Some Thoughts on Trump and Christianity

Democracy is often messy and noisy, no more so than now.  Democracy implies a battle of ideas, a struggle with competing political and social values, but the customary historical norms have dictated that we are at least civil with each other.  No longer do we discuss the great ideas with calmness and rationality, attempting to persuade by arguments supported by facts. I am afraid that civil discourse may be a relic of the past, no longer observed by the shrill purveyors of half truths, distortions and outright lies that emanate from the Trump camp and its supporters on right-wing media.

I’m old.  I admit it.  I look back nostalgically to a time in which the concept of truth was respected, when no matter what your political position was, we understood what truth was, we talked about facts, and we understood that facts were representations of a reality of sorts.  We could agree what facts were because we were grounded in the same reality.

We understand what it means to be a Christian.  While we may disagree about whether a Christian had to believe certain things, there is no disagreement about what it means to be a Christian, what values a Christian exemplifies in his life and behavior and attitude. Jesus is our model of what it means to be a Christian--it  means at the least feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, healing the sick, supporting the poor, comforting the lonely, seeking peace and standing with the powerless against the mighty.

Those are not the values of the leadership of our nation.  The policies our nation espouses now are inconsistent with the traditional values of our nation; to the contrary, our national values, at least as represented by our President and the Republicans who hold the power, not only are not Christian, they are actively and virulently anti-Christian.

This article in the Boston Globe entitled “Are Trump Christians Really Christian?” makes a strong case backed by leaders of Catholic, traditional Protestants and even some Evangelicals, that you cannot follow the teachings of Trump and the opposing teachings of Jesus, at the same time.  The people and the churches that are serious about being Christians are faced with a choice as to which master they will serve.