On
the morning of Wednesday, November 5, 1980, I met with a half-dozen of my
friends outside our high school before first-period band. We passed around black strips of cloth and
safety pins and helped each other fasten them around our upper arms, as signs
of mourning and protest. Because the
night before our hopes had been dashed, our hopes to come of age in a world moving
toward peace, equality, and justice. A
right-wing extremist had been elected President of the United States.
Over
the next several months, I wrote a paper for my honors U.S. History course about
the prospects for dictatorship in our country.
The first part was a summary of a classic work on the rise of Fascism, Escape from Freedom, by Erich
Fromm. Fromm, a psychoanalyst, was not
interested in political history so much as in social psychology. He proposed that human beings have an innate and existential
need for freedom, a kind of spontaneous solidarity with others in love and work,
not on the basis of primal ties of family and race and tradition, but as creative
individuals. But, Fromm argued, modern social and
economic conditions sometimes frustrate and prevent individuality from
developing in this way. At the same
time, these conditions tear apart the primal bonds that used to make us
psychologically secure. Hanging
suspended in the void, between stunted individuality and the loss of primal ties,
people find freedom too much to bear. So
they give it away to an authoritarian figure.
Relieved of the burden of freedom, they experience it vicariously
through the strongman, the one who alone is magnificently free to say the unthinkable,
and do the unspeakable.
My
paper continued with a historical account of populist demagogues in the United
States during the period of the Great Depression, and then went on to a survey
of contemporary society. I described
economic decline and the resulting alienation and resentment, in the small
towns and the industrial working-class.
I noted the resurgence of nationalism and militarism, the manipulation
of public opinion through misinformation and propaganda, and the rise of a
reactionary political movement. And I
concluded my paper, not with a prediction, but with a warning, of a situation
taking shape that could lead to the end of our democracy.
After
last Tuesday night more people than ever are feeling that this is a real
possibility. And it is not hard to see
why. Even as he calls for national unity,
the President-elect has yet to pledge explicitly that he will defend the constitutional
rights of the vulnerable groups he threatened and bullied during his
campaign. He has not even condemned the
wave of celebratory hate crimes that has followed his election. But as
troubling as this is, I would urge us not to misunderstand. The majority of voters, who cast ballots for
Trump did not do so because they are more racist or misogynistic than the rest
of us. They are not longing for a
Fascist dictatorship. They disliked the
same aspects of his message and his personality as others did.
But
they were willing to hold their noses and vote for him because they are
desperate for social and economic change.
They have feel humiliated and afraid because of the long, relentless withering
of their future prospects and their communities while, as Americans, they
believe it is their birthright to be free.
Theirs was not a partisan decision--millions of them would have been
happier to vote for Bernie Sanders. But,
given the choice they had, Trump was the more revolutionary option. For all the symbolic significance of her sex,
Clinton was the candidate of more of the same.
And here we have to be completely honest. Under the leadership of the Clintons and
Obama some of the most troubling
signs of our country’s drift toward totalitarian rule—the fusion of government
and corporate power, the expansion of state secrecy and mass surveillance, the
continuation of a state of endless war, the concentration of wealth in the
hands of the few, the militarization of the police, and the criminalization of
the poor—became the policy of the Democratic Party.
Of
course, they are Republican policy too, and this is where Trump’s less rabid
supporters are deceived. The new
President will quickly learn the limits our Constitution places on his
power. And even if he truly desires,
which I suppose he might, to somehow turn back the clock on neoliberal globalization, the
leaders of his party in the Congress do not.
Unlike him, they have a legislative record, which shows how slavishly
they do the bidding of the corporate elite.
And this raises the prospect of a truly precarious moment that is still
to come—now that Sanders and Trump have raised the flag of revolution, what happens
in the vast sections of our country sinking into the red, when folks realize that
they’ve been fooled again?
Jesus
of Nazareth lived in a time of seething popular unrest, of repeated cycles of
revolutionary violence, and even more violent reprisals and repression. And he wasn’t especially optimistic about the
future of his nation. As he presciently said,
“the days will come when not a stone will be left upon a stone.” But under these conditions, for a brief time,
Jesus carried out a public campaign; a campaign to show the world for all time
what it looks like when the Spirit of God has set someone completely free. And because Jesus was free--of hate and
fear, of greed and self-pity, of the desire to dominate or submit, free of
misgivings about the goodness and compassion and wisdom of God, and free of
illusions about human beings, he was the most dangerous man alive.
Jesus
was hated and feared by the authorities.
And for good reason, because the people who became Jesus’ disciples, who
believed what he said and followed him to hear more, began to see that they also could be free. They also could come
alive with the Spirit of God, and become new people, free and spontaneous
individual agents of God’s new creation of the world. It wasn’t going to be easy. It’s never easy to let go of old identities,
old ties to family and tribe, and old religious certainties. It’s not easy to give up on social climbing,
on grasping after wealth and prestige, and the other things that make us feel
superior to others. It’s not easy to
write off the debts we think that we are owed.
It
is not easy to have faith that we are sons and daughters of God, who provides
for our every need, and will not allow one hair of our head to perish. It is not easy to trust that we are brothers
and sisters, meant to live together in repentance, forgiveness, and mutual love. It’s not easy to share all things in common, and
to give equal respect, and equal value, to our very different talents, and backgrounds,
and needs. No wonder so many people
didn’t get it. No wonder they preferred
to think that following Jesus meant championing a strongman who would make
Israel great again.
But instead
Jesus died. He died to pay the cost of freedom for others, which is what the word “redemption”
means. He rose again and sent his
disciples in his Spirit, to continue his public campaign of demonstrating what
freedom is. As the decades went on, and the
political violence went from bad to worse, the Jesus movement refused to take
sides in it, and for that they were despised by everyone. They rejected the demand to honor earthly rulers
in the place of God, and for this they were hunted. But it’s not like they didn’t have political
power—in a strange and unprecedented way, they did. It came from a promise that Jesus had
made to his disciples not long before he died: the promise that, even surrounded
by enemies, even standing, accused, before kings and governors, they would not
be alone: “I will give you words,” said Jesus, “and a wisdom that none of your
opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.” They might be in chains on their way to
execution, but speaking Christ’s words, they would have power. They would be free.
I wish
you all could have been with me in Sacramento last weekend at our church
Convention when the youth of our Diocese got up to speak. Their
adult and college-age leaders went first, but then, one after the other, the
fourteen and fifteen-year olds came up to the mike. They were hesitant at first, but seemed to
draw confidence from each other, as they gave their testimony. They had gone on pilgrimage last summer, some
to South Africa, others to Tule Lake here in Northern California, and in a vast
hall, in front of hundreds of their elders, they spoke passionately and
persuasively of what they had seen and heard and learned.
They
bore witness to the scars left on bodies and communities, and on the land, by
violence and injustice. They testified to
the persistence of pain, and the suffocation of denial, and of the
truth-telling and acknowledgment of wrong that is the first step toward
forgiveness. They spoke of the new life
that flows from reconciliation. They
spoke of being changed, of wanting to change, of wanting to make change happen. And believe it or not, they spoke of the
church--of how much it meant to them to be encouraged by their church to explore and
discover the Gospel as the healing power of the Spirit in the world, the power
to create community, and to be free.
.
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