Spiritual Coffee
Things are getting stranger in the current meltdown of Trumpianity: this report on the “Jericho March” on the Mall yesterday (12/13/2020) is from a very conservative and orthodox Christian, Rod Dreher, editor of the American Conservative. Sadly I guess for many of the attendees, Dreher would still be considered in league with Satan and the Deep State. He described the event’s purpose: “It was a Trump rally by Christians (and sympathetic Jews) designed to mimic the Biblical story of the Israelite army ritually marching around the walled city of Jericho, blowing the shofar, and watching as God demolished the city’s defenses, so the Israelites could conquer. The idea of the Jericho March is that the true believers would circle the corrupt institutions of the US Government, the ones promulgating the hoax that Trump lost the election.”
But Dreher is deeply troubled by the rally’s insistence on a form of Christian activism and involvement with the state that seems to him, well, UnChristian: ” I wanted to see how far the Christian Right — for the record, I am an Orthodox Christian, and a conservative — would go to conflate Trump politics and religion. Pretty far, as it turns out. Right over the cliff. You had to see it to believe it.”
But reading this account, I still find some of it hard to believe. In particular, Dreher nails it with his keen analysis of the use of “God told me personally” rhetoric in the American church. In my own experience, this is quite rampant at the moment. Eric Metaxas, in an interview previously deconstructed by Dreher, seems to rest his entire case on what God has personally told him–or else, told someone with a verifiable track record of hearing God speak. It is all vague, in that interview.
Metaxas has now gone viral in claiming that true believers must fight this stolen election until “the last drop of blood” has flowed. Right on cue, violence erupted at the Jericho March, with Metaxas presiding as the MC. I suppose it’s sensible for Dreher to ask: “What kind of person calls for spilling blood in defense of a political cause for which he does not care if any factual justification exists? What kind of person compares doubters to Nazi collaborators? A religious zealot, that’s the kind. The only way one can justify that hysterical stance is if one conflates religion with politics, and politics with religion.”
I think for myself, this conflation, which has deep historical roots, is what is most problematic about all this, theoretically speaking. But there’s also money at stake in all this. Over and over, the “MyPillow” guy Mike Lindell made appearances too, or was called out by speakers: reminding us that even the Jericho March has a capitalist angle. Such mega-events are also good business: widespread reporting has revealed the many people who are cashing in on the mythos of “Stop the Steal,” including the President and his PAC, to the tune of over $207 million. Thus do the “theoretical” problems of conflating church and state fade away, in the midst of a cynical commodification of hyper-anger and the apocalypse.
It get’s worse, and nuttier: but I will let you discover some of that nuttiness by reading the entire account. Suffice it to say, that the disgraced but pardonned Gen. Michael Flynn, who recently called for suspending the US Constitution and martial law, also appear. Dreher notes: “Get this: at the height of Flynn speech, Trump appeared overhead in Marine One. Like an apparition! After Trump choppered off to the Army-Navy game, Flynn resumed his address.” (And that’s not even the craziest moment, either; you’ll have to read the rest to find out! But I’ll give you a hint: it involves the histrionics of Alex Jones…or perhaps several other moments. Tough to choose…)
It is precisely this mishmash of what some would call a Star Wars theology, including latent Fascism, that is the main narrative of such events as the Jericho March. Us vs. Them, Good crusading against evil. Regarding fascism, Dreher notes: “My point is simply that political rhetoric that turns a political movement into a personality cult, and unites the masses in this psychological way with the leader, are never headed to a good place.”
All of which may at first seem unrelated to the topic of Advent. A time of hope and reflection, of the coming of grace and peace. Above all, a time of waiting on the Lord. If you yearn for union with some greater personality, Advent can certainly provide one.
In the present context, I’m wondering: how much is all this turmoil, doubt, and seething anger affecting our experience of Advent in 2020? Amid all the Covid issues, and on top of the rancorous general election, now we are faced with some of the most anger-ridden protests by confessing Christians for a very long time in America. How is it affecting our nation? our culture? and our perceptions of religion and the key figure of Jesus, the Messiah whose arrival is supposedly the “reason for the season”?
Because this year, our holidays are being celebrated with all the hysteria of both the election and the Covid pandemic all baked into it.
As Joseph Kenny writes in the St. Louis Review: “Patient waiting is the key to a good Advent. But it is hard to do in a culture that tells us to rush ahead. “Blessed are all who wait for the Lord,” the prophet Isaiah says. Isaiah is looking forward to the day of the Lord and teaching us to wait for it with expectation. The word “Advent” comes from the Latin word for “to come.” St. John Henry Newman reminded us in a homily for the Advent season: “Advent is a time of waiting, it is a time of joy because the coming of Christ is not only a gift of grace and salvation but it is also a time of commitment because it motivates us to live the present as a time of responsibility and vigilance. This ‘vigilance’ means the necessity, the urgency of an industrious, living ‘wait.’”
We are waiting upon the Lord and His coming, in traditional Advent season. But as we look out upon our debased political culture, it seems that what is being modeled is far from waiting, expectation, or joy. I know exactly how the marchers at the Jericho March would twist the words of Newman to mean something that they don’t.
Believers in Advent are thus invited to choose: either the patient waiting for the Lord of all Hope; or the aggressive, hero-worshipping weirdness of this pseudo-rally for a cause that is utterly lost, purportedly aimed at a lame call to make America into something it used to be. If the SADNESS I am feeling about this Jericho Rally can help us at all, maybe it can shake some of us awake. Maybe it can scare some of the followers of Jesus into discerning a truer direction forward. And maybe it can even light the way to a path, a direction for parts of the American church to take.
But the SADNESS remains. Just being honest here: what is happening? Come, Light of the World!
Photo by Levi Midnight on Unsplash
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