Are you torn this election? Are you, like me, a pro-life Christian wondering that if you vote for Joe Biden you may be throwing away your integrity for voting for a pro-choice Democrat? Every four years, we Americans hear the same thing again and again, without even a change of wording or tone: “This is the most important election of our generation.” This means we either have a very poor collective memory OR that we, to quote the high-culture classic “Spaceballs,” are up to "ludicrous speed" with regard to the ever-rising stakes that our politics has on the survival of society as we know it. Like the Tacoma Narrow Falls Bridge exposed to just the wrong wind speed, America seems to be at its breaking point. Just a few weeks ago, Rick Joyner, a famous Evangelical pastor from Charlotte, NC, threatened a civil war if Joe Biden wins. When our metaphors have come to this level—when war metaphors start to not become metaphors anymore—you know we need more people saying let’s put down our weapons, sit down at the table, and discuss this issue as best we can with level heads. Why not try, right? If we are willing to follow the likes of Rick Joyner into a bloodbath in the streets of America, why not first try and talk it out? Surely, we can afford a few hours or days or, heck, even a few weeks to try and come to some mutual understanding. If it doesn’t work to build any empathy, any change of perspective, then we’ll be at each others’ throats anyway, in time. Consider this article, then, an invitation to the table. With even just an ounce of consideration of another perspective, we might be equipped to have real conversations with real people over real tables, maybe, just maybe with people with different ideas than our own. Much is truly at stake if we don’t. 

I don't want to use the same dramatic warnings that both sides employ—both sides, who are petrified at the thought of the other side winning, who have no more hair to pull out and whose fingers have had their nails eaten way past their cuticles—I do, however, want to try and put forth a reasoned argument for why we evangelical Christians ought to distinguish ourselves from the political Right (which has never looked more unchristian than now), break our imaginations free from any violent fallout from Trump losing, and why, in this historical moment, we should ALL vote for Joe Biden in this 2020 presidential election. 

I am an evangelical Christian. I absolutely love Jesus. He is the most attractive person I have ever encountered in all the pages of recorded history. His beauty permeates his words, his actions, but most importantly through his anger-absorbing, non-violent, non-coercive, no-strings-attached love that he dramatically demonstrated by allowing himself to be misunderstood, beaten, and nailed to a cross so that we would know without a shadow of a doubt that our shame does not stand a chance; our rage does not stand a chance; our indifference does not stand a chance; even our rejection does not stand a chance—He can take it on the cheek and still look at us like he wants us, like he believes in us, like he knows the greatness in us that we are too embarrassed to let shine. His death and resurrection took the nails out of his hands and feet and drove them into the coffin of behavior-oriented religion. No longer shall we be occupied with fooling ourselves and others in just getting by with an appearance of righteousness; He says to all of us, “you were made for more than this.” 

Jesus is not only attractive; He is my savior. He has also called me to follow him and to make him known. My personal mission in life is to help others see God just as he is by helping them see Jesus just as he is. Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” Okay, then. Now we just need to see Jesus, past the smokescreen of religion, through the confusion of so-called teachers, and in the sacred texts that claim to faithfully document the essentials of his life and ministry—his personality and his teaching. As someone who has tried to help others see Jesus, understand his words, and put them into practice, I have come to some pretty radical conclusions. And all of this is not in spite of my relationship with Jesus and belief in the Bible as God’s inspired words to us. Rather, it is exactly because of it. Hang in there, I see your hands raised, and I will try to cover every question you have popping up in your minds. But, one at a time, please. 

The Issue: Abortion

In 2000, a young man with a George W. Bush bumper-sticker-covered Toyota Camry station wagon was deeply concerned about the lives of the unborn and believed that abortion clinics around the country were our generation's Nazi concentration camps. For him, it wasn’t Pro-Life or Pro-Choice. It was Pro-Life or Pro-Death. One party was for life, and the other for death. There was no need to analyze the politics of climate change, or the economy, or immigration, or health care. None of it mattered when millions of babies were being slaughtered in death camps. That was this young man’s operating narrative. It was his conviction. It was why his heart raced every time politics came up, because it resonated a deeply troubled and morally convicted chord. That young man with a mission was I. 

And for years I propagated that narrative with conviction to my friends, my family, and my community. I understand abortion wasn’t the only issue for people who voted for him in 2016, but I can say for most Evangelical Christians, it was certainly one, if not the only, justification for voting for a man who boasted about sexually attacking women and being one of the least Jesus-like figures in recent presidential history. 

What was the justification exactly? 

