the body of christ, the body politic, and the upcoming election

No political party, and no political leader, deserves our allegiance.

No political party has the scripted solution to our ills. No political leader has the power to restore us to any genuine unity. The constitution, even, is merely a human-made textual artifact; it is not the source of revealed truth, nor a guarantor of the survival of the nation. The nation is itself an artificial unity, not a family unity, nor a unity of shared labor or friendship or belief. Our devotion to our country ceases to have moral meaning, when it is deflected from care of the living things that dwell upon this soil, and focused instead on the promotion of national ends or ideologies.

From the standpoint of a devotion to life, neither of our main political options is satisfactory. And even if one of our preferable third party candidates were to achieve prominence, he or she, also, would not be able to bring magic to the body politic, eradicating all evils and reigning with justice over the land.

The dream of a just ruler exists in the realm of myth and archetype; it is at the heart of the legend of King Arthur, and the driving force of many fairy tales. The bereft people long for the return of their king. Penelope weaves, waiting for Odysseos.

But these are only dreams. They are good dreams to have, because they should leave us perpetually discontented with misrule and violence, looking askance at the rulers we actually have, eyeing their frailties with a laugh. Political caricature is the flip side to the dream of the just ruler: none of the actual leaders we have, even the best, can measure up to our longing.

The Old Testament stories of the Israelites and their kings serve to remind us of this: they clamored for a king, so as to be just like everyone else, and ended up with Saul, who went mad. Their great hero king, David, is a wonderful epic character – but, epic is closely connected with tragedy, and David is a tragic hero as well as an epic one, because as a man of war he is left polluted, too unclean to build the temple of the Lord he loves. David does not save the Israelites.

The rest of the epic story of the struggles of Israel is part of a movement towards the only one who does save, and he is no king on earth.

But at least David did have that epic significance. Those who compare Trump to King David appear not to have read their Bibles closely, forgetting that, first of all, David rose from being a mere shepherd to attain his kingdom; that he was a masterful leader and a magnanimous forgiver of his enemies, a great poet with great passions but also a gift for remorse and penitence. And David’s sexual proclivities were normal and accepted for a male military leader at the time: kill and have sex, those are two things a real man does. When Nathan the prophet accused him, how abashed he must have been, to be held to a higher standard than other kings, who could kill and take and rape as they liked. But Trump’s defenders are not holding their idol to a higher standard, but to a lower one, accepting boasts of sexual predation and accusations of child rape because “no one is perfect” and “we’re not electing a saint” – in an era when rape is illegal, and consent is finally being recognized as a necessary component for any morally acceptable sexual act. And unlike David, Trump has not repented, nor done penitence. As Old Testament characters go, he’s more like Solomon’s son Rehoboam, who lost half his father’s kingdom due to blustering cruelty and incompetence. A Trump regime would be an unmitigated disaster, merely from a conservative natural law standpoint.

Supporters of Clinton avoid making far-fetched anachronistic comparisons, and for this relief much thanks. But in the Clinton camp we find a danger that, while not so immediately materially disastrous as Trump-worship, is perhaps more insidious, because it is less blindingly stupid: the commitment to historical progress, which means a presumption that the new is always the better, that the old ways must pass, and that if we simply come together with a shared humanitarian vision the golden dream of secular utopia can at last come true. While I believe in progress in the sense that we should try always to make things better, faith in historical progress means accepting violence as an acceptable means of going forward. The spirit of progress has brought us industry, technology, and a misappropriation of science – it has justified any number of demolitions of the earth. This is why neoliberalism is allied with war. This is why it views abortion as an acceptable solution to a complicated problem. Liberal allegiance to free-market capitalism gives subtle preference to the powerful over the disenfranchised, which is less glaring than the overt supremacy of the Trump contingent, and opens up alternatives to nativism, but elitist prejudice is still at its core.

Oh, but what if we could get Bernie Sanders and the American Solidarity Party into just the right mashup, and add Jill Stein’s cool silver fox look, and get rid of all the warmongering along the edges? What if we at the New Prolife Movement could craft the perfect political platform? I’m pretty sure we could concoct a good one. And ignoring politics, because politics is nasty (as many seem to consider a superior option), is simply not responsible: because laws and policies directly and indirectly affect our families, our workplace, our access to medical care, the earth around us. We are political animals, after all.

But.

But, politics isn’t going to solve our problems.

We Catholics must not forget that our unity resides not with the body politic, but with the body of Christ. On the Feast of All Saints, even as we prepare to make carefully reasoned decisions in favor of presumed outcomes, we need to remember that these decisions do not qualify or disqualify us for divine grace, for membership in the church struggling. There is no Catholic vote. There is no Christian ruler. There is not, and never was, and never can be, a Christian ruler. Our myths may awaken in us a dream of justice, but our histories, epics, and tragedies remind us that no human leader will suffice. Compared with our dreams, they are all caricatures, bobble-heads in a car window. They, too, are beloved by God, and called to the communion of saints, but this is not a political calling.

The Feast of All Saints is a celebration of a unity in the midst of mad diversity, an assortment of rebels, mystics, poets, grouches, lovers, fighters, philosopher, and fools, all of whom felt the tug upon the thread, the twitch that leads to the holy ladder. Each saint became holy according to his or her unique calling. As Newman wrote, “the saints are admirable but not imitable.” We are not called to conformity, to a unity of dull repetition, but a unity as colorful and detailed, intricate and vivid, as a rose window in a Medieval church. If you could get all the saints together, alive on earth right now, there’s no way they would agree on American politics, or Western politics, or global politics. Some would take one side, some another. Others would be appalled by the whole thing. Others would probably be confused.

Let’s try to remember that amidst our political disputations, our frenzied ideological disagreements: beyond this, we stake our claim in a unity that is not of any enforced political structure, but in the enduring mercy of God.