Downward Trajectory

Cistercian Abbey of Mount St. Bernard. Photo by Financial Times.

A weird thought from the theologically-minded Elizabeth Bruenig, having dinner with some  evangelical Trump supporters in a small town an hour or so from Dallas during Easter week, in a big article in the Washington Post last week:

In some sense it seemed that Trump is able, by being less Christian than your average Christian, to protect Christians who fear incursions from a hostile dominant culture. But that paradox also supplies a handy solution to the question of whether Christians should direct their efforts to worldly politics or turn inward, shunning political life for spiritual pursuits. By voting for Trump — even over more identifiably Christian candidates — evangelicals seem to have found a way to outsource their fears and instead reserve a strictly spiritual space for themselves inside politics without placing evangelical politicians themselves in power. In that sense, they can be both active political agents and a semi-cloistered religious minority, both of the world and removed from it, advancing their values while retreating to their own societies.

It's like only Nixon being able to go to China without freaking out the rightwingers because his anti-communism was such a certain thing, or maybe the mirror image of that; the very extremity of Trump's worldliness, his open worship of money and sex and himself and his total lack of compassion, makes him the man who can achieve their aims or delay their downfall without corrupting any "good" people in the process. Since they believe all secular life is rotten with corruption it will take corruption on the grand scale to get it done, and he's corrupt enough already.

And again, since we're all sinners, why would it be such a big deal for the president to be one? Trump's just incapable of hiding it, which makes him paradoxically the most honest of us all. Sure he's lying to us all the time, but he doesn't expect us to believe him. And sure, he has unacceptable ideas, but who doesn't?

“Basically,” [Trump-supporting, retired accountant] Joe argued, “Trump is everyone, without the filters. I’m sure at some time you’ve thought some horrible things, but you had a filter there to keep you from saying it.”

“But is that a defense?” [his Trump-opposing attorney son] Daniel asked.

“No, that’s just —”

“A fact to you?”

“Just an explanation of why. I mean, he is a raw personality with all filters removed. . . . I think he pretty much exemplifies this sin that we all carry with us. He just doesn’t know how to repress it.”

And so on (Bruenig is a lot better at recognizing what's meaningful than The New York Times in their Pennsylvania diner).

The first president the Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress ever voted for, he tells Bruenig, was the devout and virtuous Jimmy Carter, who disappointed him by ignoring the agenda; the second was the Hollywood divorcé Ronald Reagan, who didn't. Trump is more immoral than Reagan could have even imagined, and the evangelicals know that. But not only is he tough and unscrupulous enough to  deliver on that agenda, in spite of his own notoriously unchaste life, he seems to want, for whatever unfathomable reasons, to give it to them, in Supreme Court justices and executive orders. He's tough enough, sinner as he is, but he's their sinner:

Back and forth like this, on and on: the Green New Deal, taxes, climate change, abortion, with Joe holding that Trump’s essential toughness set him apart from the other slick, polished Republican alternatives, and Daniel pressing as to whether that belligerent approach to politics really accomplishes evangelical goals. “Trump accepts evangelicals,” Joe said, unlike the Democrats.

If that's the explanation, it seems to me rational, though scary. It suggests a big population sector that is not committed to majoritarian democracy, or at least that wants to be able to segregate itself, on a state-by-state basis, from the fornicating majority, rejecting its abortion clinics and trans-friendly bathrooms, at any cost to constitutional rule, because that's what God wants, and they don't think they should let go, though they have little hope of arresting the general decadence of their world:

“As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns,” [Jeffress] explained. “If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. . . . I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. . .”

It sounds as if they might be prepared for war,  but equally or more as if they might be prepared for the kind of self-segregation practiced by Mennonites or preached by Rod Dreher, a "Benedictine option", a quietist withdrawal after the inevitable failure of this last, crazy, monumental effort.