1. That electing a Republican president—no matter who they are—is of life-and-death importance, because

2. He/she gets to appoint justices to the Supreme Court for life, so

3. The Supreme Court can one day reverse Roe v. Wade, so 

4. Fewer babies will die.

I have lived outside of the United States for nearly 15 years. Over these many years, I have met reasonable, sincere, faith-filled, and intelligent people who believed in a woman’s right to choose. At first, my blood boiled. How could this be? How could genuine, Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Christians ever be Pro-Choice? Surely, these were compromised believers regurgitating the billion-dollar abortion industry propaganda, right? I wish I could have written them off that way and kept to my idealistic notions, but in each case, relationship forced me to try and see this issue from a different perspective.    

But, let’s not talk about abortion for a minute, okay? Instead, let’s talk about something that has lost its divisive charge in our generation and see if we can’t relate. This was the abortion issue of our great (or great-great) grandparent’s generation: Prohibition—a sixteen-year American experiment with illegalizing alcohol. Leading up to the passing of the eighteenth amendment in 1917, lots of blood was boiling. Alcoholism had stolen enough good men and destroyed enough families, that many felt something needed to be done to stanch the bleeding. Persuasive voices filled with religious conviction convinced enough of America that alcoholism was a plague that needed dealing with—an evil spirit that needed to be cast out. On December 18, 1917, the 18th amendment banning alcohol was ratified. After the passing of the prohibition amendment, the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol became illegal country-wide. But things slowly got worse. Enforcement proved difficult. Speakeasies and illegal operations sprung up in every large city and small town. Due to a lack of transparent public regulation, “rotgut" and other toxic chemicals were sold as alcoholic beverages and led to sickness and death. Alcohol-related crime increased. People filled jails. Organized crime flourished. Murder rates soared. Black markets grew. After the prohibition amendment was repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933, these trends reversed. 

Why? How could such a well-intentioned policy go so wrong? Well, for one, it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, and human beings’ simultaneous addiction to, and rebellion against, systems of rules and laws. This is what Christian theology calls The Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not an apple or any other juicy snack, but a “fruit” as in “a product/consequence that contains seeds to reproduce itself." Humanity has an ancient obsession with fear and punishment and an insatiable hunger for systems of right and wrong (whether through law or religion) as the cure. In other words, we all see and experience evil and conclude it comes from a lack of knowledge. If only others knew more, they wouldn’t do evil. Simple: more laws, less crime. If only it were that easy. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory glance at our history, or our own lives, to disprove this. What kind of world would that be anyway?

Whenever we force certain inevitable human behaviors into the shadows of illegality, it doesn’t eradicate the darkness, but rather grows it until a host of other evils become reasonable options. However, when we bring things into the light, we enable those who need help to reach out for it. All the classics of literature are exploring the reality of the complexity of the human soul and society’s way of dealing with it. Anytime we employ fear to influence behavior, we create more darkness. A safe place and open-eyed discussion of real-life consequences is all we really need to equip our children to navigate this world as mature people. And the only environment that creates mature people is in an environment where choices can be made. If there isn’t freedom of choice, we can actually have the reverse effect and push people away from us and toward making the wrong one. 

We conservatives are pros at this argument when it regards the economy: Less regulation and taxation will create the atmosphere for business owners to do the right thing. The opposite, so the argument goes, would be to trade in our freedoms in order to live in a dystopian planned-economy where the State tells everyone what to do. This is essentially the same fear that liberals have—remove abortion rights and we end up with an intrusive, paternalistic State investigating our miscarriages, prosecuting sexual misconduct, and punishing unsupported teens and unintended mothers. These exaggerated outcomes are merely a commentary on how separated we are—how unwilling we are to sit down at the table and talk to one another. To bridge our great divide, we must first cast out (literally exorcise) the exaggerated suspicions we keep against one another—the spirit that convinces us that we are the good guys and the other side are the bad guys. If we are to slide toward any fearful dystopian government system, it will only be because we continue to villainize each other and further separate. But, if we permit ourselves to move toward the gray areas together, we will discover easy solutions we never thought possible. When we divide, there are no solutions. The “better world” we leave to our children isn’t a world of ideological purity, but rather one of ideological diversity—everyone in conversation with each other, neighbors with one another, with the maturity to know how to disagree and still love. Isn’t that what being in a family teaches us, after all? 

Regarding the influence that a Republican president or a conservative Supreme Court has over the issue of Roe v. Wade, and the influence that Roe v. Wade has over the number of abortions that actually happen, watch this video by Phil Vischer, creator of the Veggie Tales. It contains excellent data that shows just how complicated this issue is, and how talking points and rhetoric are used to keep giving undue weight to the presidency on the issue of abortion. The most effective things we can do as pro-lifers are things we do on the local level, regardless of who’s president.

