I was still early in my rookie year as a parish minister when I discovered people's powerful urge for a priest who could heal them with a simple gesture. Shirley (not her real name) was a well-respected middle-aged woman in the congregation who asked for an appointment to see me on a personal matter. She arrived and, after an exchange of pleasantries, I gently inquired about what occasioned this visit. Shirley pulled out a Book of Common Worship and turned to the marriage vows. Then she asked me to please read them responsively with her, reciting the lines of the groom.
I demurred, and I asked her what was going on here. Over the next hour, Shirley poured out her difficult life story of growing up in an abusive home, leaving to go out on her own all too young, and winding up in Newport News where she became a prostitute servicing the sailors whose ships were in port.
But I realized there was more to the story--what was up with the faux wedding? Pressed further, she came to the realization that her request of me was in the hopes that a fantasy marriage to a man of the cloth might reverse the sin and guilt of her early years.
I came to regard this phenomenon, repeated often in other (if less dramatic) pastoral moments, as "the priest wish". The priest wish is the wish of the wishful that there actually be someone who could, with a relative wave of the wand, make everything okay.
Donald Trump now plays that priestly role for many. This means he is not to be taken lightly, for it is a hugely powerful role.
But it's worse than that. For in addition to gleefully playing the role of high priest with a magical deal-making wand, Donald Trump also skillfully practices heresy.
It is critically important to remember that heretics were rarely if ever wrong in what they propounded. What made them heretics was their tendency to absolutize whatever truth they were propounding to the exclusion of other truths inherent in the complex matter from which they had extracted their appealing sliver of truth.
Donald Trump speaks much truth. Many of his positions are even admirable (especially, in my opinion, if he really does favor universal health care in America). And he gives truthful-feeling voice to the frustration experienced by all those who cannot understand why there is gridlock in Washington or why the middle class is so financially hard-pressed or why we can't keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S. or why we can't keep those pesky Mexicans from coming to the U.S. to do the low-paying jobs Americans wouldn't take anyhow.
And why don't foreign countries take orders from us any more? Here he represents the widespread yearning for American hegemony over a rambunctious world. He'll tell those Iranians exactly what we want from them, and by God (ours) they'll knuckle under or feel the force of our fury. All those other countries who favor the Iran deal--the European Union and, what, ninety other countries? They're too stupid to realize how our own stupid negotiators have been snookered by the Iranians. He'll get that straightened out first morning in office.
Later that day, he'll order the President of Mexico to pay for a 20' wall a thousand miles long, and it will happen because, well, because he drives a hell of a deal. Same with China. He'll bust loose their currency and end their manipulation of trade because he makes deals all the time and understands this stuff.
Oh, for a tough boss to take charge and say to all those stupid bozos who displease him, "You're fired". Donald Trump assures us all that he is uniquely and solely capable of satisfying all the wishes of the wishful, including with a wink and a nod the possibility that they, too, will wind up as billionaires flying around in their own helicopters.
Trump the heretic speaks just enough truth to be appealing to those who don't notice what's missing or who are blinded to practical and moral considerations. This world runs on transactions, he assures us, citing his routine purchases of political influence through campaign contributions. And with Citizens/United having opened the floodgates for a marketplace of legal bribery, everyone knows he's actually telling it like it is.
Because he shoots from the hip with half-baked ideas, many commentators dismiss Trump's most bombastic propositions as "impossible". I disagree. Send eleven million undocumented residents back to where they came from, including their born-in-America children who are legal citizens of the U.S. according to the U.S. Constitution? This is not impossible. Seriously. Almost anything within the laws of physics is actually possible.
Heretics' power comes because they dazzle with a simple truth which is actually true--one that prompts our involuntary head-nod--and ignore or dismiss the context and the consequences. Mass deportation? Huge job, to be sure, but really pretty easy. Identify them, detain them, do the paper work, and ship them off. Impossible? No. So what if there are millions of them. Look how relatively easily Nazi Germany identified millions of Jews in the countries they occupied. They identified them, rounded them up, and shipped them away. Nobody is even remotely suggesting that Trump proposes a "final solution". In his mind getting them all on the southern side of that 20' wall will suffice.
Doable? Certainly. But let's take just this one proposal and look at some of the implications of making it possible. Many in-depth analyses of the actual cost of such a deportation program can be found by an internet search. A wide range of sources, from the liberal New Republic to the conservative Wall Street Journal, put the hard-dollar costs to apprehend, detain, and transport some 11,000,000 current residents at half a trillion dollars.
But it goes much deeper than that. The conservative American Action Forum analysis reported in The Atlantic gets downright gory: "The impact on the economy would be even larger, according to the study: Real GDP would drop by nearly $1.6 trillion and the policy would shave 5.7 percent off economic growth. Researchers Laura Collins and Ben Gitis also write that their estimates are conservative, since they do not include, for example, the cost of constructing new courts, prisons, and other buildings that might be needed to process and detain millions of immigrants."
Okay, so it's a big and costly and disruptive job, but it is not impossible. In Donald Trump's deal-making eye, all this may be a small price to pay to redress a situation he and many others despise. Somebody stupider can fret about the larger consequences for America as a nation. Meanwhile, he will get one of the thousands of Mexican immigrants he claims work for him to take a grinding wheel and remove those obnoxious words from the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.""
Make no mistake. The priest wish is alive and well in the United States of America right now. Many yearn for a miracle-working savior. And our national pulpit is currently dominated by a high priest whose heresies are undeniably appealing to millions and millions of Americans. We are not immune to such enchantments. Donald Trump is a master of evoking the involuntary head-nod with his shards of truth and blusters of Rambo-like bravado. The months ahead will demonstrate how many of those who instinctively respond that way can then resume thinking for themselves.