I have found the past week hard going. As soon as I think about it there are several obvious reasons, to do with life circumstances, family, work, and my own inner climate. On reflection it's the last of these that troubles me most. Weather is an interesting metaphor for mood. Weather is changeable, varied, and something we either hide from or revel in. Weather can seem hostile or comforting, and as Jesus said about the night breeze, you know not where it comes from or where it's going. Not even our satellite and computer enhanced meteorology guarantees predictability.
This week my inner climate has been seriously affected by trying to think, pray and understand what is happening in our world, in our country, and particularly to the community of nations that make up the North Atlantic continents, east and west. Much of my musing and fretting, thinking and praying, emotion and thoughfulness, found a focus on what has been happening in the US with the almighty tug of war over the nomination to the Supreme Court.
I have a wide circle of friends, diverse, informed, responsible and on both sides of the main political divides, both in the UK and the US. I also have friends in the EU who are bemused, hurt and anxious about our future post Brexit – but that's another story. For now I have been trying to think and pray my way through the unfolding drama that is American partisan politics at its most nakedly hostile. How has it come to the point where a woman's testimony to what happened to her as a teenager becomes world news? How does her account and memory of sexual abuse as a teenage girl take on a political significance of such magnitude that her pain becomes secondary and her allegations become weaponised by both parties?
There are watershed moments in the decline of a culture. In the immediacy of live streaming, social media and a digital culture fixated on screens we have become used to the jaw dropping spectacle. We understand the clickbait habit that is all but irresistible. But the images and sounds from the Senate Committee hearing last week, live streaming those two testimonies, have a significance far deeper and reverberations far more perilous than the latest celebrity scandal, political crisis or Trump tweet. There are moments when we sense a loss of control, the extinguishing of a standard, the erasure of a mutually agreed line of decency, and with it we come to terms with a further diminishment of our moral capital. At such times we depend on moral leadership, we listen for voices of reason, we wait for that intervention which rehumanises a process rapidly becoming negligent of the categorical imperative that seeks the good, and the true and the just. It never came.
Cultural integrity plummeted further when the President of the United States engaged in a public mockery of the woman who had testified before the Senate Committee. Not so much a watershed, more a cataract of indecency unparalleled in modern Western political rhetoric and public discourse. The man elected to protect each United States citizen, and in whom is invested the authority of law and who embodies a Constitution which is the basis of justice, mocked, humiliated, diminished and bullied someone who the day before testified to the Senate Committee. She was entitled to his protection; instead she was baited, ridiculed and denied the basic right of being treated with respect.
When I speak of my inner climate, and how hard the past week has been, it's come about by seeing the gathering of dark clouds of abusive power, moral disregard, mockery of judicial process, orchestrated hatred, and once again a powerful man enjoys humiliating a woman in public. These are the rumbles on the horizon, the first flashes of a storm that unleashes forces beyond the usual controls of moral constraint, public decency and secure institutions which hold power accountable. Something unprecedented happened when Trump became cheerleader against a woman who claims she is a victim of sexual abuse.
Part of my anguish, and that word I seldom use self-referentially, is that amongst those cheering this President are those who claim to know and follow Jesus. I don't understand this. I've tried, but I'm stuck. So here's another voice worth introducing to the conversation.
I'm currently immersed in Paul's letter to the Galatians. Now Paul also knows a thing or two about rhetoric, argument and persuasion. And he knows how to fight. But to Christians who support Trump and who will not call him out on that misogynistic rant the other night, Paul has some words that are worth their long pondering: "Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit…for the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature." (Gal 5.25,17
A Christian's loyalty is to Christ as Lord, first, foremost and finally. Whatever our political affiliation, however committed to a party and its policies and personalities, a Christian will always count such commitments as secondary, provisional and temporary. Seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness is a Christian's primary and permanent commitment. For Christians Jesus is Lord, and that Lordship is total. "I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Gal 2,20)
So here is my question: How can a Christian, living by the command to walk in the Spirit who is the Spirit of holiness, and claiming "Christ crucified lives in me", hear the public mockery and humiliation of a woman who testified under oath to being sexually abused, and approve, or worse still, be silent? Because whatever else the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about, it is about not being conformed to this world; it's about love trumping hate; it's about mercy if we ever expect to be shown mercy; it's about living in ways so reminiscent of Jesus that our loyalties are unmistakable.
The support of evangelicals for Donald Trump is a complex phenomenon, and one I've written about before. But even if there are defensible grounds for evangelicals supporting Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils, an argument many evangelicals offer, that can never justify approval or silence about the behaviour of Donald Trump this past week. The public mockery of a woman by the American President, at a Republican rally, a woman who saw it as her civic duty to tell her story of alleged sexual abuse, and to do so under oath, and under the sworn protection of the Senate Committee, was an abuse of power, and a watershed moment in the decline of decency at the heart of American government. But for Evangelical Christians who voted for him, it was more than that. It's a moment of moral decision about who is Lord in a Christian's life. I can think of no circumstance whatever, in which Jesus would urge his followers to ignore, or be silent about such baying ugliness.
And just to be clear. Both parties weaponised this woman's pain, and the accused man's pain. Both [parties contributed to that watershed moment of cultural disgrace, and added impetus to that rapid downhill race to the bottom. The problem with going fast down the Gadarene slopes, is that it is so hard to stop, and even harder to push back up to where we started from.
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