Our #1 Enemy: Division

Speaking of assuming that we are the good guys—that we’ve done all the hard work, others want to take it from us, we need to protect ourselves from the left-wingers, the Chinese, the Muslims, the terrorists—this is exactly the very sickness of the soul that the Judeo-Christian tradition is trying to critique, warn against, and ultimately deliver us from. The worldview of us-vs-them always leads us down the wrong path, and creates a future of more division. It starts with suspicion and leads to separation and more suspicion—the necessary ingredients for violent conflict. The posture of God toward the world, on the other hand, is welcoming, accepting, kind, generous, giving, mirthful, and unconditionally loving. 

Our grandparents rebuilt the whole world after WW2, and their collective wisdom was to tie us all together economically, so as to force us to win together, hinging individual success on everyone else’s success (granted, not everyone is succeeding…more on anti-globalism later). The greatest generation did not want another World War to ever happen again. It was so senseless and self-destructive. And it started with this narrative, enunciated through the fury and spittle of Adolf Hitler: 

1. There is a you and there is a them;

2. You are a victim in this unfair world system; 

3. The reason you are suffering economically is because of foreigners;

4. Foreigners are a stain on our greatness, and international commitments are holding us back;

5. So, we must cut them off, drive them out, take our rightful place, think firstly of our own benefit, and 

6. Make Germany great again.

It was a narrative fueled by (and that also fueled) racism. It needed to identify who was in and who was out, and the only metric given to do that was appearance (hair color, skin color, etc.), regardless of how many generations one had lived in Germany—regardless of a person’s ideology, market value-add, role, position, etc. We cannot let ourselves be deceived by this narrative again. It is a deception—a very subtle one from a certain perspective; a very blatant one from another. It is the number one strategy of the enemy of our souls. If he can divide us, he can conquer us…and drive us to war. The Bible speaks of divisiveness in the severest of terms. The apostle Paul in Galatians 5 gives a strict warning against factions and divisiveness—"The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:19-21).

“Factions” and “discord” are in the same list as “witchcraft” and “sexual immorality.” Take a moment to let that soak in.

"For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility... His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility" (Ephesians 2:14-16).

"For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge —that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:14-19).

"Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:22,23).

"Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them. You may be sure that such people are warped and sinful; they are self-condemned” (Titus 3:10).

And, "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:). The fruit of the Spirit are painted on nearly every children’s Sunday school wall, hung as flags, posters, and banners, to remind us of the attitudes we ought to foster toward others. 

Protectionism and separation always leads to more suspicion, which leads to more separation (and more suspicion), because in the absence of the positive pressure of being in relationship with real people who are different from us, we risk slipping into prejudice and other misinformation. We have a lot of healing to do—from ideologies that have drawn lines, built walls, and inspired mistrust instead of inviting dinner guests. We must remember that we are friendly and welcoming people with a spiritual heritage of hospitality. 

Two years ago, my daughter sent President Trump an illustrated children’s book called “Emma’s Poem.” It is the story of the woman who wrote the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty. The inscription on Lady Liberty reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” That is the true America. That is the idea that created our “government for the people by the people”—for every class to have the same access and accountability to justice, for every person’s will to be honored, for everyone to have “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Though it did not all manifest overnight, the ingredients were baked into our constitution and culture that inevitably led us on the path to more civil liberties for all. We still have not arrived, but must press on. Together.

We must root out divisiveness. It is the cancer itself. Factions and suspicion are as destructive to the cause of Christ as anything on Earth. And they are tearing us apart. In Biden’s voice, I hear a call for unity and healing. I hear him speaking to all Americans. In Biden’s America, there’s room for us all. To disagree? Of course; To work together? Definitely; and also to figure things out together. In Trump, as is as plain as the words on his own lips, there is no vision for a united America, but rather a further divided one. Trump doesn’t see himself as the president of the whole country, only of his supporters—only of red states. As shocking as it was, he suggested that not counting the death rates in blue states would make the death rates look much better. We shouldn’t be surprised that this was another total fabrication. This statement only served to display his cruelty. If he could, Donald Trump would disown anyone who did not serve his ego, and he would boast about not shedding a tear, and would probably get a power trip for every “blue state” he could cut out with a “you’re fired.” 

