ofthewedge

Source: Barna Group 2013

“…and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.” Second Book of Kings 9:20

Every day I wake up to notifications from across the Atlantic of some fresh wickedness perpetuated by the United States Administration, occupying the airwaves as the evening moved west across the plains and prairies of North America. This parade of shocking news has become relentless all because of the festering ego of one orange man of German descent.

History has become more like an almanac, a series of extraordinary headlines forming layer upon layer of quickly forgotten outrage. Today we have abducting children from their parents at the Mexican border, lying about crime in Germany, provoking China into a trade war, and flouncing out of the UN Human Rights Council.

We have forgotten for example the shooting in Parkland Florida and Trump’s weasel offering of “thoughts and prayers”. On the BBC Radio 4 Sunday programme following the massacre there was an interview with Patrick Carolan from the Franciscan Action Network. Gun violence is a right to life issue, he said. Trump in fact doesn’t enjoy support of vast majority of Christians. Those who support him are Christian in name only. They are not following the teachings of Jesus. They are obsessed with abortion which is only one ‘right to life’ issue, and one which is clouded by complexity and other compelling rights, notably the right of a woman to be in control of her own body. Trump wins 81% of the white evangelical and most Roman Catholic votes. It is hypocritical for leaders to offer prayers and thoughts without action.

Carolan was echoing the Epistle of James which has become more relevant than ever to the millions of people who espouse Christianity but act like self-interested monads, who make it a tenet of faith to reject the theory of evolution yet subscribe in effect to a brutalist, unforgiving strain of social Darwinism. To say that whatever befalls you is God’s will is no different from saying that evolution, or unbridled ‘markets’, determine the way creatures must be.  The right to have a gun does not supersede the right to live free from fear of violence.   “Stop pretending you’re Christian and start acting Christian. Stop worrying about what Trump says. He has nothing to do with being Christian or person of faith. We are not a moral nation if we allow children to be shot. You are not acting as people of faith if you oppose gun control.”

What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. James 2: 14-17.

A Pew Research poll in 2010 found that evangelicals were hardly more familiar than atheists with the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus. “Americans revere the Bible—but, by and large, they don’t read it,’’ was the conclusion in a 1989 study (The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90’s, George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli). In 2012, a Christian polling firm (whose chart is pasted above) found evangelicals accepted the attitudes and beliefs of the Pharisees more than those of Jesus.

These are the people who form the base of Trump’s support. Everything he does is calculated to ‘shore up the base’. This is a new alliance of convenience – they deserve one another. These putative Christians have their plenipotentiary in the pasty presence of Mike Pence, adoring and silent at the President’s side. Even if they balk at Trump’s moral decrepitude they lionise him as if he were a modern day Jehu, the psychopath anointed by the prophet Elisha to destroy the House of Ahab. If we are lucky Pence is Saul, before the Road to Damascus, looking on approvingly at the stoning of Christian martyrs.  But these are not lucky times.

What the Church and perhaps the whole world needs now is a new generation of fire-breathing prophets, scruffy, raw and unrelenting like their Old Testament predecessors, acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly before the Lord, to clear the Temple of its hypocrites, thieves and apologists for child abduction.