Civility, Morality, and Christians During the Trump Era
In leftist Christianity, what's the correct response?
I tried to make myself write this article, prior to the near-certainty that Biden would be our next president, but I couldn’t until this past weekend. Since then, Trump seems to have been felled by a precarious election and the vestiges of our flawed, faux appearance at democracy. It took extreme methods, and of course, the court battles will continue to play out. Not that, as a leftist, I’m any huge fan of Biden, nor do I expect much out of him. But if you don’t see why people would celebrate the toppling of a far-right authoritarian when our country’s on the verge of overt fascism, maybe you’re veering toward the reactionary side yourself. Accelerationism isn’t as romantic as it seems.
Meanwhile, the divide of our country is stark: Biden and Trump BOTH received more votes in 2020 than any presidential candidate ever before in American history. Yes, it was, by both popular and electoral standards, overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. But 71 million people adored Trump enough to vote for him, and that’s a lot of people.
Many of us were simply horrified as we watched our Christian relatives stump for Trump (or worse, quietly support him even though I know they know better) and while people are lulled to a false sense of security under a “blue” president, the damage is extensive and Trumpism is far from over. QAnon people, Parler, and online news media with zero accuracy whatsoever still exist en masse.
I don’t have an answer for Trumpism. I have begged the few remaining conservative family members who still talk to me to turn from it. For the most part, they’re never-Trumpers. They’re solidly middle-class. Their identity is primarily in their Americanized Christianity, and their racism and sexism is rather internalized, not externalized: ignoring the existence of either, without directly contributing to it. But the part that offends them the most about Trump isn’t his beliefs, laws, or deeds — it’s his demeanor, his words. Which depresses me the most, because that’s the surface level of his treachery.
They are not concerned with morality, they’re concerned with civility. But being civil to Trump supporters hasn’t made them hate anyone less. One relative told me we needed “God’s rainbow of beautiful colors and many beliefs!” and I wanted to cringe. What part of God’s plan includes white supremacists and people hoarding billions of dollars while the majority of the world lives in war and poverty? Are you sure that’s just not YOUR plan, because it benefits YOU?
But then I remembered: these are the same people who find me and my two partners as disgusting and evil as systematically allowing Black people to be murdered by cops on the street. To these social conservatives, I am just as bad as racists, and it doesn’t matter how much I love my partners and how good we are. This is the result of fundamentalist Biblical illiteracy taken in an imperialist, controlling, old-fashioned context rather than a modern one. To them, I am sad, gross, misguided, misdirected, and mentally ill, rather than just a human being who happens to love more than one person.
When they announced on November 7th that Trump had lost, I posted a photo of myself in my only American shirt, a marijuana leaf stylized with the flag design, flipping off the camera. I posted the lyrics to NSYNC’s "Bye Bye Bye” in the caption. My mom was mad, and sent me a message that I was just as bad as Trump. I was uncivil. And civility is what’s most important to her.
A middle finger to a man who will never know I exist is, to her and other civility Christians, just as bad as forced hysterectomies on women in American concentration camps. I guess. And in that thought process, we should be nice to white supremacists, and nice when talking about them. Because that’s civil.
Civility, of course, is often secretly complicity. And when moderate, white, middle-class American Christians tell you to be civil to the people who would actively harm other people, they’re not being Christ-like: they’re being complicit.
The image of Jesus is one of non-violence, but he stood up to the violence. He didn’t perpetuate it, he didn’t participate in it, except once: when the church behaved too much like the empire. People paint the image that he was super, overly pacifistic, but that’s not quite it. They do the same to Martin Luther King, Jr., not understanding that non-violence is never, ever about silently accepting the status quo and being nice to the same enemies who want to murder you, but about standing up to it, even if they hurt you or kill you. Because they can’t hurt or kill us all.
People have confused civility for morality in Christianity. People like to point out problems in modern Christianity, and there are so many, but that’s probably the top of the list. We have become so complicit and so accustomed to silence, to shrugging our shoulders while horrible things happen to people around us.
In the heart of this, we keep watching people we know support and believe terrible things. For 71 million Americans, Trump was a necessity. But the inaction is what’s scary, and the lack of concern for the people around us on a systemic level. I don’t know how you fix it.
So what is the leftist response? Uprisings, destruction, and revolution aren’t the epitome of the nice, pacifist Jesus everyone loves. And just because Jesus overthrew the tables in the temple, well, he was God. How do I know in what situations that reaction is correct? Have I screamed and threatened my way into changing someone’s mind? Not yet, I haven’t. But nor have I gently, nicely convinced someone to stop being such a fucking capitalist racist pig.
I am more inclined to radical non-violent resistance than I am to arm myself and start shooting people. I don’t know if it’s possible to change systems without violence, but that’s the path I can take for myself. And my rage is okay. In the words of Tracy K. Smith, “‘Fuck you’ can be a love song.” This moment calls for fury and anger — directed at oppressors.
As for being nice to the enemy, I don’t know. The reason I want to be a leftist at all is because I’m sick and tired of people being without shelter, food, healthcare, water, and all the things they need to survive and thrive. That means I want everyone, including Nazis, to have medical care if they get sick. They shouldn’t have to earn it through some merit-based capitalist system. The same people that would see me dead are the same people I want to have a good, healthy life — if only they would step their boots off the necks of others.
Maybe the answer is balance. You can offer someone bread with one hand, but be prepared to stop them from hurting someone with the other one. I don’t know how to radicalize people, because I feel like thus far, I have entirely failed. I have to figure out how to keep trying.
One thing I know for sure: there’s no such thing as a moderate Christ, and therefore there should be no such thing as a moderate Christianity. At a certain point, you have to choose morality over civility.