I’ll say it again. I am urging everyone everywhere to be against an us-them mentality, a right-wrong, my-way-or-the-highway, steeled conviction that the divine “I” is the arbiter of moral truth in the universe. Let it go. We must all let that go, and embrace a colorful, nuanced, qualified by the unending infinitude of wisdom that only poetry can approach and appreciate. We have to let it go to live as Jesus intends all of us to live: in the beautiful flow of the generosity and mystery of life—a generosity that cannot be owned or claimed or staked by another, yet each of us has a role in growing it, distributing it, and multiplying it. We need to be stewards again. We need to be for togetherness again—for the calm yet sometimes passionate disagreement over a table of fellowship laden with food. We are for the difficult task of relationship with each other, so that we can “together with all the saints, grasp the height, depth, width, and breadth of God’s love” (Ephesians 3:18). The “riches of the inheritance of the saints” in Ephesians 1:18 are each of us inheriting each other. We believe that we are, all of us, good for the other, that “they” are good for “us,” because we are all “us.” The world still belongs to the peacemakers. We commit to being peacemakers, and not participators in narratives that lead to violence.

On Law and Order

Speaking of violence, let’s talk about the tools of delivering the ultimate fulfillment of our violent fantasies—instantaneous death to whom we deem dangerous, unnecessary, or collateral in the quest for whitewashing our tombs to perfectionist-level shininess—Guns. We recently had a break-in in our house. We woke to discover a window in the living room wide open and my wife’s wallet wide open on the coffee table, empty of the $200 cash I put in it the previous day. Next to the TV laid my laptop computer. Thankfully, it hadn’t been taken. We posted in a neighborhood FB group, and someone replied that there had been a young teenage boy going around asking for money for a surgery for a family member.

What made me most thankful of all for the measly outcome of a stolen $200 was that this boy did not attempt this petty crime in America, where a homeowner would have been completely justified in killing this intruder for reasons of self-defense. It makes me sick, in fact, that reasonable people would ever entertain the thought that such a person “had it coming.” Really? Did he really? A boy, who in a time of global pandemic, with a family member in need of surgery, doing something desperate in a moment of severe need…had it coming? I won’t mention the cases where during home break-ins, a home-owner's inappropriate use of their weapon in self-defense only escalated violence, or had had it taken from them and used against them. The only thing good people do with guns is put them down and walk away from them. Keeping them for anything other than sport or hunting props up the myth of redemptive violence and keeps alive the fantasy of guaranteed self-protection under any circumstance. 

We do not need to merely reconsider our arsenals. We Americans need to do some serious soul-searching to examine what in our psyches, in our imaginations, in our view of the world, makes an accumulation of death-delivery systems so addictive?…so necessary? Could it be that the world is not as violent as we think? Or, could it be that the world will be exactly as violent as we expect it to be? I think the answer to both of those questions are “yes.” Jesus honored the self-fulfilling nature of the perceptions of a violent world when he said, “if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.” I think one day when we can fully see things as they are, we will understand that all along it was the violent world inside each of our hearts that we projected on the widescreen of tangible reality, fostered and perpetuated by our tools and trophies of war. God help us. God, cleanse our imaginations. Help us project onto the world the wisdom of James 3:17: 

"But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace."

The second amendment didn’t secure me the right to carry an AR-15 into a supermarket; it secured my state the right to organize a militia against federal encroachment, and to back up each State’s claim to sovereignty and volunteer participation in the Federal system with the weightiest words of all—a declaration of war. This promise made in the constitution brought all the States to the table. Honoring their individual authority, yet inviting them all to join forces and become a unified nation was a revolutionary idea (pun intended). We have to remember that at that time in history, no one could see 2020 America. They couldn’t fathom the incredible synergy and power our unity would afford us. And at the time, a union was not a foregone conclusion—there was no guarantee that it wasn’t going to splinter into a thousand pieces, each one revolting against the leader that preceded them, on and on down the line like a million church splits, until we got down to the lonely indivisible atomic particle: The individual. Every man for himself. Can you imagine persuading a bunch of freedom hungry, individualistic people to band together to fight against the oppression of England in one moment, and then in the next moment forcing them to submit to a group of hotshot New Englanders? No way. How, then, were these men going to build unity after establishing a spirit of liberty from oppression? The only way to do it was to convince reasonable men (unfortunately, only men at the time) to willingly agree to participate in a collective partnership with shared values, goals, and resources for defense. And the agreement was to be spelled out in a document—the Constitution—a document that does not focus on don’t’s, but one that enumerates rights. 

