Like so many of us, the chaos, cruelty and carelessness coming out of the White House over the past several months has left me anxious, afraid and agitated. The relentless cascade of statements, actions and punishments has made it incredibly difficult to maintain a spiritual and emotional balance. As hard as it has been to deal with all that, I experienced an internal pivot this past weekend when I read that the President has directed the state Senate of Texas to gerrymander its Congressional districts to basically guarantee the election of five Republicans and at the same time reduce if not eliminate the prospect of electing Democrats; and in the same news cycle fired Erika Lee McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, because the July jobs report was embarrassing to Mr. Trump.These two actions broke open in me an awareness that the President and his confederates are taking all the steps necessary to implement a totalitarian state.
Like many of us, I have chafed under the threats to democracy, but always emerged with the thought, if not the conviction, that it can’t happen here. That our democracy is too rooted, our commitment to fairness under the law is too deep, our allegiance to the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – is so strong that the many freedoms we enjoy could not be taken away.
But they are – consistently, relentlessly, and shamelessly.
Like many of us, I grieve this transition. Beneath all my feelings and reactions, which are hard to work through and sort out, is the realization that the fundamental component of a totalitarian state is that there is no vision; there is only domination. Vision gets lost – or is systematically crushed. Winners and losers become a binary way of operating and thinking. MAGA – Make America Great Again – is not a vision. It is a slogan, which is increasingly invoked to reward winners, which turns out to be anyone who supports the President; and punish losers, anyone who dares to challenge him. Adding to my grief and fear about all this is the recognition that a sizable cohort of the Christian world subscribes to this notion of dominance. The well-funded New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is a growing confederation of Christian churches which are committed to a seven-mountain strategy: dominating the areas of religion, family, education, government, media, business and the arts. In the NAR view, President Trump has ascended to the summit of two mountains – government and media; there are only five more to go. A frightening and dangerous prospect, which Project 2025 has sought to implement.
There is growing energy to fight against the onslaught of totalitarianism. That is important and necessary. At the same time it is even more urgent to fight against the temptation to have our psyches co-opted by the remarks and actions of the President. His postures and policies can be a malevolent lure, causing us to be caught up in our outrage and fear, thus rendering us less able to reflect and act.
And we need to fight for those who are being subjugated, punished, banished and ridiculed. We do that by standing with them, standing up for them, all the while listening to their stories of oppression, pain and fear. Building relationships. And passing those stories on and making them known. Those stories became a critical foundation of a vision. And there is an urgency to engage in public liturgy – liturgy being an Anglicized word for the Greek combination of laos – people, and ergos – work; work of the people. Liturgy is the public processing of pain. Liturgy takes us beyond protest, which is a critique of what is happening, to vision – what we are called to be.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18 King James Version) America is a country that is built on a vision, perhaps best expressed near the beginning of the Declaration of Independence: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. For 249 years the country has struggled to not only live into Thomas Jefferson’s vision, but to expand it to include women, people of color, immigrants – the full range of the human family. The words and actions of the President and his team appear to want to shut that down.
A guiding vision for me over the years is expressed in the opening verses of John’s Gospel: “what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John 1:4 NRSV) Some would say that John’s vision is limited to those who claim a relationship with Jesus. I understand the Gospel writer to be embracing a vision of light and life, and while I claim Jesus as my primary source for that light and life, I am aware that most, if not all, of the world’s major religions invite people into light and life, but through a different doorway.
A vision proposes light and life beyond how we are currently experiencing the world and our place in it. We need to hold on to that vision, and to proclaim it at every opportunity. History has demonstrated that claiming a life-giving vision has the capacity to thwart the surge of totalitarian power.
