Jeremy Corbyn is no Donald Trump, and vice-versa. But the moral lesson is the same. This tale of two parties is a powerful allegory about what happens when you take voters for granted for too long. And the Republican Party leaders now launching a late, hopeless rebellion against Donald Trump this weekend should look at what has happened to the Labour Party, and despair. What these Grand Old Party bigwigs don’t realise – or can’t accept – is that, however much the public may think Trump’s candidacy farcical and find him appalling, voters hate them far than they could ever hate the Donald. The more cynically these establishment politicians move against the leader – endorsing him one day then turning on him the next – the more they confirm the public’s suspicion that they are lying crooks who will stop at nothing to preserve their power. The latest coup against Trump, just like the latest attempt to force Jeremy Corbyn to resign, has only strengthened his position among his supporters. Look at the ovation the Republican nominee received outside Trump Tower last night.
"the wisdom of repugnance": a test case
In this post I want to connect my earlier post about what needs to be done to reclaim the term “evangelical” with my frequently-asserted hostility to the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.
In a well-known passage from The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis writes,
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic , the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’
If one side of this proper training is the delighted recognition of, and attraction to, the good, the other and equally necessary side is the instinctive recoiling from “the disgusting and hateful.” That second kind of response is what Leon Kass appealed to in his famous essay on “The Wisdom of Repugnance.”
I believe that the proper response of the well-former mind and heart to the very idea of Donald Trump as President of the United States is, to put it bluntly, revulsion.
It is possible, of course, to feel that revulsion and then decide that it needs to be mastered. That is what has happened to many Republican politicians who have supported Trump: they let their political ambitions (in the worst case) or political loyalties (in the best) overcome their revulsion. Consider the former governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, who as I write has just withdrawn his support for Trump, saying, “He is unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit to be President of the United States.” That formulation is so perfectly accurate that I can’t help thinking that Pawlenty has been saying it in his head for quite some time now but has only today been driven to say it out loud.
I have little respect for politicians who ever, at any point, endorsed Trump, and none whatsoever for those who have not denounced him by this stage of the game, but I understand why they might have careerist reasons for doing what they do. We will set them aside, reflecting that verily, they have their reward — or their punishment, as the case may be.
What concerns me far more deeply is the ordinary, everyday Christian — the person who claims to be an evangelical Christian — who is not revolted by Trump, who lacks the requisite “wisdom of repugnance.” I think, for instance, of the people who have compared Trump to King David, presumably because both are guilty of sexual sin. But those who make this comparison have failed to recognize the difference between one who says “For I know my transgressions, / And my sin is ever before me” and one who says that he doesn't “bring God into that picture” when he does something wrong and follows up by saying “I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad.” And if you don't understand that distinction — and equally if you understand it but for political reasons pretend not to — there is very little about the Christian message that you truly grasp.
By the way, I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton here because there is so little evangelical support for Hillary Clinton. She also offers much for us to be appalled by.
And I’m not even making the argument that an evangelical Christian should never in any circumstances vote for Trump. (Not today, anyway.) I am simply saying this: the fact that so many American Christians feel no revulsion at the thought of electing Donald Trump — this man so palpably “unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit” — as the leader of this or for that matter any other nation, but rather express great enthusiasm at the prospect, indicates not just a lack of knowledge but also, and more important, a lack of moral training. The immediate responses are missing or wrong.
There are many criteria we might apply to judge whether a given congregation (or for that matter denomination) is genuinely evangelical, here’s one of them: Is it raising up its people in such a way that they feel repugnance when confronted by truly repugnant ideas — like the idea of Donald Trump as leader of a nation?
What does a healthy response to the current controversy look like? We might turn to the editorial page of the Deseret News for an example. After incisively quoting Proverbs 29 (“when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn”) they state quite straightforwardly their response to Trump’s sexual boasting: “What oozes from this audio is evil.”
