How I can relate to Donald Trump

As I’ve been journeying through my recovery process over the past several months, one of my most important tasks has been to untangle the deep resentments that are beneath my character defects. While I do think that God has given me spiritual insights I’m legitimately supposed to share with the world, it’s also true that I desperately want to be an important author who reshapes American Christianity. This quest to be important is the biggest reason I’m a selfish asshole. It’s the thing I most loathe about myself. I don’t understand why I can’t just enjoy my life, my family, and my friends without leveraging everything into a strategy for building power and influence. My mind seems to automatically go there in every social situation. Some writers seem to be able to power-network and self-prostitute without losing their souls, but I can’t. It’s so exhausting and distasteful to me.

When I look into my depths, the social rejection I experienced as a child and teenager appears to be the primary engine of my ambition. The need to be important seems like it developed as a compensation for not fitting into the cliques that I saw all around me in middle school and high school. Every time I’m rejected, it becomes part of the rage that fuels the fire. I suppose there are aspects of this process that are not unhealthy. Michael Jordan talks about how his ambition for basketball was kindled when he got cut by his ninth grade team. But my book release process this year has unveiled so many of my demons and brought all my resentment and self-pity to the surface.

I really want to break into the progressive Christian writer aristocracy. I want to have the personal cell phones of everyone in the conference-hopping jet set. I want to see my face in the gallery of faces on conference publicity websites. I want to be in the circle of friends with huge platforms who write gushing hyperbolic blurbs on the backs of each others’ books. And every time there’s a no or a non-response, it’s like when I tried to sit at the popular kids’ table in middle school and they made me leave. It doesn’t matter how many people write me emails to say their lives have been changed by my work. It doesn’t matter how kind and helpful other Christian writers are. If the one Christian celebrity whom I’m pursuing won’t respond to my emails, that’s all I can think about. And every time I come across a blogger whose platform has grown more explosively in five months than mine has in five years, I burn with white hot envy.

It’s so ridiculous to care so much about things I know to be so immature. I don’t want to want the things that I want. I did the Enneagram test recently and discovered that I’m a 4 with a 3 wing, which means basically that I’m an overachieving, hypersensitive diva, a.k.a. a hot mess. I’m hoping to do some research into how Enneagram 4’s can heal from our toxicity. One thing I suspect is that I will never “arrive” until I completely don’t care about “arriving” anymore. Because the goal posts are always shifting. So one major goal in my recovery journey is to stop caring about “arriving” so I can simply live.

In a recent conversation with my friend Brandan Robertson, he said that what he most admired about his mentors (and mega-famous progressive Christians) Rob Bell and Richard Rohr is that they “live with amazement.” In other words, they aren’t tied up in knots worrying about how many people are going to buy their books and follow them on Twitter. Of course it seems easy to be that way after you’ve “arrived,” but maybe they really were always that way and it was part of what made them compelling. I’ve been following Rob Bell for a long time. I’ve never seen anybody so curious and fascinated with life. It often irritates the hell out of me. I wonder how differently I would feel if  I weren’t so jealous.

To bring things back to Trump, I realize I’m not an expert psychologist, but he seems to be channeling his personal resentment and self-pity to connect with his followers. Trump has tapped into a very potent, toxic set of feelings to galvanize a movement that is dangerously immunized against all criticism. Because every time the media make Trump and his supporters look stupid, they’re being elitist snobs, regardless of the facts. He gets to be the martyr every time somebody fact-checks him or calls him out for anything.

I don’t know about you, but I probably have more Trump in me than Jesus right now. My resentment and self-pity have made me a toxic mess. They are such seductive feelings to wallow in. I can’t help but wonder to what degree our nation would be healed if all the white men were simply delivered from our resentment and self-pity. I know that’s what my salvation looks like.

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