Being Honest About What Is Happening in the United States Is Essential to Making It Stop

This week, I published two new columns on Verdict.  Here, I will summarize both columns and add a few thoughts to supplement what awaits readers who click on the links.  As I will note below, this is all in the service of trying to find a way back from the wilderness in which the people of the United States now find themselves. 

I used most of yesterday's column, "What Would Jesus Do? Law, Religion, and Patriotism Through the Looking Glass," to criticize House Speaker Mike Johnson's blasphemous response to the Episcopalian Bishop of Washington.  I began that piece on a different topic, however, ridiculing Senator Lindsey Graham, who outright admitted that Donald Trump broke the law but then offered an odd defense that boiled down to: "Eh, he won the election.  What, you think he should obey the law?!"  It is especially depressing to remind oneself that Graham is not even close to being the most obtuse or shameless Republican in the Senate.

But the bulk of yesterday's column involved a return to a subject that has been fascinating to me for quite some time now: the sheer heresy of the Christian right.  I took a deep dive into this area in September 2023, writing two columns (here and here) in response to the news from a former Southern Baptist leader that non-Trumpy evangelical ministers had been receiving pushback from some parishioners for being pro-scripture.  Say what?

In my primary example, one minister had apparently used the phrase "turn the other cheek" during a sermon, only to be scolded by an angry pro-Trump congregant for mouthing a "liberal talking point."  When the minister replied that he was literally quoting scripture (specifically the Sermon on the Mount, which was delivered by, you know, Jesus), the response was, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak."

Although that was plenty bad, last week's outburst by Johnson -- who angrily asserted that Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde's call for mercy toward our weak and scared fellow children of God was "radical ideology" -- was worse.  It is one thing, after all, to find out that some ignoramuses in the pews neither know nor care about the teachings of their supposed lord and savior Jesus Christ.  That is bad, but those hateful types have always existed and will always be happy to hide their evil intentions behind religion.  Johnson is worse, because he claims to be very familiar with Christian teaching and says piously that the Bible is essentially his manual for governing.  But the very essence of the manual of Christianity -- the New Testament -- is now seen to be inconvenient for the avowed theocrat who is third in line to the Presidency.

In the first of those 2023 columns, I summarized my own religious upbringing as the son of a Presbyterian minister.  Even though I eventually chose not to be religious, I am at least aware enough of the faith to know what is supposed to matter.  With Johnson's outburst, I now have to ask: Am I -- an avowed atheist -- more of a Christian than some of the most prominent Christians in the country?  How did that happen?  Life is odd.

I will add one further thought about Johnson's response.  Suppose that a so-called Christian wanted to take Trump's side in the aftermath of Bishop Budde's soft-spoken plea to Trump.  I have no idea why one would want to do that, but stay with me here, please.  Rather than trashing one's own religious doctrine, it would have been rather easy to use other Trumpian lies to craft a slimy response.  For example, why not grab onto Trump's claim that all of the people seeking a better life in the United States are cold-blooded killers, and then say that the truly merciful and Jesus-y thing to do is to worry about the poor innocent victims?

I am obviously not saying that anyone should buy that answer, but it has to be better than what Johnson did, which was to obediently parrot Trump's political attack on Bishop Budde and throw Christian ideals out the window.

In other words, Johnson and the many others on the Christian right who lobbed similar attacks at Bishop Budde made two revealing choices.  First, they decided to attack a person who had called on Donald Trump to reconsider his harmful choices in the name of Christ's teachings, teachings that lie at the very center of their religion.  Second, they did so unnecessarily, because there was another approach -- equally dishonest and venal, to be sure, but at least nominally pro-Christ rather than abandoning "this woke Jesus guy" -- that they either considered and rejected or that never occurred to them at all.  How damning.

Today's Verdict column, "Respecting the Haters, But Not the Hate," picked up on yesterday's column by adding that Johnson and his co-believers also seem to have no problem with the Trump administration's recent order for immigration agents no longer to respect the safe havens of hospitals, schools, and churches.  That news again is that the Christian right's favorite heretic has used his power to violate the sanctity of religious sanctuaries, and the religious folk are fine with it.

The remainder of today's column uses the Trumpists' abandonment of their professed beliefs (both secular in the form of "law and order" and sacred in the form of religious piety) to ask why those voters who supported Trump did so.  If the explanation that they have been pushing is bunk, what is the true story?

In particular, I returned to a point that I made at length in a Dorf on Law column shortly after the 2024 election, which is that it is in fact disrespectful for political commentators to say that Trump's voters were worried about things like grocery prices and thus should not be blamed for having voted for a clear and present danger to the country -- or even short of blaming them, simply pointing out what those voters did.  Indeed, the insta-conventional wisdom was one step worse, because it was based on the idea that some people are too slow or bored even to know what they were doing when they voted.

When I wrote in today's Verdict column that I respected the haters, I meant that I do not think that they are stupid, or that they are children, or that they are unaware of the implications of their choices.  It was especially important to point out that the exit polls that show Trump voters having blamed grocery prices should not be taken at face value.  After all, at least for now (!), people are still rightly embarrassed to say to a pollster that they voted for Trump because he will hurt the people that his voters hate.  It is much more strategic to say, "I'm hurt by the price of eggs, so I voted for Trump" -- even though Trump never (even during the campaign) gave anyone a reason to think that he could reduce grocery prices.

As a final point, I will add here that the now-accepted story -- that Trump's voters were the victims of a bad economy and thus are not to be blamed or vilified -- has a telling logical gap.  Specifically, it begs the question: Why didn’t everyone freak out?  That is, if "I voted for Trump and ignored the obvious threat that he posed because I'm hurting" is a reasonable excuse, we need to know why Trump did not win in a landslide.  Fewer than half of the votes in that election were cast for Trump, and many millions more people did not vote at all.  Were they living in places where the price of bacon had not gone up?

Again, for all the talk about grocery prices, why did tens of millions of people -- who also "sit around the kitchen table and worry about the future" -- not buy Trump's line of shinola?  Conservatives often disparage people who talk about the "root causes" of crime by saying that plenty of people have terrible childhoods but do not grow up to be mass murderers, with that retort supposedly proving that soft-hearted liberals are giving bad people a free pass.

That is nonsense, of course, because the debate in US criminal law policy has never seen the non-hardliners say that people who commit crimes should go unpunished or even that they should be allowed to continue to do their worst.  The "but consider the full context" plea is always about tempering the degree of punishment, especially as a response to those (like Trump, of course) who always call for the death penalty.

Here, however, we are being told that merely criticizing Trump's voters for electing a man who is manifestly unfit for public office is inappropriate and even elitist.  What do we expect those pour souls to do?  How dare anyone expect them to do the same thing that more than half of the citizens in the country did, which was to understand that Trump offered no solutions to real problems and was obviously going to engage in a presidency of vengeance?  How highfalutin and patronizing for anyone to say that support for Trump was not a sincere response to "the economy"!

As it happens, this argument tees up my next Verdict column, which I hope to publish next week.  Having the clarity of knowing what truly happened in the 2024 election is the first, necessary step toward any possible future return of decency and the rule of law.  No one should imagine that any such comeback will be easy, but as a starting point, it is essential to be honest with ourselves about what just happened.