In Disgrace

Donald Trump 

How can we say goodbye to this President? Donald Trump is leaving the presidency in disgrace. I will say nothing about his character except that it was his character that caused him to slip up in so many ways that we stand speechless wondering how so many of us could have been fooled by this guy. Clearly he will go down in history as something extraordinary. My cautionary fear is that we may simply dismiss him as an aberration. In fact he isn’t.

 

Donald Trump’s character is no more messed up and contradictory than any of us. Lord Acton is famously quoted as saying “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We give our presidents close to absolute power, and if the checks and balances in our system are not working very well, a president, even with the best of intentions, can fall into corruption perhaps before he even realizes what is happening. This is not meant to excuse the man; we all share in making him what he has become. And so it is inappropriate for any of us to make him a scapegoat for all the problems we perceive in American politics.

 

The weakness in our political system is not that a man like Donald Trump can end up in the oval office. It is that our discourse has become so adversarial and partisan that there is little communication and understanding between opposing sides in an issue. Church leaders may unintentionally contribute to this by taking public stances on issues that are matters of debate in American thinking. For example, for a bishop to suggest that Joe Biden, a Catholic, should be refused communion because he has not been consistently on the right-to-life side in his voting is an abuse of the pulpit because it contributes to polarization and may make Catholics feel they may be doing something immoral by voting for Biden. There are many moral issues that the Church quite rightfully has something to say about: abortion, the death penalty, immigration, end of life issues, marriage and the family, and may other issues affecting life in America and beyond. But these are all issues for debate no matter how strongly we may feel about them. Being a committed Christian may settle some of the issues for us individually, but it does not give anyone a license to be intolerant of others who may not share our moral view of things, and although we should be naturally disappointed when laws are liberalized to grant freedoms that we view as inconsistent with Christian moral theology, we need to be able to distinguish between what is needed in a church community and what is needed in society in general.

 

Trump has appointed judges and Supreme Court justices who may overturn Roe vs. Wade. Many Catholics applaud this, but it is source of huge polarization and is part of the reason that the Trump presidency has been so contentious. The efforts of the Catholic Church to promote the use the secular laws to regulate or to prohibit abortion in this country have caused division and have failed to convert people to the church’s moral position. I believe Trump would not have beaten Hilary Clinton in the last election if it were not for the strong support he received from the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestants because of the abortion issue. He delivered what they asked for.

 

The civil war was fought over the issue of slavery. That was a great moral issue, and we can look back on that period of American history from the moral high ground of emancipation. Abortion is not the great moral issue of today. I don’t think we are about to have another civil war unless it is about democracy itself, but that could happen. The moral high ground is not a religiously motivated prohibition of freedoms Christians may disapprove of. The moral high ground is the protection of our democracy, assuring a political discourse that will lead to making things fair for the people who live in this land. Just as people were unjustly disadvantaged by slavery, so today we have large numbers of people who are disadvantaged in our society today. The undocumented who live in our land and the poor are today’s slaves. The new moral high ground has something to do with that.

 

It is going to be interesting to see how the United States comes out of this. Revolutions kill a lot of people and create disorder lasting generations. God save us from that. But we cannot be blind to the fact that the world has tremendous inequality of opportunity and very little in the way of a safety net for the disadvantaged. I spent six months in Mexico and Guatemala last year and I am very much aware of the deep problems there. Migration is a symptom of the problem, but Trump’s wall is not a solution. The people who live on the other side of the wall in many cases are barely surviving, and most are hard working religious and noble people. The help they need will inevitably come from us in one way or another. It will be a test of our character, leadership and generosity as well as our vision for an interconnected world. To be able to contribute positively to solving this problem, we cannot afford to maintain an adversarial mindset.

 

I believe our elected leaders need to show the world how democracy can lead to the solution to many problems through fraternal discourse and solidarity with people of different backgrounds.

 

C. David Burt