Building Walls instead of Bridges

I simply do not know what to say about Donald Trump. I grew up in a home where what was going on in the world and in the nation was talked about regularly at the dinner table. Politics was often a spirited discussion between my father, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and conservative in almost all his opinions and positions, and my mother who I realized was a lot less ideological and more liberal. He didn’t have much good to say about President Roosevelt and Eleanor but she liked them a lot. Dad used to brag that the first words I spoke as a toddler were “Wendell Wilkie”, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1940 election, an election FDR won handily. I still have his Republican campaign lapel pin bearing Wilkie’s picture from that election. Robert Taft, Harold Stassen, Earl Warren, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Nelson Rockefeller, were familiar names to me listening to my father and they were men of dignity, intelligence and civility.  Mother was a nominal Republican but in 1960 she switched. She loved JFK, Jackie and the whole Kennedy ethos. There were, I recall, vigorous conversations about the Richard Nixon – John F. Kennedy contest in 1960. I asked her, “Did you vote for him?” “Of course I did,” she responded,” but I didn’t tell your father.” I grew up seeing the world though the lens of the 1950’s -60’s Republican Party. It was John Kennedy, the optimism of the New Frontier, the Peace Corps, the high call to service – “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” – that inspired me at the very moment I was deciding what to do with the rest of my life, inspires me still, and made me leave my father’s politics.

And yet, I grew up assuming that Republicans and Democrats, like my parents, were partners in managing the nation, that Congress was the place where ideology evolved into governance, and that the whole deal depended on civility, respect, and compromise.

I am astonished at what has happened in 2016. Jacob Weisberg, author of a book on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, wrote about Reagan in the New York Times recently. “He supported amnesty for illegal immigrants, advocated gun control, used Keynsian stimulus to jump start the economy, favored personal diplomacy even with the nation’s sworn enemies, and instituted tax increases in six out of the eight years of his presidency.” In short, Reagan, who was deeply, ideologically conservative, was also a pragmatist, willing to compromise in the process of governing. Dad died before Reagan was elected but I know he would have loved him.

Then Weisberg turns to the current Republican presidential candidates, each one of whom invokes Ronald Reagan as a patron saint but who have turned Reagan’s party into “a swamp of negativism, ideological extremism, and pessimism about the nation’s future, in direct opposition to Reagan’s example.” The have “transformed primary season into a reality show of insults, betrayals and open feuds.”

I simply do not know what to  make of Donald Trump, and the biggest mystery of all is that Evangelical Christian voters are overwhelmingly Trump supporters. The February 23 issue of Atlantic put it starkly: “How did a twice-divorced, casino owning New Yorker  who curses during speeches and is prone to church-related gaffes such as putting cash into the communion plate, win in a state (South Carolina) where seven in ten Republican voters are white evangelicals?” The author of the article argues that evangelicals, who claim to vote on the basis of Christian morality, have become, “‘nostalgia voters’, a culturally and economically disaffected group that is anxious to hold onto a white, conservative culture that is passing from the scene.”

Each Republican candidate, with varying degrees of authenticity, wraps himself in the mantle of Evangelical Christianity, and Trump famously calls himself a Presbyterian – which makes this Presbyterian cringe. The Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church(USA) says that Donald Trump’s name is not on the membership role of any congregatIon in the denomination. Pope Francis got it right when he pointed to the obvious, “building walls instead of bridges is not Christian.” Jesus was not laying out a detailed political strategy plan for governing in the Sermon on the Mount but he did say things like;

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you..
If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also..
Do good..be merciful…do not judge…do not condemn..
Forgive and you will be forgiven.

And then, according to St. Luke;
“Why do you call me Lord,
and do not do what I tell you?”

The Bible  does not lay out a plan for governing nations or dealing with complex international realities like Iran, ISIS, North Korea, and Syria, but it does provide moral guidance that can be the basis for how we strive to live our lives, spend our resources, cast our ballots, a basis for how we treat other people, a moral foundation built on hospitality toward the stranger, helping the poor, including the excluded, and humility in all of life’s situations.

Heeding the teachings of Jesus is the precise opposite of boasting, bullying, name calling, threatening, appealing to our lowest instincts – anger, fear and greed, rather than our highest. It surely doesn’t include rounding up the strangers in our midst, regardless of how they got here, and sending them back to the countries and communities from which the escaped, and building a wall to keep them out.