Month: July 2020

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?”

So Jesus asks of his followers in Mark 8. He has even more ultimate things in mind, but I’d like to borrow the question and its implied answer in the context of US politics and society.

The US loves, worships!, winners in many spheres. Take sports and business culture as just two examples. Unfortunately, the US celebration of the simple narrative of winning and having glorious winners works particularly badly in democratic politics. It’s a terrible foundation for a peaceful, flourishing, pluralistic society.

In a democratic and pluralistic society, the aim of politics is to allow decision making by a majority without silencing or depriving the minority of the fruits of participation, thus allowing both winners and losers in the political process to continue to flourish in society. Such a politics is about a shared outcome, with room for those winning and losing any individual vote. It is the basis for peaceful co-habitation in a varied, polyphonous society.

That goal is simple to state and hard to maintain. Our politics, deformed through decades of culture warring habits has become all about one faction winning and being able to set its own agenda in a maximal way, to the detriment of the other faction(s). Put differently, the goal of US politics has become depriving the non-winning factions of the fruits of participation as much as possible. I think this is a habit of mind to be found both left and right, but the right has become particularly shameless in its pursuit of the maximal win, as witnessed by its habit of ruthless, doubled down vote supression of opposing voters.

As with so many other spheres that are not sports competitions, this vision of winning is utterly corrosive for politics and society. It’s a recipe for ever increasing strife and ever diminishing peace. The phrase ‘no justice, no peace’ expresses this. The less things are just and ordered well for both majority and minority, the more peace recedes and fractures. Winning under this definition may initially feel good, but it quickly converts into a desperate struggle to find more and more symbolic reassurances of supposed winning, even as the reality of actually winning much of anything good ebbs away, both for winner and loser, who instead become entangled in desperate, contemptuous struggle.

To come back to Jesus’s phrase: under this kind of winning, the winner (and losers) stand to lose everything that is good in a polity (its soul). But those who double down on winning maximally can see this loss less and less, because flourishing itself vanishes from their telos more and more, both for the self and the other.

So it is that political winners can seek to gain everything and simultaneously lose everything. In our time, it’s as though God created Donald Trump to make this very point. But after Trump, the toxicity of the winner-take-all approach will endure, unless we start reconceiving of winning as wide, secure, mutual flourishing, not winner-take-all. Under winner-take-all in politics, everyone loses in the end.

The Trump years have been grinding years of culture war. Though Donald Trump didn’t start this war, he is one of its most enthusiastic warriors. His devotion to war shows itself in his relative lack of interest in the issues for which culture war is fought. What he prizes most is the sheer war of it all, which is the way of a warrior who truly loves war. He shows interest in the issues only when there is potential to inflict maximum injury (metaphorical or otherwise) on his enemies, or to maximize the spoils of war (his own advantage).

The logic of the Trumps of this world has the power to convert even reluctant culture warriors: the issues being contested recede, and the state of war itself becomes the focus. I don’t think this point needs further proving.  I am an Evangelical, and the sadness and ruin of what has happened to Evangelicalism under the corrosion of the culture wars establishes my point. There are few moral commitments that Evangelicalism had preached in the past which have not been subordinated to war at this point. Ask a 7 year old in a cage at the border, hoping there might be soap today, just how pro-life or pro-family Evangelicalism really is.

As a follower of Jesus, I believe cultural peace, not war, -making expresses who Jesus is. Some might object that Jesus was a precipitator of conflict, that he was aware of himself as a causer of conflict. But Jesus preached loving his enemies. He blessed peacemakers. He gave his life to make peace between humanity and God. Some, often the ones most vocally declaring their loyalty to God, would rather not see that peace. This means that peace making will not be free of conflict. Jesus knew that and yet still pursued peace making on a cosmic scale. Paul summarizes the ministry of Jesus, handed on to the Christian church as “the ministry of reconciliation”.

War is self-perpetuating and will not stop without peacemaking. Even if Trump does not get re-elected, our entrenchment in war won’t just stop. Many former conservatives are all in on the war, long after their commitments have lapsed. The left has its own war enthusiasts: Neo-Jacobins, like all culture warriors are happiest when fighting. So, even if we say no to Donald Trump, this will not automatically disarm the warriors who see pitched battle as their calling and their principal source of joy. We will need so much reconciliation to help surmount the damage of the culture wars, to rob them of their momentum.

We need a large chunk of Americans, divided on so many issues, dedicated not just to showing out the warmonger, but to disarming, even where they do not agree with each other. The man may go, but if he leaves us as divided as he has loved making us, he’ll have left us this heightened war as his legacy.  So, here’s me praying he both goes and that a lot of us disarm so that he doesn’t stay in spirit. Here’s me praying that Christians do their part to exorcise the spirit of war he represents.

We’ll know things are improving if it becomes far more common to love your enemies, to care for them and value them, to believe in their dignity and worth. The logic of war is the prevailing logic of our moment, not the logic of Jesus, which means that right now, large numbers of Americans believe enemies are to be defeated and vanquished. The other side must lose.  But for those pursuing culture peace, Jesus declares that enemies are not there to defeat or vanquish, but to love, and that this is more important than ‘sides’.

Jesus took this to unusual lengths, being willing to die for enemies.  In a society that is not in a state of outright physical war, that is usually not necessary.  But the minimum application of Jesus’s ethic is that enemies are there to live with as valued neighbors, as hard as that can be to achieve, especially when enemies are behaving like enemies.  Here’s me praying we put far more energy into being neighbors now and when Trump is gone.