Constitutional historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Rakove takes a similar position, arguing that James Madison’s intent in the second amendment was to appease anti-Federalists that their state militias would not be disarmed. But in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to bear arms extended beyond organized militias and applied to home self-defense. This set a new legal precedent and extended the original intent of the 2nd amendment to beyond state-run militias. So, now that Uncle Jimmy sits locked and loaded on his porch like Jack Ryan waiting for Irish vigilantes to break in (Clear and Present Danger), let’s talk for a minute about justice.

If you’re at all like me, you may think of justice as “punishment for committing a crime” or “no punishment for not committing a crime.” If one of those two can be determined, then justice has been served. The Bible, however, has a different concept of justice. Justice isn’t whether you are punished or not; true justice is about restoration—healing of the land, reconciliation to relationships, making things right again. So, what if you, as a house owner, did use a gun for its intended purpose and killed or maimed a thief? Would that be justice? No. If anything, it would be a 4,000 year reversion to one of the most primitive codes of law—the Code of Hammurabi. But even Hammurabi would be horrified if he saw you shoot a man for stealing a loaf of bread. His code only provided permission to retaliate to the degree that you suffered harm, i.e. "an eye for an eye.” 

We are under a severe illusion if we think that heavier threats of punishment are going to prevent crime from happening. Since “the war on drugs,” Republican and Democrat presidents have militarized policing across the country. Funding for high-powered weapons and equipment is on par with a military unit going into Afghanistan, but these are local police officers in American cities and small towns! The “defund police” movement, contrary to what gets exaggerated, is not a movement seeking to burn down every police precinct in the country. It is actually a highly academic and well-thought-out argument for a new way of policing that is good for both police and the communities they serve. What's it going to take for us to see each other as people again? Together with restorative justice theories these have promise to be more effective in reforming criminals than the old “tough on crime” approach. 

My house has a front door. We have a handful of friends that can come through our door at any time without knocking. (It’s so good to have friends like that!) But for visitors who are not on that list of intimate friends, there is process: they knock or ring the doorbell, the door is opened from the inside, greetings are exchanged, entry is requested and is either granted or denied based on circumstances. A front door with a welcome mat can be a place of wonderful fellowship and pleasantries. A country’s border should be the same. There are people and processes and pleasantries that should make our borders and international ports of entry a shining billboard of our hospitality. These places, however, have become places of deepest suspicion, where every visitor could be a criminal or a terrorist. There is no evidence to support that immigrants commit more crime than American citizens. On the contrary, in the last 38 years, 65 out of 118 mass shootings were perpetrated by white American males. My point is, the enemy isn’t some other race, nationality, or religion out there; the enemy lies within. We need the right set of eyes to see it and the grace to coax it out, for the sake of our togetherness and the safety of our society. Border officials who think by being nasty and angry that they are effectively being “tough on criminals” are missing the fact that they are mostly being tough on themselves, eroding their trust in humanity’s goodness, and violating their own true nature to be hospitable and honor-filled people. Honor, trust, and kindness are more effective at reforming criminals than the threat of punishment. We all need to be reminded of that. Threats do not stop children from misbehaving. They only make punishers out of good parents—parents whose love and trust and patience can drive insecurity and fear out of the little hearts of our children and remind them what it looks like to be safe and patient and kind in the face of violence. 

Either way, we NEED more intelligent gun laws. 

Fox News and Marketing

You can truthfully and legitimately convince someone that if they do not buy your product, they will risk having more difficulty or frustration or lost time, but should you tell them that if they do not buy your product their children will die immediate and excruciating deaths, and you are not selling life rafts on a sinking cruise ship (as barbarous as that would be), then you have crossed a line from marketing persuasion to fear-mongering deception. If I encourage voters to vote for me because together we are going to unite, work together, and heal our nation, I am appealing to the better angels of our positive natures. If I say to voters they must vote for me otherwise their precious suburbs will be burned to the ground by blood-thirsty left-wing liberals, I have crossed a line from campaigning to sowing division, discord, primal fear, and suspicion of others. All based on lies. 

A couple of years ago, I had a very interesting conversation with a dear friend who happens to be a Trump supporter. At the time, he happened to primarily watch Fox News. I’m not claiming there is a perfect news source, but we end up reflecting the sources we trust most (or do they reflect ourselves back to ourselves?). I told my friend that when I watch Fox News, I feel things on an emotional level—fear, moral concern, threat to ideals, righteous anger—but when I watch or listen to the NYTimes, there’s a different feeling—I feel I’ve been reasoned with, with clear, measured, calm facts and statistics. It’s like the difference between watching a dramatic Hollywood thriller and a documentary. My friend walked away from our two-hour debate on politics stating that out of all the things I said to him, this point left the deepest impression on him. He is now more open to gaining his news from multiple sources. I’d encourage everyone to not limit themselves to one news source, especially one that siphons sensational information that speaks to the more primal urges and desires, such as tribalism (us vs. them), sex appeal, fear, and moral outrage. 

Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, have become so successful because they have cleverly used marketing psychology to win more viewers. It rightfully understood that its viewers are not just dispassionate information processors, but are humans with primal desires, urges, hopes, fears, and psychology. It accepted that since all media is biased, why not just be open about what our biases are? Fox News does not hide the fact that it is biased to a right-leaning perspective, and then reflects that worldview of its viewers back to them with well-reasoned articulation of why they have that perspective. It is the epitome of confirmation bias, which is a slippery slope to more exaggerated confirmation bias—like being stuck between two mirrors slightly off parallel, the reflections bend ever more off course as they gradually dim and eventually fall out of frame. 

Speaking of media bias, take a moment to study the chart above. I was surprised (refreshingly) to discover that there are ways to measure standards for presenting unbiased information to the general public. I’m not saying never watch Fox News. But, if you can see it for what it is, you will not likely be misled by it. If you rely on it alone for news and information, you may be in danger of losing yourself in a house of mirrors. 

The “Reasons” that many voted for Trump in 2016

I understand how we got here. There’s no hate or blame from me. What we are experiencing is a global phenomenon—the pendulum of progress pummeling local businesses by the competitive prices and cutthroat job competition of open border globalization. Some trade agreements made job migration too easy, so that any foreigner more desperate for your job became a threat. The internet eliminated any advantage proximity once gave you. The bottom line was racing to ever-lower levels and employer-employee loyalty became eroded past paper-thin. Factories closed, investors lost, and workers tried to re-train and re-tool for a new world. All of this shaken security and shredded certainty left us with the sense that no one is up there in the top echelons of power fighting for our ability to provide for our families. This disquiet led Britain to jump off the Brexit cliff, and the still-attached strings left them dangling halfway off the ledge. Britain has its Brexiters; we have our Trumpists. The question is, however, do we cut the cords of global trade alliance or do we fix the system we inherited? With the surgical finesse of a wrecking ball, Trump has demolished much of what had been built on the foundation of post-WWII globalism. He came up to the boundary stones placed with careful intention by our ancestors, and without even asking why they were there, he bulldozed them away as if clearing the landscape for another casino.  

With the anti-globalism milieu we began to entertain in 2016, I heard many Trump supporters use these reasons for why they voted for him: 

• He says it like it is / He isn’t politically correct

• He’s good at making money, so he’ll be good for the economy

• He’ll be a strong leader and drive hard bargains with adversarial nations

• He won’t play the political game and therefore bring much needed change to Washington

I was deeply disheartened at the time as there were many prominent Christian leaders claiming to be “prophets” and predicted Trump’s rise, thereby giving him a  “stamp of approval” from God. If God says he is going to raise up this man to lead, then he must be God’s chosen man, right? (Pay no attention to the circular reasoning.) Unfortunately, this became more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a truly biblical one—due more to the social following and religious influence of these leaders than actually “knowing God’s will” in the matter. Still, however, we heard many Christians justify their choice by claiming that regardless of Trump’s moral choices, or even his faith professions, he was a “Cyrus” (reference to an unbelieving political leader that God used to implement his purposes) whom God was going to use in our generation. Those less Biblically literate were still able to make the leap quite easily by saying, “sure, I don’t like him as a person, but God must be using him to bring correction to some trade imbalances, etc. that have gotten out of control lately.” World statistics show, however, that prior to Trump getting elected, America and the world had been seeing unprecedented prosperity (see chart below). Sure there were corrections needing to be made, but the “corrections” most needed were in finding ways to bring more benefit to factory workers around the world, NOT how do we find ways to make executives in America richer (by backing out of deals and commitments, employing threats, blackmail, and the other bully tactics demonstrated by Trump). We can’t be deceived in thinking that a tree with so much bad fruit can be somehow good if scaled up to the size of a nation or the world.

Regarding change in Washington, yes, Trump has certainly brought change. There is now more nepotism, cronyism, personality-cultism, marketing (the Goya photo shoot), opportunism, truth-bending, and fear…and in the shadows cast by these new “lights," the coronavirus is not the only novel disease getting passed around. Every culture of fear creates it’s own lexicon, it’s own rules, it’s own pecking order, to keep responsible people out of the light of scrutiny where ego is challenged, and in the light of celebrity where ego is stroked. This is oligarchy at it’s finest; not the equal rights and equal-access-to-justice democracy that our forefathers dreamed of. 

