American & Christian

Do not say, "Why were the former days better than these?" For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. – Ecclesiastes 7:10 (NRSV) Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. – Isaiah 43:18 (NRSV)

Ok, I have held off now for months but I can do so no longer, I have to Muse about “The Donald.” His latest “position” on Muslims in the United States has pushed me over the edge. On the Huffington Post website his campaign press release read: "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” Add to this his call for a data base on all Muslims and a shutting down of all Mosques and I am fed up with his Islamaphobia and his lack of compassion, understanding and commitment to Christian and American values.

What is going on? How can so many people be supporting this idiot? Time and time and time again through US history we have tried to ban, round up, subjugate and “protect our citizens and our way of life” to have these efforts backfire or be condemned in light of the values we profess. Slavery, Chinese immigration laws of the 1880s, Japanese internment, etc are all failures of just the kind of thing Donald Trump and his supporters are advocating. All have been proven to be worthless and all are condemned as anti-Christian and anti-American because they violate our basic understanding of our country, our values, and our humanity.

I can only understand these extreme reactions if it is placed within the realm of fear and a flawed desire to somehow reclaim a nostalgic past where all was wonderful. That past never existed. Because of who we are there has never been a time when we could keep others out in order to protect ourselves because we are all others here. One of the reasons people began to migrate to this land in the 1600s was because of religious intolerance in their homelands. A founding principle of this country is that people should be free to practice their religion and that being a citizen of this country does not require you to profess any religious creed or doctrine that you don’t want to.

How can people support excluding others based on religion? It is fundamentally against everything that is truly American not be mention Christian. We are told by Jesus to love one another. We are told by Paul that there are neither Gentiles nor Jews. We are told by our founding documents that all people are created equal. This may be the ideal and it may never have been fully realized but these are our basic understandings and core values. When you talk about keeping a group of people out or about gathering them into ghettos or making them register or monitoring an entire faith group -does this sound familiar like maybe Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or Stalinist Russia or …? – you have given up what it means to be an American and a Christian.

Fear is easy to manipulate. Fear is easy to build upon. Fear is a strong emotion that kicks in all our reptilian instincts. Fear is a motivator for doing things you would never normally do. And fear is something manipulative people have drawn on to get groups to do things they would consider evil, abhorrent and beyond anything they would normally tolerate. I don’t think Donald Trump is smart enough to be deliberately manipulating the supports he has. I think he is just a scared, fearful and mean man who cares nothing for others and isn’t able to look at what he says and believes in a critical way. He is so narrow in his thinking, so limited in his compassion, so trapped in his billionaire fantasy land, and so out of touch with the world that he can only spout off ridiculous ideas that have no basis in reality and that would in fact do more harm than good.

I am proud of the fact that these United States have always tried to live by the words of the poem “New Colossus” on a plague on the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

We may have often times failed in our living out this dream, this call, this desire but it has been our beacon to the world and it helps to define who we are, what we believe and what we want our nation to be and set a standard for how we behave.

I don’t want to give Mr. Trump any more time or attention. I think his popularity is being driven by the media obsession with him and his ludicrous statements and preposterous positions. He makes good theater but he’s had his time in the spot light and we need to set this show aside. After all, only 35% of Republicans support him and only 23% of the US population is Republican. His views are not the views of a solid majority of Americans (according to the Wallstreet Journal), thank God!

Dear God, help me to be more tolerant of those I deem to be ignorant, mean, and narrow minded. Help me to live out my convictions and my faith. I pray for those been targeted and vilified. Help my nation to be the ideal we profess, a place that welcomes all. Amen.