Trump is America's First Post-Christian President
Reflections upon re-reading MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
Hello,
My favorite writing to read from MLK. Jr on this day is always his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” which he penned when he was arrested in Birmingham, AL in 1963 protesting legal segregation in housing, employment, and voting; and violence against black Americans who resisted and fought for the integration of public facilities, restaurants, schools, and stores in one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. then and now. His arrest was for violating a court order, which he received when protesting a court injunction against mass demonstrations. MLK’s letter was written to other Christian leaders who did not support the boycotts or strategies of the Birmingham campaign, which was organized by Birmingham affiliate of the MLK-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.
The letter is great for all kinds of reasons, both for it’s historical significance and for it’s argumentation and philosophy. The philosophy can be summarized as something like: unjust laws must be resisted; moderate opposition of supposed allies is just as bad as those who outright oppose progressive change; and an injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere. My favorite section is this:
“…I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
While reading this letter today, I started to think about how Donald Trump might in fact be the first true post-Christian president; ironic for all of the obvious reasons. Yes, most Christians in America support Trump and they tend to do so for very explicitly Christian reasons. Yet, Trump is so obviously not a Christian, easily captured by his life he has lived and by the policies he supports.
In the early 19th century, as part of the “second great awakening,” evangelical Americans championed progressive causes such as the abolition of slavery, the suffragist movement, and were some of the first environmentalists, be they Calvinists or transcendentalists. In the 1930s, the rise of the Social Gospel helped propel Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, built largely on the fact that people who were “ill housed, ill clad and ill nourished” was a moral failure and that there was a moral and communal duty to ameliorate these conditions. Of course, MLK and many, if not all of, the 1950s-1960s civil rights movement leaders, marchers, and supporters were Christian. Today, plenty of Christians still care about these things, of course, but many have fallen victim to the rightwing butchery and appropriation of Christian values, largely spread during the Cold War and championed by Ronald Reagan that was built on the Red Scare and also fears of racial integration. This calls to mind a quote from the late Jimmy Carter’s 2009 editorial about the perversions and uses of religious arguments at their worst; the context was women’s rights but can be applied to race, too:
“This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with, and reinforce, traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant and damaging examples of human rights abuses."
As we live through Trump’s second term, to anyone with eyes, his chaotic brutal reign will be obvious. His antipathy for human life, human rights, the environment and any Christian notions of grace, forgiveness, charity, service, and compassion, will be put on display for the world to see. We will see vengeance, oligarchy, domination, cruelty, brutal materialism, and injustice.
For the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Patrick M. Foran