destructive anger. Focus instead on building godly and nurturing alternatives to the old order whose very existences subvert it.
This is the vision and the goal of an Isaiah 6:8 group. It isn’t a political gathering. It’s a small island of faith that, God willing, can become part of a larger archipelago.
We shouldn’t romanticize the difficulty of what we Christians who resist Trump are facing. We have to reclaim our faith without doing so in ways that actually betray it; we have to avoid the destructiveness of rage and hate born from a deep sense of betrayal from those Christians who support Trump; and we have to pray ceaselessly – yes, even for Donald Trump – especially for Donald Trump – that God will shine God’s face on this land. The going will be rough, probably in ways we can’t yet imagine. But we can and should take heart, especially in this Advent and Christmas season of renewal, from the magnificent promise of the Benedictus:
In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.