My fellow evangelicals: listen and heed. Your very future depends on your ability to do so.
historical addendum to the previous post
The word ‘Protestant’ ... originally related to a specific occasion, in 1529, when at the Holy Roman Empire’s Diet (imperial assembly) held in the city of Speyer, the group of princes and cities who supported the programmes of reformation promoted by Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli found themselves in a voting minority: to keep their solidarity, they issued a ‘Protestatio’, affirming the reforming beliefs that they shared. The label ‘Protestant’ thereafter was part of German or imperial politics for decades, and did not have a wider reference than that.... It is therefore problematic to use ‘Protestant’ as a simple description for sympathizers with reform in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the reader will find that often in this book I use a different word, ‘evangelical’. That word has the advantage that it was widely used and recognized at the time, and it also encapsulates what was most important to this collection of activists: the good news of the Gospel, in Latinized Greek, the evangelium.
— Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History
Steal It Back
The always-thoughtful Alastair Roberts asks:
In light of the ignominious behaviour of leading ‘evangelical’ voices in supporting and standing by Donald Trump, I have a question for my American friends who haven’t compromised on this point. At what point should the self-designation ‘evangelical’ be abandoned? At what point do the liabilities of the term outweigh its potential benefits? At what point does the meaning of a term need to be so hedged with qualifications and distinctions that it ceases to be fit for purpose?Roberts concludes that the term should be retired: “We need to shift the weight of our identity and our labours away from the mass movement and back towards the church and the task of forming a healthy and well-defined public.” In one sense, he’s right: evangelicalism has traditionally been a renewal movement within existing denominations or traditions, not something that stands on its own outside those traditions, and I think it works best that way. Evangelicalism at its best sees how the Christian traditions tend to lose their focus and their fire; it strives to bring Christians within whatever tradition to a new intensity of focus, a new fire of faith.
But to say that is to say that the term “evangelical” needs to be re-situated, not that it needs to be abandoned. I find myself remembering that moment in Rattle and Hum when Bono introduces “Helter Skelter” by saying, “Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.” It’s time to steal “evangelical” back.
Who should steal it?
- Those who believe that renewal among Christians is necessary
- Those who believe that such renewal is difficult
- Those who believe that such renewal is costly
- Those who believe that the power to be renewed comes only from the Trinitarian God
- Those who believe that that power of renewal is primarily and always to be sought through what John Wesley called the “the ordinary channels of conveying God’s grace into the souls of men,” as identified in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” In Wesley’s formulation, “First, all who desire the grace of God are to wait for it in the way of prayer.... Secondly, all who desire the grace of God are to wait for it in searching the Scriptures.... Thirdly, all who desire an increase of the grace of God are to wait for it in partaking of the Lord's Supper.”
- Those who can discern the resources within their own denominational traditions to pursue these tasks
- Those who think God is happy with them just as they are
- Those who turn to God for material prosperity in preference to intimacy with God and charity towards their neighbors
- Those whose minds are formed not by “searching the Scriptures” but by television, talk radio, and Twitter
- Put “searching the Scriptures” at the heart of congregational preaching — and singing (which requires, among other things, immediately eliminating all praise songs that are not thoroughly scriptural and restoring the place of hymns that offer a sophisticated interweaving of biblical texts: nothing teaches Christians how the various parts of the Bible interrelate better than the great hymns)
- Rigorously and patiently teach people the various disciplines of public and private prayer (Adoration, Petition, Intercession, Thanksgiving, Lamentation)
- Regularly and reverently celebrate the Lord’s Supper
Don’t abandon “evangelical.” Steal it back.
Douglas Coupland: ‘I’m actually at my happiest when I’m writing on a plane’
Douglas Coupland: ‘I’m actually at my happiest when I’m writing on a plane’
If you told me I had to write the way that Coupland now writes, I’d give it up. You’d never hear another word from me.
Yet the author of The Age of Anxiety and the author of The Gutenberg Galaxy turn out to have more in common than their conflict might suggest. Both in their 60s by the time of this discussion (“Thank God I can remember the world before World War I,” says the poet) and both 1930s converts to Catholicism…— Marshall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Modern Technology & Media (1971) | Open Culture. That would be — what’s the word? — wrong.