You v. me v. everyone else

In law school, one of my first reading assignments in constitutional law was Federalist No. 10, in which James Madison tackled the problem of factions in a republic. [Among other things, Madison believed that a large republic was preferable to a small republic because that would increase the chances of electing competent representatives. To put it mildly, Americans are putting that belief to the test in 2016.]

But back to factions: Our society is full of them. We’re divided into factions based on race, religion, political party, views on hot-button issues of the day, nationality, ethnicity, or whether you should put salt on watermelon (no, you shouldn’t). You name it, and we can find a reason to divide over it. Or as Bob Wiley told Dr. Leo Marvin, “There are two types of people in this world: those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.”

From what I can tell, a lot of factions arise from one group’s fear of those who are not like them – those who are “other”. The “others” then react negatively toward the first group, and things spiral from there. Fear is usually not a productive emotion, as any Jedi Master can tell you:

 Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

– Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Factions go way, way back in history. In Old Testament times, the Jewish worldview was largely “Us against everyone else” because God chose the Jews to be his people – no one else followed God. Even after Jesus Christ’s arrival and the subsequent spread of Christianity, Paul had to deal with factions that immediately sprang up in some of the new churches he was ministering to.

Back to the present: After yet another round of violence over the past few weeks seemed to divide many of us into pro- and anti-police camps, the New York Times ran this fascinating story on something called “intergroup threat theory”:

When members of one social group feel it is under threat from another group, researchers say, this can heighten cognitive biases that distort how that group is perceived. That risks deepening social divisions and even, in extreme cases, escalating isolated episodes into conflict between groups.

So when we hear about something bad happening to someone in “our” group, and it was done by someone in an “other” group, our biases – our blind spots, our prejudices – kick into overdrive. As if we weren’t flawed enough already as humans, our identification with a group can throw us completely off-kilter when fear creeps into the picture. Other groups respond in kind (usually), and things just get worse from there.

But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression … the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

– Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

How do we counter our instinct to embrace anger, fear, aggression? How do we avoid the dark side when there is so much darkness all around us?

This may come as a shock, but I don’t have much faith in our elected leaders to help us on this point (sorry, President Madison). As the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson pointed out in a column last week, Robert Kennedy is not walking through that door:

In fact, there are people on the left and right who benefit from encouraging just enough division, just enough fear, to motivate their supporters, without tipping them over into violence. They are playing with fire in a parched and withered land.

Our leaders play with fire, but unfortunately we’re the ones who get burned. It’s up to each of us to refuse to get sucked into the trap of viewing everything around us through a faction-based lens. We need to resist generalizations, knee-jerk reactions, and the “oh yeah?” responses. We need to remember that we’re Americans, “with a capital A” as John Winger said. David Brooks made the same point more eloquently in a column last week when he discussed other factions in our society, including the nationalists/particularists against the globalists/universalists. I found his concluding paragraphs very compelling:

The fact is that both mind-sets have their virtues. The particularists emphasize the intimate love and loyalty that is the stuff of real community. The universalists are moved by injustices anywhere, and morally repulsed by inaction and indifference in the face of that suffering.

The tragedy of this election is that America already solved this problem. Unlike France and China, we were founded as a universalist nation. You can be fiercely patriotic and relatively open because America was founded to take in people from around the globe and unite them around something new.

Unfortunately, the forces of multiculturalism destroyed that commitment to cultural union. That has led to Trump, who has upended universalistic American nationalism and replaced it with European blood and soil nationalism in a stars and stripes disguise.

The way out of this debate is not to go nationalist or globalist. It’s to return to American nationalism — espoused by people like Walt Whitman — which combines an inclusive definition of who is Our Own with a fervent commitment to assimilate and Take Care of them.

It’s up to us to do this. Jesus said, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44) Pray for those who harm us and upset us. Pray for those we view as “other”. And yes, pray for our leaders to somehow help us through all of this.

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Postscript: This weekend, my wife and I took a drive through the central Virginia countryside, and I put on some music from my iPod. (Yes, I still have an iPod.) One of the songs was “We May Be The Ones” by Paul Westerberg. (Yes, I like Paul Westerberg. And the Replacements. So there.) The chorus goes, “We may well be the ones/to set this world on its ear/We may well be the ones/If nothing, why are we here?” Listening to that got me thinking – Jesus definitely set the world on its ear in his time here. Two thousand years later, if we love each other, and pray for each other, and pray to find ways to get past the factions that divide us, I think we could very well set the world on its ear one more time.

Stop this man, please

I am not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat, either. I’m more libertarian than anything in my political views, but I have mostly given up on the official Libertarian Party because a lot of its stances are too inflexible and simply aren’t pragmatic or realistic.

Anyway, on Tuesday I’m going to vote in the Republican presidential primary here in Virginia (thank you, open primary system). Normally I don’t vote in primaries, but I’m going to vote on Tuesday for one reason, and for one reason only: to vote for someone other than Donald Trump.

I don’t have any particularly strong affinity for any of the other Republican candidates, but frankly, I’m voting against Trump because I feel like it’s my obligation as a Christian.

