What Role for the Church in Trump’s World?

I’m trying to not write, all the time, about the national political situation. But today I will, though coming to it by the route of a biblical story. One of the best: Read it yourself at II Samuel 12: 1 – 14.

It is the story of a king, David, who has done an evil thing, and a prophet, Nathan, who tells the king the truth about what he has done. Nathan does it with great cleverness.

What David did was take Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and have his way with her, resulting in her being pregnant. Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, a soldier, is off on the front lines in David’s service. To cover himself, David orders Uriah home from the front that he may spend time with Bathsheba. Out of loyalty to his compatriots at the front, Uriah refuses such comfort. So David’s fallback is to arrange to have Uriah killed in battle, thus making Bathsheba a widow and available to become his wife. David, the Golden Boy of David-and-Goliath days, had sunk low, very low.

Nathan doesn’t confront David directly. Instead he tells the king the story of two men, one a rich man and one a poor man, living in the land. The poor man’s only wealth, his greatest joy was a little lamb, “who was like a daughter to him.” While the rich man had herds of sheep and lambs aplenty, he seized the poor man’s lamb, butchered it, and served it to a guest he wished to impress.

Hearing Nathan’s story, David is enraged at the callous deed of the rich man. David declares, “This man shall die,” at which point Nathan says to David, “Thou art the man.” To David’s credit, he acknowledges and confesses his egregious sin. And while he is forgiven, there will still be consequences. (That’s how it is, forgiveness does not erase the consequences of evil deeds.) While David shall live, others shall suffer and die because of his deceit and failure. (That’s also how it is, at least often: the innocent suffer for others’ evil.)

Today this story is being re-enacted. The poor man being Ukraine and its leader, President Zelensky. They are not only the poor man. They may well turn out to be the lamb, offered as a feast for the powerful guest, Vladimir Putin — he who the rich man, Trump, longs to flatter and entertain. Trump has dared to impugn Zelensky as a “dictator,” which is rich as Trump seems to be just fine with other dictators (e.g. Russia, China, North Korea). Even worse, Trump has suggested that Ukraine started this war.

So who will be Trump’s Nathan? In all likelihood, no one. For three revealing reasons.

First, the religious right has, like the Republicans, caved to Trump long ago. Among the religious with access, Trump has no prophet to hold him to account. The religious right has traded any claim to the prophetic office, one that answers to God alone. That trade was for partisan politics, which answers to an earthly leader, party, and ideology.

The church’s role is not an apolitical one. The church’s role is to be prophetic, challenging all abuses of power (of the right or the left). What the church must not do is surrender its independence by promoting a partisan political agenda. The evangelical churches and their leaders have failed in just this regard. Yet there are exceptions. One is Russell Moore, now the editor of Christianity Today magazine, which was founded in the 1960s by Billy Graham. Another evangelical Christian who is a Nathan today is David French, columnist at The New York Times.

Second reason: Trump will never do what David did, namely acknowledge his sin and repent. Donald Trump is a man who long ago perfected his key tactics: meet any accusation with a counter-accusation; answer all criticism with no-holds-barred attack on the critic; lie, lie, and lie again, and never admit to any wrong-doing or mistake. We thought Jesus was the only one who was “without sin.” Turns out Trump, at least in his own eyes, is also “without sin.”

Which means, and this brings us to the third reason that this David has no Nathan, is that we today, for a host of reasons, are without a shared moral language or values. As recently as the Civil Rights movement, we were a culture that had a common language, a shared story and values held in common — like the rule of law, the rights and dignity of each individual, and the promise, despite our failings, of America. Martin Luther King Jr. could appeal to these values, to this story. He could reference a biblical theme or story like that of David and Nathan and people knew what he was talking about. No longer.

Trump, bottom line, is a nihilist, that is, it is all about power and power alone. “God,” said Nietzsche in declaring the advent of nihilism, “is dead.” There is only “the will to power.” Trump embodies the “will to power.”

Is there any ground for hope? I think Nietzsche was wrong. God is not dead. We live in a moral universe. And though it hardly seems so today, “The arc of history bends toward justice,” to quote Martin Luther King Jr. Though many have bowed the knee to nihilism (nothing matters, there is no truth, only power), there are many — more than you know — who have not bowed the knee. There are many — more than I know — for whom right and wrong, true and false, good and evil mean something.

The nihilism that is at Trump’s core stands revealed in his willingness to sell out Zelensky and Ukraine — no matter the price and to lie as he does it. The rich man will, it appears, slaughter the poor man’s lamb for the guest he wishes to flatter and entertain, namely, Putin. Yet, as St. Paul wrote, “God is not mocked.” There will be a reckoning. But it may well be like that story of David, who while he did not die for his sin, saw others suffer and die as a consequence of the evil he had done.