You may think I’m being harsh on Donald Trump. We’ve all seen how his own mouth has done more to indict than defend him, owing to his once-praiseworthy tendency to “speak before he thinks.” We must remember that this quality is only virtuous in the context of courage, that is, with an acknowledged awareness of risk (not gain) to oneself personally. With Trump, his speaking-without-thinking is by no means a show of courage, but rather a window into how he actually thinks—in the ideal world in his head where he is on top and there are no dissenting or disapproving adults to waste his time on. I agree that we cannot hold our elected officials to Jesus-level moral purity. No one would pass that test. However, this does not excuse us from being discerning—from looking at a person’s words and actions to discover, as best we can, what is in the heart or intention of that person, so as to know whether or not we should trust them with babysitting our kids or running our country. We must believe that Jesus’ teachings do not only have spiritual/mystical application—his wisdom was incredibly down-to-earth and practical—but they can also be applied to what we expect of our public service people. 

And since when is becoming friends with other nations a bad thing? Bad deals should certainly be avoided, but now more than ever, we need a spirit of friendship and wisdom when sitting down at the table to create more win-win situations. It appears Trump isn’t interested in win-win, because his policies have led to more lose-lose. We are experiencing the fruit of believing his everyone’s-an-adversary rhetoric. What fruit? People are more suspicious of each other than they were four years ago; nations are pulling out of trade deals and are at each others’ throats; there’s more ethnic and racial name-calling; and there is more tension and mistrust overall. In short, the cracks of our division have spidered outward in every direction, and I fear America’s windshield isn’t shatterproof. And what is business anyway if not relationship built on trust, if not mutual benefit, if not scientific and industrial collaboration? So, I ask you, has Trump really been good for business? As Trump’s taxes show us, we discover that he was never really that good at managing money after all. He’s lost more than he’s earned, and he is in deep debt to creditors ($1 billion peanuts, in fact). I think it’s time we changed the windshield.

On the Handling of COVID-19

I will give you this about Donald Trump: his projected confidence in spite of the evidence against him is weirdly amusing…almost attractive. Trump has an incredible ability to project confidence. This is an amazing skill. The best showmen and magicians use the art of misdirection to entertain and amuse, but in the case of this president, it is far less admirable. It may work well to close deals, for selling things, and...for pulling the wool over people’s eyes. However, this skill of bending the truth to benefit self can be a huge threat to public safety, as 2020 has clearly shown. The perceived confidence of a leader may be one part of good leadership, but it is certainly not the only part, as the president seems to think. True leadership informs, educates, consults, submits to experts, gathers the best advice of others and makes hard decisions for the sake of others, without thought or consideration to one’s own perceived reputation. We have seen very little of this kind of leadership from President Trump. Instead, we hear, “I’m awesome, I’m good for this country, we’re winning, we’re going to win, we’re going to win like you’ve never seen before.” This would be a great speech for a football team before a game,…but in times of crisis, we don’t need a cheerleader on the sidelines; we need a doctor at our bedside. Sadly, Trump’s “way” muddied the facts, and has led to over 215,000 deaths in America. 

No other country has fumbled the ball quite like ours. It’s hard to deny. We aren’t talking about skewed data from governments that are trying to look better on the world stage. We are talking about hard numbers and statistics from hospitals, morgues, that have been confirmed by the WHO. In China, there is a culture of listening to authority even if it infringes on personal liberty. And, there is also a culture of going to the hospital when sick. When our friends in China catch a cold, they go to the hospital for an IV of antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics in China is actually really bad. I only mention that to say there weren’t millions of people in China that contracted COVID and just chose to stay home. 

It’s hard to take in the magnitude of the scale of the difference between the numbers of COVID cases in the US and China. In the graphic below, take note that the vertical axis increases by orders of magnitude. The United States is still racking up around 50,000 new cases every day (since March!). China peaked in late February, saw a sharp decline in March, and since April has seldom gone over 100 new cases per day (the average is somewhere in the twenties). 

Is this possible? Can we trust China’s data? It would certainly be easy to doubt that a county of 1.4 billion could have such low numbers. But, as having lived in China during the lockdown (we, along with the entire country, were kept in our apartments for nearly six weeks) with only one of us allowed to leave once per day to get groceries, we believe China is telling the truth. Unflatteringly, in some cases, very drastic measures were used to contain people, cutting off travel, closing off an entire city, total shutdown of economic activity, and even highly limited human contact for over 1 billion people for nearly two months. Remarkably, we saw a general acceptance of these measures in China. Nobody wants to endanger their own lives or the lives of their loved ones. For the most part, people complied and got through it. While Chinese culture is more inclined to following instructions from those in authority, in times of crisis in America, we too are hungry for information and leadership. 

