Faith Communities: Blessing or Curse

         The President has already rounded second base in his campaign of public disenchantment with the news media. The Pew Research Center reports "a quarter of American adults (26%) haven't read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form."  Worse, some 29% of adults, ages 50 and older, also haven't read a book in the past year"  

   
          Add to this the finding of the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy that thirty-four million adults can't read at all and twenty-one percent read at only the 5th grade level and you can believe the President recognizes the roots of this "natural" constituency and is calculating carefully when he teaches the evangelicals (25-35 percent of faith communities according to Pew) to put their trust in him because like them, he is chosen!

           While the fall of Mike Flynn as director of the NSA shows the not so invisible hand of the intelligence agencies at work, it is no guarantor of their future results because the obsessions of President Trump include this large measure of calculation aimed at both voters and the apparatchik of Washington.

           The biggest potential obstacle to the Trump advance along the base paths should be the faith communities, especially faith groups that have realized that the idea of "chooseness" is more liability than asset.  Shedding that liability means cleaning up some commonplace illusions; one of them being the high degree of believer self-regard that turns the god idea into a personal possession. This personal "get out of jail free" theology guarantees deliverance even when righteousness has not been practiced.  

           If it is fair to say that the rise of Trumpism represents the greatest threat to democratic institutions since the civil war 150 years ago, it is important also to say that it was the long stand of faith communities for Abolition that set the moral stage for Emancipation. Such faith groups weren't in the majority, but standing against slavery and for Abolition put them into the long arc of justice. It was their vocation.

          What is not yet clear today is whether new energies in the faith communities will now take an immovable righteous stand for the human rights of all their immigrant neighbors.      

            Bear in mind that the pivotal part of the Trump era authoritarian anti-media stance counts on the passivity of faith communities whose first loyalty is usually to their institutions.  Even more liberal segments among the faithful think it's an emergency when the church roof blows off but not an emergency if democracy might fall or racism continuies to be tolerated because it's too political to talk about.

           Also bear in mind that much is required of People of the Book. The Trump game won't change even if Trump falls sooner rather than later. His success demeaning the news media is attracting understudies who will take his place for at least four more, maybe eight more years of near total Right wing control; long enough to establish a new autocracy and send discouraged people of faith back to the old self-regarding faith in a god acting just for them.

            Today's Trump order (2/21/17) requiring ICE to arrest any undocumented person they encounter should be the end of such cheap grace.  As if floating on a metaphorical raft in the Mediterranean millions of our immigrant neighbors face mass deportation. Blocking ICE's path may divide faith groups, impair annual budgets, but it can give fresh definition to people of the book by defining righteousness and its requirements: loving justice, doing mercy, walking humbly. [Micah 6:8]

The Long March

        Even as the Trump administration in its first thirty days self-destructs unassisted, a recovery of footing can be expected from a party in control of Congress, thirty-two state houses and 34 governorships and in a position to shape the Supreme Court.  The good news is that this Republican supremacy will face the same turbid sea of quandaries their Democratic party rivals famously failed to resolve.  In the Republican victory the seeds of their defeat are already growing; witness their discovery that the Affordable Health Care Act—Obama Care—is turning out to be very difficult to replace. Immediately, they’ve been faced with tumultuous town meetings and something worse from a Republican perspective: given the enormous inequality across the country it is impossible to deliver health care for all without state and federal subsidies drawn either from cost reductions or tax revenues. 

Of course who believes our new leaders want health care equity for all?  Many Republican states (and maybe also some Democratic ones) will be thinking about reducing benefits to lower income families by increasing deductibles; which will simply mean in the preferred language of the new head of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, you will have health care “access” when and if you can afford it. That’s why they’ll call it win=win.

            

             Both parties face this impending catastrophic predicament as a huge and growing inequality problem engulfs the country and the world. According to Oxfam the richest eight men in the world have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity.  This road ahead for all of American politics and both parties is full of deeply seated negatives involving the declining standards of living for eighty percent of the population and pervasive racial inequality.   

Demos, a public policy organization advocating equality in democratic practice, released a study lasrt week on “The Asset Value of Whiteness” reporting that  “according to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, the median white household possessed $13 in net wealth for every dollar held by the median black household in 2013. That same year, median white households possessed $10 for each dollar held by the median Latino household. “

Black adults with at least some college had $11,100 in wealth at the median, Latino adults had $20,500 in wealth at the median….dwarfed by the $79,600 in median wealth held by whites who attended at least some college.

          These mountainous inequities make the Trump era seem like a nasty blip compared with the longstanding failure of American politics over centuries to do the right thing. Neither the old parties: Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Bull Moose Progressives, nor the new Democrats from Wilson to FDR to the Clintons changed this pattern.  It amounts to a global ticking bomb feeding new dictatorships from Turkey to Syria to African nations to ISIS and an age of terrorism. Or, in this week’s (3/14/17) suggestion of Times columnist David Brooks, it could mean rule by Kleptocracy.

           The American mind has always been on something else: getting ahead, getting a little better off, if not more so—all the while embracing the permission our theology of exceptionalism gives us.

It’s a lie, one that gives sway to new generations of political liars. 

           Put another way, while our demise may be imminent it is not inevitable.  Thoughtful resistance to these negatives must go to the heart of our American disease of “great” and we must teach each other, learn together as a priority in neighborhood community action groups, activist congregations and among marchers in the streets.    

            We are therefore best advised to re-tool, make all our associations places of talk, study and strategic action planning so that we give birth to a new story about ourselves as advocates for our brother’s and sister’s welfare around the world.   The problem ultimately is not with Trump but with us.