Wait a second, you may say. Didn’t the president of Liberty University – “the world’s largest Christian university” – endorse Trump a few weeks ago? Yes, that is an unfortunate fact. I don’t know what kind of internal compromise Jerry Falwell Jr. reached with his conscience to take such an action, but the cynic in me can’t help but think it has to do with power, money, or both.

It wouldn’t be the first time a high-profile Christian compromised himself. Last week, a college history professor on the Washington Post website offered this historical comparison about another time that Christians signed up with a bully: when Pope Leo III cut a deal with Charles the Great (aka Charlemagne) in A.D. 800:

It didn’t matter that Charles had multiple wives and mistresses. Nor did it trouble the pontiff that he had a reputation for ruthlessness, earned during his wars against the Saxons, a Germanic tribe of pagan worshipers. In 782, in the Massacre of Verden, Charles ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners, apparently for their refusal to convert to Christianity.

Here was a political leader who knew how to get things done, who could get tough with the church’s enemies, who could protect the empire from barbarian invaders. With the church on his side, he would restore Rome to its ancient glory. Sound familiar?

So when Republican evangelicals in South Carolina overwhelmingly voted for Trump last week, exactly what were they doing?

Their own fears are causing them to abandon their principles. In America’s historic struggle to protect religious liberty, evangelicals fought hardest for a Bill of Rights that guaranteed equal justice — not only for themselves, but for unpopular religious minorities. They have been the loudest critics of discrimination based on religious identity.

Yet three-quarters of GOP primary voters in South Carolina — dominated by evangelicals — support Trump’s plan to block all Muslims from entering the United States.[1]

…

Many evangelical voters seem ready to support Trump’s militancy, whatever form it takes, with hands upraised to heaven. They say they’re willing to endure their candidate’s “idiosyncrasies” because of his “authenticity.”

Never mind that he is an authentic egotist, or that he is unabashedly crude, proudly manipulative and emotionally undisciplined. What has happened to the evangelical insistence that presidents be people of prayer, humility and integrity?

In case you need some background on exactly what makes Trump such an awful candidate for any government position of consequence, here is some background reading. Take your time and read each article carefully – I’ll wait.

1. Blogger Matt Walsh takes on Trump supporters by trying to speak to them Trump-style, and he does a comprehensive job of summarizing Trump’s inadequacies, to use a polite term. I can’t even pick out just one quote because there is so much good stuff in there.
2. Jeremy Nix at the Huffington Post writes an open letter to his friends who are Trump supporters. Again, just read it. If you favor Trump, please look within yourself and try to come to terms with exactly what it is inside you that is driving you to this position.
3. This Rolling Stone article takes a look at Trump’s success to this point and the reasons behind it. To be fair, it does offer this summary of the other Republican candidates: “They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.”

(Welcome back.) As the Rolling Stone article points out, Trump makes some points that other candidates won’t (e.g., see his takes on insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies) simply because he isn’t in anyone’s pocket. OK, I’ll grant you that his wealth is something that distinguishes him from the “establishment” candidates, but is that really enough? I don’t think so.

The last straw for me came in the form of this post from Max Lucado, because it really boils down everything in the above articles to one simple point: Donald Trump is not a decent person. To pile on to all the anecdotes described in the articles, he’s the kind of person who would strong-arm the government into seizing an elderly widow’s home so he could build a limousine parking lot (true story). He claims to be a Christian but also claims that he has never asked God for forgiveness. That doesn’t add up. Lucado has almost always stayed out of politics during his long, successful career as a pastor, and he has shared his reasons for speaking out now. At the end of the interview, he admits we’re not electing a pastor-in-chief of the U.S. but emphasizes why decency matters:

I appreciate the idea that we don’t want to elect a pastor-in-chief. I’m a pastor and I understand that it’s my assignment to spiritually oversee the affairs of a circle of people. That’s not the job of a president. They are much more what I would see as a Daniel or Nehemiah. They are much more concerned about the affairs of our country.

But boy, we have to call upon them. We pay a high price as a people if we don’t hold our leaders to a high standard. [emphasis added]

I understand if you think that there are things about other candidates that aren’t too decent, either. I understand if you’re angry about something, or a lot of somethings, and you just want to vote for someone who will make “them” (whoever “they” may be in your mind) pay for whatever it is they’ve done. But Lucado is right – this is the President of the United States we’re picking, not the next head of an organized crime family whose mission is to “set things right”.

Honestly, picking on Donald Trump has long struck me as low-hanging fruit. In 2015, I dismissed him as a cartoonish sideshow and thought/hoped that he would fall by the wayside once the voting started. I was certainly wrong about that. I completely underestimated how he has tapped into feelings of frustration, anger, and fear and how he has given cover to those voters whose own prejudices are usually not fit for public consumption (and now we have Trump refusing to take a stance on the Ku Klux Klan).

It’s not too late, though. It’s not too late to pray for our country, and it’s not too late to cast a vote against this man who falls far short of our standards in so many ways.

I’m your humble blogger, and I approve this message.

[1] I guess those folks didn’t read this December 2015 piece by Russell Moore, a leader in the Southern Baptist community, on why Christians should condemn Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric. [footnote not in original]