“God punishes wicked subjects with wicked rulers.” So said Martin Luther in his Treatise on the Ban, as we blogged about earlier. He can also punish them with good rulers. And there might be differences of opinion among the judged on which is which. But God does judge the nations, including each one of us.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is not a fundamentalist preacher but a sober mainstream conservative pundit. He interpreted the 2016 election between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump as the judgment of God.
In a column for The Week published just before Election Day of that year, Dougherty published a piece entitled This election is God’s judgment on us. “I’m not joking,” he said. “This isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. I’ll give you all the technical and historical knowledge I have. We can discuss history and analyze policy options all day. But if you want my answer for what is actually going on in this election, I suspect we are experiencing God’s wrath.”
It isn’t just that particular election. He sees unsettling parallels between our national and cultural problems and those condemned in the Old Testament:
I look at the headlines, our candidates, our political parties, our civic life, and mostly what occurs to me is that God has given us over to ourselves in this election, and he lets us make fools of ourselves with it. And not just this election. All the signs of God’s judgment of a nation, or a civilization, seem to be on us. In the Biblical accounts of Chronicles, you see the pattern. Faithful kings “seek” after God and ensure that a faithful liturgy is celebrated in Solomon’s Temple. Unfaithful kings make alliances with wicked nations, and cement these alliances with idolatrous worship in “the high places” or even the Temple itself. This lack of faithfulness is generalized, and the priests become wicked and oppressive. The life of God’s people becomes marked by violence, dislocation, and oppression. They lose the blessings of the Lord: good harvests, healthy children. They stop winning wars. They are conquered.
Dougherty sees his own church in the same light:
The Catholic Church, which I belong to, is rotten with wicked priests and mediocre leadership, ruined by pathetic attempts to make an alliance with the spirit of the age it lives in. It debauched its own liturgy to effect this alliance. Our sister churches of the Middle East are being put on the wrack of martyrdom by Sunni extremists, and the Western Church — fat with German money — is obsessed about how it might come to bless adultery. Last week, I read that the pope is seeking to come to some kind of understanding with a murderous regime in China. How pitiful. And then I look closer to home. Many civilizations have disgraced themselves with the murder of their enemies. But my own is one of few so debauched that we kill our own children and call it good.
Our leaders and our cultural and financial elite are also subject to God’s wrath:
Everywhere in the last decade, the leadership class of the Western World has been exposed for its avarice, its greed, its stupid clubbiness, its shallowness. The well-paid executives of our banks crash the economy while defrauding poor and working families. They get bailed out by the government, their bonus checks clear at the end of the year, and their banks’ name are put on our Coliseums. Our leaders fecklessly start wars in the Middle East, and then throw up their hands in surprise when the result is chaos, death, and fury unleashed upon the whole world.
And we ordinary folks fall under the same judgment:
In democracies, citizens are said to be the sovereign of their nations. What have we as citizens done to repair the damage or bring justice to our countries? We do nothing. Turn on cable TV, shout at someone at Twitter. For all the times I’ve satisfied myself with doing only that, I’m sorry.
Whereupon Dougherty becomes profound:
But for those who can accept it, God’s judgment is a good thing. The same fire that consumes the chaff is used to purify gold and silver.
Dougherty’s fellow National Review writer Jeffrey Blehar brought back that 2016 piece and applies it to the 2024 election. He concurs: “This election has taught me to fear God.”
Both Dougherty and Blehar were writing before they knew the outcome of the election. They didn’t approve of either candidate. They saw God’s judgment manifesting itself in whichever candidate won.
To be sure, the United States of America is not to be confused with ancient Israel, to whom the Biblical prophecies were chiefly addressed (though the prophets also did pronounce God’s judgment on other nations as well [e.g., Isaiah 13-23 and Jeremiah 46-51]). And God’s judgment is rather more severe than losing an election or misgovernment.
To his credit, Dougherty moves from his frustration over the election to a broader consideration of God’s judgment. I appreciate his comment that “God has given us over to ourselves.” He is alluding to Romans 1, in which St. Paul describes perhaps God’s most terrifying judgment: He lets us do what we want. Whereupon we have to suffer the consequences for it.
21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Here is what the Bible teaches about homosexuality, not just that it is a bad behavior that should not be done, but that it is a punishment for idolatry. It is “contrary to nature” and, interestingly, an “error.”
Than again, “all manner of unrighteousness,” which St. Paul details, are also described as God giving us up “to a debased mind.” This account culminates with an offense that is made to sound even worse than actually doing all of these sins: Approving of them! Saying that these sins are not sins at all, indeed, that they are good.
This passage is not intended to set apart just a few transgressors for God’s judgement. Rather, as the very next verse makes clear, God’s judgment falls upon all of us, including those of us who self-righteously judge the transgressors: “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things” (Romans 2:1).
The reason that approval of sin–such as the approvals of sexual and homosexual sins meted out by progressive churches–is especially heinous is that it teaches those caught up in these sins have no need of repentance, that they are actually righteous and thus can be self-righteous, imagining that they do not need Christ’s forgiveness and so shutting themselves off from the good news that is St. Paul’s central message:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17).
Illustration: Day of Judgment by Lucas Cranach the Elder – The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26458626
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