Note: These are my thoughts and mine alone. This is also raw, as I’m sure it is for many reading this. I just had to write some words down on it.
“Make America Great Again” was a great slogan when Reagan used it and it’s been a great slogan for the years that the Trump campaign has used it as well. It taps into a primal desire of ours: the desire to be great.
The desire to dominate rather than be dominated.
An inspirational nostalgia that tells us, “We did this before. We can do it again!”
As a brand and rallying cry, it’s effective. We know that from the 71 million people who told us so with their votes.
But there is a significant problem with the slogan. And no, I’m not talking about the obvious problem: that it’s difficult to find a period of comprehensive greatness in American history, especially for the poor and the marginalized (who are the ones who truly matter). I’m talking about the fact that the criteria is wrong, at least for the Christian. Our goal is not ever to be great, but to be good. And while some have called the nation to goodness, the nation has never been good.
In terms of greatness, we’re still, and will continue to be, the biggest economy in the world. We’re the richest. But one of our problems is that we very easily conflate wealth and goodness. It is one of the indications that we do not believe Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:24: that we cannot serve two masters. God and Mammon continue to wage cosmic war over our souls.
But as human beings, we are insistent on making the same mistakes over and over again. And what many have done is repeat the most significant ethical and theological failure of the people of God in the Old Testament besides our Edenic eviction. We find that failure in 1 Samuel 8.
Following the period of the Judges, a period where everyone did what was right in their own eyes, the people of God were desperate. Judges is a brutal book filled with physical and sexual violence and you can understand why the people cried out for deliverance. The problem, however, was that they stopped crying out to God and looking to Him and the guidance that He offered in the Law. Instead they looked around at the nations around them. They chose to sacrifice their intimacy with God, their calling to be an alternative among the nations and many of their freedoms on the altar of monarchy.
Samuel warned them in 1 Samuel 8:11-17. And we have heard similar things.
Your king will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and ot make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and your vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. (1 Samuel 8:11–17)
The people were warned that their king would basically create a military-industrial complex, that he would economically exploit them, that he would take their best and give it to those who were loyal to him, and that he would ultimately seek, not their best, but his own best and those who align with him. He will live by the logic of violence, using it to secure and defend land. Samuel (and the Lord) warned the people of God that the logic of the kingdoms of the world is the logic of selfish domination. And yet, the people cried out again, “Give us a king! Give us a king!” Many in our churches have uttered that same cry and now they have found a politician fully willing to embrace that title and all that comes with it.
How should we interpret these times? Some think that 1 Samuel 8 was the acquiescence of God: basically, a beleaguered God saying, “Fine, if this is what y’all want, here you go.” As though God was just wearily giving in to a persistent people. Hosea frames it differently in Hosea 13:10-11: “Where now is your king, to save you in all your cities? Where are all your rulers- those of whom you said, “Give me a king and princes”? I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath.”
In the Old Testament, the provision of a king was an act of judgment on the people of God. None of the kings were good. None of them.
What about David? Don’t gloss over the rape and the murder.
What about Solomon? Don’t gloss over the idolatry and the exploitation of women.
The results of such a system were the oppression of the poor, both from within and from without, idolatry, war, and ultimately exile. I don’t want any of those things!
My indictment is not of the nation as a whole. I have no jurisdiction there. But for the people of God, particularly those who claim to be a people ruled by God, to desire a king, a strongman who will fight their battles, is for the people of God to sacrifice the most precious thing that God has given us: Himself.
Now I don’t want to seem alarmist and hopeless. I’m neither of those things. But I do want us to be honest about the rhetoric that soon-to-be-president-again Trump has used and continues to use, as well as the rhetoric of the folks he has surrounded himself with. The poor, oppressed and marginalized will likely continue to be trampled. I don’t want it to be the case, but it likely will be. The obscenely wealthy will get more obscenely wealthy. I don’t want it to be the case, but it likely will be. Either candidate winning would have still exposed us to the demonic reign of an exploitative political economy, which neoliberal, racialized and financialized capitalism is. But those wounds will likely be rent open much more quickly now. So this leaves us with one option in the midst of it.
It is the option that the seven Asian churches in the book of Revelation were offered: a vision of Jesus and a call to bear witness. The Church of God aligns itself with the one who is clothed in a long robe with a golden sash around his chest, whose hair is white like wool and snow, whose eyes are like blazing fire, and whose feet are like bronze glowing in a furnace, and whose voice is like rushing water.
The Church of God aligns itself with the one like a son of man, who holds us in His hand and who walks among us.
The Church of God aligns itself with the Lamb, who pursued and enacted justice through suffering, solidarity, and death, and against the Beast, who knows nothing but force and violence.
Where some will utter, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” as they have uttered about many empires in human history, whether Babylonian, Greek, Roman, British, Portuguese, or American, we will cry, “Who is like the Lord?”
The call for the people of God is endurance and faithfulness. It is the call to be relentless in standing alongside those who are trampled, imprisoned, starved and killed by the state. It is the call to bear witness to a Gospel that promises personal, communal and cosmic redemption. It is to resist the domination and exploitation of the empire, to resist the violence of the empire and to resist the vitriolic, propagandistic lies of the empire. The people of God hate (at least) three things, for they are three things that the Lord hates: the trampling of the poor, the killing of the weak, and lies about one another and about the Lord. We can build communities that resist those particular things by the power of the Holy Spirit. Such work has always been necessary. Maybe this will remind people of that fact.
Some are tired and weary right now. Some are approaching despair. Some are overjoyed. All of that is an indication that our communal identities have been bound up in a nation and series of institutions that has never been and will never be comprehensively good. We should (and will!) advocate for it to be better, but we ought never place our hope in it. Empires rise and fall. It’s what they do. The gates of hell can prevail against any human institution.
But they cannot prevail against those who are united to Christ and who walk by the Spirit of God.
So to those who did not get what they wanted on Election Day, do not lose hope. Christ is on the throne and is coming quickly and He is operating now with a people, a people who insist on being witnesses to the way of the Lamb. And to those who did get what they wanted on Election Day, do not rejoice too much. Be ready to struggle when the antichrist, Hydra-like tendencies of domination, exploitation, murder, and lies rear their heads and aim at your communities. Who you vote for for president is a small piece of your political witness, but some of y’all voted for a convicted felon who has publicly spouted vile racist claims, called for revenge on his political enemies, and has surrounded himself with folks who have little interest in building a multiracial democracy. Each of those things is just demonstrably true and our consciences must not be so seared that we believe that we will just be able to sit and let that run its course.
So I’ll end with this: love your neighbors, love your brothers and sisters, and love your enemies. Invest in the material wellbeing of your neighbors, your brothers and sisters, and your enemies, especially those who are in need. That means if you claim to be a Christian and you have neighbors and brothers and sisters who you are afraid of because they are either Marxist or fascist, figure out how to love them. Because if we as disciples are not known by our love, we ought not be known at all. Let’s seek to make America good.
Lord, give us a King to rule us. Oh wait. You already have.
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