Christians have always prayed for people in authority, particularly the head of state in whatever place they lived. For centuries, that meant the emperor or king or queen or such like. Since the Revolution, American Christians have prayed for the president. Much of the time, that hasn’t seemed like a problem. If you liked the incumbent, it was kind of like cheering. Even if you didn’t, you still wanted God to aid the president in maintaining the peace and stability of the country.
For many Christians (those at least who actually believe what Jesus said about the importance of loving our neighbors and doing good to those in need) this has become more difficult in the case of the current incumbent. Praying for Mr. Trump may almost seem like praying against the well-being of the country. So I offer some thoughts on the topic.
First, remember that praying for someone is not a way of expressing approval. Praying for any one is a way of laying that person in the hands of God for whatever he or she may need, even if you think that what your object of intercession needs is a swift kick in the pants. To be sure, we assume that God knows better than we do; but prayer does allow us to put our two cents’ worth in.
One way to start, then, is to tell God exactly what you think of Mr. Trump and his policies and even give God some hints as to exactly what you would like God to do to him in recompense for, say, his fostering of white supremacist groups. If you feel your imagination is not up to the task, there are many Psalms—97 is a good example—that can provide some suggestions.
Yes, cursing is one form of intercession, and if that’s how you’re feeling just now, feel free to go right ahead. The Psalmist did. Venting can serve a useful purpose—for a while; and, in any case, there’s no point in covering up how you really feel when you pray since God hears the unspoken prayer as well as the spoken anyway.
Of course, if you take Jesus’ teaching seriously, you’ll be feeling at least a little guilty about this. Telling us to love our neighbors set the bar pretty high; telling us to love our enemies made it uncomfortably exacting and very difficult to fudge. We remember that God loves even the worst of human beings, and there are moments when we all find that a great comfort and reassurance. But must we include Donald Trump? Yes, we must, sooner or later. Loving the Donald doesn’t mean you have to like him or think well of him or excuse him; but it does mean desiring his welfare. And since he is, by the cranky machinery of our constitution, President of the United State, the welfare of the whole nation is in some ways, dependent on his.
The welfare I refer to is not simply physical; it is deeply spiritual. This is no less than a prayer for his salvation. How, then, to pray? We might start with something simple, such as “God, please try to keep him from doing anything that will corrupt or destroy the country he is sworn to lead and protect.” We know, of course, that God doesn’t always save human beings from themselves. But it’s still right to pray that prayer—a prayer that the head of state may at least not destroy the state or abandon its best principles.
We can take this prayer deeper. We can pray that Mr. Trump will begin to notice and understand the true dimensions of his presidential responsibility. More than that, we can pray for the awakening of his soul and spirit. His public record thus far suggests that he has been neglecting the life of the spirit. He managed to convince the Evangelical establishment otherwise before the election, but that didn’t take much since they so much wanted to believe it anyway.
What would I most desire for the President? That he come to some recognition of how much he has taken his wealth and success for granted, of how much he owes to other people and to what he might think of, at first, as sheer luck but might come, over time, to recognize as the undeserved grace of God. In other words, I pray for the kind of conversion that would lead him to a new life.
How can such a thing happen? To some of us, the awareness of God’s love is granted even from our early years. For some, like the Apostle Paul, it takes a blinding vision and a voice, a shattering of soul and spirit that may take many years to come to terms with. For some, it comes through physical suffering. I don’t pray that Mr. Trump suffer. But I do pray that God will use whatever God may find useful in pursuit of this goal.
And, since the Scriptures are quite clear that the greatest of God’s weapons is love, I try, in a still faltering way, to offer to God my love for this sorry man for whom I have so little respect, so much suspicion, so little hope. That love, I hasten to add, includes still opposing him at every wrong turn he takes in whatever small way I can. If God’s love does contrive to get through to him, he will understand that.
Donald Trump
LIVING WITH DEMOCRACY
Over the last few decades, I’ve found myself thinking that we somehow had regressed as a nation to the turn of the last century and the era of the Robber Barons. With the recent election, it feels more like the 1850s and the nasty politics of the era leading up to the Civil War. I don’t mean that we are on the verge of another violent collision on that scale. I mean that the level of fury and dishonesty has reached levels I thought of as a historical relic, long left behind.
Such periods are a major challenge for democracy, which assumes that public decisions will be argued out on a reasoned basis. In this election, only one side was playing by those rules. The Founders were aware of this possibility. That’s why they built a specifically constitutional democracy. Even the Electoral College, which is making such a mess of the vote this time around was originally a protection to keep populous states from beating up on small ones. One could argue that it has outlived its purpose, since it is making it possible now for states with small populations to gang up on states with larger ones. But be that as it may, we are a constitutional democracy, and there is no politically realistic chance of getting rid of the College in my lifetime.
It’s not just the US where democracy is in trouble. Think Brexit. Think Poland, Turkey, and Hungary. We thought we were above all that. But there is no simple upward trend of enlightenment and decency in history. One could perhaps argue that there has been improvement over the last three centuries, but not without hiccups, surprises, and wild mood swings.