Trump isn’t the only one to blame, but he does shoulder a significant amount of responsibility since there were a lot of contradictory messaging coming from the top even months into the pandemic, scorning the use of masks, pitting the economy against public safety, playing down the risks, etc. In the enormous uncertainty of the early phase of the pandemic, and even now, there was no clear warning of the deadliness of this disease and no positive examples being set. The fact that Trump, while still contagious with the disease, was not quarantining himself or wearing a mask demonstrated a level of recklessness and irresponsibility seldom seen in leaders of his stature. If we’ve come to expect leaders to be like this, then it is high time we change our expectations and hold them accountable. 

C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: A Prophetic Allegory

The main thing I pray for America in this season is discernment. Discernment between fear and love, between who’s trying to bring confusion and who’s trying to bring clarity, between disunity and unity, between who divides and who unites, between Machiavelli and Jesus, between lies and truth, and between hate and love. 

You may be familiar with C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. In the last book of the series, The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis tells a chilling allegory of an ape and a donkey who find a lion skin. The ape puts the lion skin on the donkey and thus begin a charade of dire consequences. Together, they pretend to be Aslan, the god-figure of the world of Narnia, who happens to be a lion. As there had been few recent sightings of Aslan, the memory of what he looked like and sounded like was fuzzy in people’s minds, therefore a supposed “Aslan sighting” was easily believed. And, as it was a confusing and uncertain time, any mention of Aslan was a hope-inspiring prospect. At first, the ape and the donkey kept the sightings brief and distant. But more interest and excitement from the animals of Narnia emboldened the imposters to speak more, and longer. The perpetrators spoke harsh words from an angry Aslan. Something about them sounded believable (words that reflect the disappointment and shame in our own hearts often sound true). And, if this was the real Aslan, even if his words sounded a bit off, they had to trust Aslan knows best. The ape and donkey now found themselves playing a game they could not stop, as if other forces took over the masquerade and pushed them beyond what they could now control. The donkey wanted out, but the ape wouldn’t let him stop. Their rhetoric became more harsh and angry and separatist and eventually incited the good creatures of Narnia to take up arms and go to war. All of this was a great deception until in the end it did, in fact, lead to a Great War that became the end of the world of Narnia, and an end to the story. The deceiving spirit of Tash was exposed and the world imploded.

I feel that Lewis’ allegory has poignant parallels to where we are as a country. I feel the GOP has made a wager with its own soul and has in turn lost it. In an attempt to align itself with “god," the Republican Party has unwittingly aligned themselves with the other spirit. It has hitched its train to Trumpism and simultaneously TNT’d the bridge over the great divide. It has no unity message or vision of a united country—of a United States—that can work together, heal together, and live together. I am deeply troubled that so many professing Christians have listened to a man wearing a lion skin claiming to be "for their religion." His words and salesman tactics appeal to fear and scarcity; his tweets keep highlighting a divided and violent America. His shameless self-promotion, self-congratulation, and narcissistic concern for his ratings, rather than the pain and confusion of the American people, all deeply concern me. He has had more opportunity than almost any other president to unite instead of divide, to pastor instead of abuse, to comfort and express condolence—all of which would have engendered so much broad and bi-partisan support during such a public crisis as this year has proved to be. Any of these gestures would have secured him another four years, because they would have shown real people like you and me that he cares more about himself and more about just winning. Let us see a true leader—a self-sacrificing, self-deprecating, jovial leader—who reminds people of their humanity, generosity, and greatness. 

We need our imaginations captured by positive potential. We need someone who understands that negativity itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need someone who keeps putting words and images in front of our eyes that remind us of who we are truly capable of becoming: not just a bully nation feeling victimized by the world and destined to be on top again, but rather a builder of trust and cooperation and consensus. This is not everything’s-okay-Neville-Chamberlain-styled appeasement. This is post-WWII reconstruction. This is the same spirit that laid the foundation of global trade, where everyone’s in it together for the good of self, of country, and of others. We shall not echo again the voices of us-vs-them, of division, of pitting peoples against one another. There is dark power in that narrative, and we have seen where that narrative leads. The world has not forgotten the horrors of the twentieth century. We recommit to remembering and promoting the narratives that became the antidote. 

May we each see again—see this moment for what it is, see each other for the value that we all bring to the table, and see who we should vote for in this election. Now get out there and vote!