What is happening

A previous draft of this post waxed far more political than I ever have on this site, and I regretted it, so I've taken most of it down. I've left only the below truncated reflection that compiles a Twitter thread of mine from a few days ago. Suffice to say my thoughts on our country's political moment are more expansive, but the small number of people who come to this site do not come here for political commentary. So I leave you with a commentary on what the events of the last four years in the U.S., with their culmination in a literal insurrection at the Capitol, may portend for the Church's witness.

Most Christians who spent the better part of five years downplaying Trump's moral hazard are going to be permanently warped by the exercise. Many of those will spiral further down the MAGA/QAnon rabbit hole into unrecognizability. Still others will retcon their rationalizations about Trump and thereby become encrusted in false pride, missing an opportunity to learn the important lessons of the Trump episode that could protect against future failures of moral reasoning and restore their Christian witness.

A very small minority will allow the shame of January 6th (and indeed of all 2020) to wash over them and cleanse them of pride, and they will recover their moral credibility. But not nearly enough will.

The American Christians who indulged, rationalized, and even empowered Trump through thick and thin have damaged the Gospel witness of all American Christians. The Christians who reluctantly supported Trump in 2016 only to become slowly engulfed by his cult of personality over four years have handicapped the cause of Christ in this country and shackled their more prescient brothers and sisters with a new and undeserved burden of penance.

In short, the damage to Christian witness will easily outstrip the benefits of having reinforced the Supreme Court with a few conservative justices. It was always a bad bargain, and with a man who literally wrote a book about how to get other people to make bad bargains.

I'm glossing over some theology in the above, as well as operating from a specific political perspective that I'm not taking this opportunity to elaborate on. But no matter. The current predicament for tens of millions of Christians in our country can reasonably be distilled to a failure in regards to the Psalmist's warning:

Put not your trust in princes...in whom there is no help. -Psalm 146:3

Christians not only put their trust in a prince, they didn't even have the dignity to wait for an admirable one. The damage and shame of it will ripple into our children's futures, and three Supreme Court justices won't be able to stop it.

​Lord have mercy. ☦︎