Occupy the high ground
by Tom Sullivan
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders last week would not respond. Headline news, to be sure.
Former president Jimmy Carter told CBS last week, “I think most people want a president who they trust to tell the truth always and who has some basic moral values, including loyalty to his own wife.”
Asked if the White House had any response to Carter’s basic moral values statement, Sanders said Americans came out to support Donald Trump believe in his agenda. He’s kept a number of his campaign promises, she continued.
Trump’s agenda is Trump. His implicit promise was to put immigrants and minorities back into their places.
From Stormy Daniels to conspiracy with Russia to “emoluments” padding his family’s accounts, Trump has demonstrated infidelity to his wife, his country, and the rule of law. His supporters appear as unshakable in their allegiance as his party.
“Surely this is a porn star too far for white evangelical Christians, right?” asks Amy Sullivan in the New York Times. It is a rhetorical question.
Conservatives have long publicly beat their breasts about their patriotism and their moral and family values. We are supposed to treat their earnestness as proof of their devotion, and yet they proved just the opposite. As Bill McKibben once wrote:
The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.
The Christian right and now, by extension, the Republican Party have long claimed exclusive commercial and political rights to morality in this country and sold it all for a mess of Trump pottage. For a shot at preserving white, male Christians’ place at the apex of the social hierarchy for a few years longer, they have abandoned the moral high ground they once jealously defended. The left should occupy it, if for no other reason than to deny it to them when they decide they want it back.
Their faith in American principles has long been a mile wide and an inch deep. Trump has no depth at all. Yet they support him. Amy Sullivan suggests why:
But the ultimate answer may be the simplest. Mr. Trump owes his continued high standing among white evangelicals to the fact that nearly 40 years after the Moral Majority’s founding, the partisan meld is complete. Decades of fearmongering about Democrats and religious liberals have worked. Eighty percent of white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as a Democrat.
The “scarlet abortion ‘A’ that Democrats wear for their support of abortion rights,” Sullivan explains is one stumbling block, but a contrivance of the Christian right as well:
But no one is pro-abortion. The crucial difference is not between those who view abortion as good and those who don’t, but between vastly different approaches to reducing abortion rates. One party maintains the fiction that overturning Roe v. Wade will end abortion; the other promotes policies that have actually reduced the abortion rate to its lowest level since 1972. (That more Americans don’t know about this accomplishment has much to do with the fact that national Democrats don’t recognize “pro-abortion” as a slur and have steadfastly refused to take credit for plummeting abortion rates.)
For all the years of legislative, executive and judicial control Republicans have enjoyed, they have yet to support a serious effort to overturn Roe v. Wade. They only dangle the carrot in front of conservative Christians to keep them properly motivated. In the age of Trump anything is possible, of course, but with massive women’s marches and the NRA unnerved by high-school gun control activists, how motivated are they to reach for it and accelerate bringing the roof down upon their heads?
“The so-called white evangelicals surrounding Trump say so much about what God says so little and so little about what God says so much,” Rev. William Barber says so often. Barber has restarted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Barber spoke last week at Yale:
He said the country has lost that compass because of systemic racism, systemic poverty, and the “heresy and malpractice of the theology of Christian nationalism and the way in which it has hijacked the moral framework of the nation.”
And he called on the crowd to focus not just on physical violence, but “policy violence.”
[…]
Barber has become the face of a movement that is pushing forward on an agenda that says the moral concern of people of faith is not abortion, the suppression of LGBTQ people, prayer in school, gun rights and states rights. It says the true moral compass focuses on lifting people out of poverty, ending oppression and disenfranchisement, and putting a stop to the devastation of the environment and militarization for the sake of a war economy.
The prime issue voters are focused on this year is health care. People who would oppress strangers in their land, deny food to and health care to the needy, and arm teachers to the teeth are not the ones who will bring healing to the nation.
The left should occupy the moral high ground abandoned by the right. They should do it without malice, but with kindness.
Still, on this Easter Sunday, I am reminded of Proverbs 25:21-23:
21 If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink:
22 For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall reward thee.
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