I would like to think that this election is a mere blip that we will soon get past. But there is no guarantee of that. What we can say is, “We’ve been here before, even if not in my lifetime.” This is not the time for despondency, but for renewed and thoughtful determination. And time to ask why so much of our electorate (though not the majority) has given way to sheer recklessness in its choice of Donald Trump. I’m not thinking primarily of the bigots who were attracted to Trump’s open racism and misogyny and xenophobia—as they have been to decades of less explicit exploitation of these attitudes on the part of the Republican Party. I am thinking rather of ordinary people who had given up hope in the political business-as-usual. Some of them voted for Obama the last time around—and for some of the same reasons.
Much of this desperation has to do with specifically local situations. Democrats, I’m afraid, have been too willing to focus narrowly on national issues and politics. In the meantime, Republicans have worked hard to take control of a majority of the states. If Democrats want to change the future of the national government, we will have to get more serious about state governments. Remember that even the least populous state gets a minimum of three electoral votes. Those who live in California or New York cannot afford to be indifferent to the economic well-being or the political health of, say, North and South Dakota. Too often, we have ignored their economic troubles and looked down on what we esteemed their benighted politics.
When I hear friends talking—how seriously is hard to say—about renewing their passports and looking for refuge in some other country, I think, “What other country?” Yes, Canada is a saner place right now than the US, though it may not be eager to add a flood of Yankee refugees. But no human polity is guaranteed immunity to the kinds of disruption we are currently experiencing. Think again of the Brexit. Indeed, I believe that all human beings are equally subject to the doctrine of total depravity—that nasty reality in our hearts that knows how to turn good into evil and which resides as determinedly in the souls of bishops and archbishops, Evangelical leaders and politicians as in those of ordinary folk.
In the US, we have made at least some progress against racism, sexism, homophobia and other kinds of divisive suspicions and hostilities. The present resurgence of these things is a sign of how far they have been brought out into the open and how desperate they are to reclaim their lost influence. This it not the time to give up in disgust and look for some perfect safe place—non-existent in any case. It is time to broaden our vision so that we can see why so many people in the middle of the country, geographically and economically, have lost hope in the political world as we have it. And it is time to recommit to a vision of democracy as embracing all the people. That perfect democracy doesn’t yet exist anywhere. Indeed, I do not believe it will, this side of the Age to Come—which is why we have to keep working to salvage it, restore it, maintain it, extend it.
RUMINATIONS ON THE PRESIDENCY OF DONALD TRUMP
What will Donald Trump’s presidency be like? Perhaps it seems too soon to ask. The country is still awash with emotion, ranging the full gamut from joy to despair. I was at least half-way expecting the results of the election on the basis of Trump’s improbable victory in the Republican primaries and the meagerness of Clinton’s lead in the late polls. We have learned (or should have learned) from the last few elections not to take such figures seriously.
It’s easy enough to blame the results on bigotry, but I do not think that is the primary issue. Bigotry is a real issue and, by its very nature, a deeply rooted one, but I do not think it was itself the fuse that produced this explosion. The fuse has been lit in plain sight over the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared, particularly in the middle of the country, while despair, anger, and opioid addiction moved in to take their place.
The fact that the counties where Trump fared best were majority white and of limited education does not mean that the voters in those categories are bad people. It just means that they’ve been hit the hardest and may well have had the fewest reserves for coping with the troubles—economically, intellectually, or in terms of skills. We have developed into two nations: one prosperous and well-educated (largely coastal plus select centrally located states); the other struggling and angry (largely South and Midwest).
This is not to deny the element of bigotry. Racism has been active throughout President Obama’s tenure—partly because it was so threatened by his election. Misogyny has played a big role in the election we’ve just had. But the explosive potential of these elements, I believe, has been increased by anger over perceived (and often quite real) loss.
In any case, one begins to wonder what the Trump presidency will actually look like. On the basis of the campaign, I think we can only say that we do not know. It could be a continuation of the campaign, angry and vengeful. Or it could be a continuation of the campaign, driven by whim. Or, as Maureen Dowd speculated recently in The New York Times, there may be some other Trump persona waiting to emerge.
We have no better luck speculating on the Republican Party. It has become increasingly fractious during the Obama years. Now many of its latent disagreements are out in public and could conceivably dig themselves in more deeply. Will the Republicans succeed in ruling in some coherent way? Or will they continue to paralyze the country in their offhand way? I don’t think there is any way to foresee which it may be. The thing I most fear is that any prospect of statesmanlike or stateswomanlike behavior is remote. They are badly out of practice. Indeed, one could almost say that they have stamped such practices out entirely.
The Democrats, in the meantime, must cope with a new recognition of their own deficiencies. How is the party of the educated also to be the party of the alienated and oppressed—all the alienated and oppressed—whites, too; middle-aged men without prospects, too? To them, I would say, “Widen your circle of sympathy and understanding.” What is destroying the middle reaches of the country will wind up destroying all of us if it is not dealt with creatively and fairly.
Someone has said, “This is our Brexit.” I think that is right. It arises out of similar circumstances and with the same intensity of passion and irrationality. And, in both cases, the process has been unleashed and we must now wait to see what form it takes and how we can respond.