Donald Trump, Politics, and the Scandal of Forgiveness

July was quite a month of scandals. Do you remember when Melania Trump was accused of plagiarizing? Or when the crowd at the RNC turned into a mob by chanting “Lock her up!?” And we’re wondering if Donald is in bed with Vladimir. Now as July turns into August, Hillary just can’t get away from her scandalous emails. It’s a train wreck. And I can’t stop looking.

Jeremiah Alberg defines scandal in his masterful book Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses as, “those events, scenes, and representations to which we are attracted at the same moment that we are repelled.”

For me, Donald Trump is a walking scandal. His tweets are minute by minute opportunities for offense. Somehow, over the weekend Trump managed to get himself into a rivalry with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Muslim couple who spoke at the DNC about their son who was killed in military combat.

“What an idiot!” I think to myself as the scandals come, one after the other. And Alberg’s definition rings true. I am repelled by Trump, but, and this is hard for me to admit, I’m also attracted to him like a moth to a flame.

I love a good scandal because they are based on rivalry with the other. My instant reaction of “What an idiot!” is coupled with a sense of arrogance. As Alberg claims, “… what drives the scandal is the secret thought, ‘I could do it better.’”

It’s easy to see the dangers involved with scandal, but scandals are not evil. They are human. In fact, if we look long enough at scandal, we can learn something important about ourselves. Indeed, scandals can justify a superiority complex over and against our rival, but scandals can also be a bridge that allows us to love our rival as we love ourselves.

Let me get a bit personal. My involvement in scandal tells me more about myself than it does about anyone else. Scandals are always based on a relationship of admiration and repulsion with a rival, but – again this is hard to admit – my rival reflects to me what I find repulsive about myself.

Scandals reveal our shadow side, that part within us that needs to “be redeemed,” as Alberg puts it. An aspect of my shadow is my admiration for Trump’s ability to gain and manipulate our national attention. Yes, I’m repulsed by his consistent attempts to expel and marginalize groups of people, but I’m also fascinated by his ability to gain the devotion and admiration of countless people.

So scandals can teach us something important about ourselves, if we have the right tools for examining scandals. Alberg provides one such tool, what he calls “the hermeneutics of forgiveness.” (Hermeneutics is a big scholarly word that basically means interpretation.) The best way to manage scandal is not to avoid it. Nor is it to accuse our rivals, which is really to accuse those shadow parts in ourselves that our rival reflects back to us. The best way to manage scandal is to go through it with the spirit of forgiveness.

Alberg is quick to state that this form of forgiveness is not primarily about forgiving the one who caused scandal. Rather, it’s about our openness to receiving forgiveness for ourselves. Personally, I’m constantly getting caught up in our cultural scandals, which are motivated by a sense of channeling group hatred over and against another, in my case, Donald Trump. Trump is the one person my progressive friends and I can agree to hate with impunity.

What kind of world do we want? I want a world that isn’t run by the scandal of hatred. Donald Trump directs cultural hatred and fear against Muslims, Mexicans, Latinos, and many other groups. And I see inside myself a desire to reflect that hatred back onto Trump. But I don’t want a world of hatred. Expelling Trump through hatred will only ensure that the spirit of hatred will come back to haunt us like never before.

“One can get beyond the scandal through forgiveness,” writes Alberg, “not by forgiving the scandal but by receiving forgiveness from this ‘scoundrel’ for what we have done to him.”

This “scoundrel” that Alberg refers to is Jesus Christ. Jesus, like Donald Trump, was a walking scandal to his culture. He challenged the people of his day to drop their “us versus them” mentality for the sake of love. But old habits of hatred are hard to break, and people are scandalized when their hatred is challenged. That’s why we often find Christ’s universal forgiveness to be scandalous. So the hatred that Jesus confronted nailed him to the cross. In fact, Pontius Pilate and Herod, two former enemies, became united in their hostility against Jesus. The same can be said about the crowd that united in chants of “Crucify him!” The same can be said about us, whenever we join a crowd that directs hatred against anyone that we accuse of scandalizing us.

And when we get caught up in the crowd, as we most surely will, Jesus the “scoundrel” is there to offer forgiveness. He isn’t scandalized by our hatred. Rather, he universally forgives it. As he prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That’s where we find the “hermeneutics of forgiveness.” Once we receive the Father’s forgiveness, our lives can be transformed as we begin to offer that forgiveness to ourselves and to others.

Image: Flickr, “Donald Trump,” By Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License, some changes made.