Trump’s America

There are a lot of people, probably mostly liberals, who are really quite shocked to find us where we are in America today. How did a terrible man like Trump become our President? This is not who we are as a country!

I think this sort of thinking requires a denial of the reality of United States history, both in the long view and in the more recent. Trump is, in many ways, the quintessential American President. Trump is America with the mask of politeness taken off and discarded.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about Trump that is so American is the racism. While we love to think of America as the "melting pot" of cultures, we're a nation pretty much founded on white supremacy. We were created by the genocide of indigenous Americans, and built by the forced labor of people stolen from Africa. The White House (so appropriately named) itself, the home of our nation's leader, as pointed out not too long ago by Michelle Obama, was built by slave labor. I myself am fond of reminding people that the founding fathers were made up of two groups: rich white men who loved Black slavery, and rich white men for whom Black slavery wasn't a deal breaker.

Trump’s sexism is also very American. We became an independent nation in 1776, but women weren't federally given the right to vote until 1920, nearly a century and a half later. (Oh, and that was only white women, of course.) And voting is just one right of many denied women; the right to own property, the right to have a bank account separate from their husbands, the right to not be discriminated against for employment or housing? All of those came later. Of course, one of the most important rights, the right to be able to control their own bodies and their reproductive choices? That one's still up in the air, as women are effectively given less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

What else defines Trump? Xenophobia? I would call it selective xenophobia, as ICE raids places known to have immigrants with black and brown skin, but makes no moves against communities of undocumented white immigrants. We build a wall on our southern border, but largely ignore undocumented immigrants coming across the northern border. Why? Well, those immigrants are white, aren't they? I may be wrong, but I believe the very first law in the United States limiting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, because we can't have non-Europeans in the U.S., can we? Of course before that, when the United States won a large portion of the southwest from Mexico in the mid-19th century, Mexicans in those territories were assured on paper that they would be American citizens, but apparently in practice, most of them were driven off the land, deprived of property and rights. America has never been keen on accepting non-Europeans, so Trump’s xenophobia is really nothing new.

Oh, and putting the rights and needs of rich people over those of the poor and middle class? That's just capitalism, which has also always been us. White capitalists have always ruled this country, and pretty much every President has been at least a millionaire. Bigotry against LGBTQ people? That's a western cultural norm. We used to (really still do) have laws against them existing, and barely have half a century of progress towards equality, but conservatives will constantly make up stories about how drag queens and transgender women are attacking children despite the fact that the observed reality is that the people children have to fear are religious leaders and their own parents.

This unfortunate conglomeration of lies and bigotry is what America is, has always been, and it's that reality that Trump represents. Can we change? I hope so, and so do many other Americans. But no politicians from either of the two major political parties seem to be willing to make those changes. I believe it's going to take a major shake up of the status quo that's going to require either some restrategizing in the Democratic party, or a rejection of the outdated Democratic party for a newer, more progressive set of politicians. Really, it may take a revolution of some sort, because the status quo needs to be completely rejected, and that's hard to accomplish.

If you, like me, don't want Trump’s America, then don't wait for voting in the midterms in 2026. Start strategizing now, and pushing for changes that can happen now. It's going to take a fight to reverse 250 years of history, but it's not impossible if we put in the work.

Adultery in one's heart

Father Nathan Monk just did a piece focusing on a passage that's always been a confusing one for me. The Sermon on the Mount has a section in it where Jesus goes over a lot of sins, and he takes time on each one to further clarify the meaning and severity of these sins. What Jesus says about adultery has always been of particular interest to me:

Matthew 5:27 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."

It's interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One of them is personal; lust has, to be honest, been one of my biggest weaknesses throughout most of my life. The other issue is that I find the typical Christian interpretation of this passage to be confusing; is it literal or hyperbolic? Perhaps not surprisingly, these two issues end up being quite intertwined.

Starting with the interpretation issue for those not familiar with the Christian take on this passage, it's like this: verse 28 is totally literal, 29 and 30 are completely hyperbolic. Now while it's good that Christians aren't literally encouraging people to maim themselves over temptation, it seems strange to me this sudden change of gears in just one verse. Why is 28 literal when the rest is not? It seems strange for Jesus to make a jump like that, right in the middle of a thought.

This is where my particular flavor of temptation to lust comes in, and has been a point of contention between me and several pastors. Yes, I have had a problem with lust, but look at how Jesus talks about it in verse 28: "...anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." If this is literal, there are problems both generally and particular to my own flavor of lust. Generally, the problem is that adultery in Judaism is a capital offense, so if you've literally committed adultery, you should be stoned to death, and so should the woman you lusted after! Does anyone believe that makes sense? Because it logically follows if you're taking it literally. As for my own lust, it has been my tendency that when I see an attractive person, I might be likely to imagine them naked, but I almost never fantasize about having sex with them; I just want to appreciate their attractiveness, and while I admit it is indeed lust, am I really "committing adultery in my heart" so to speak?

This is part of the problem of taking it literally: Jesus does seem to be saying that it's the act of fantasizing sex that is the problem, yet we get told that looking at someone naked is a problem in itself. I strongly disagree, as I am quite capable of looking at nude people without it being sexual at all. Even when I look at someone nude and do feel that I'm lusting after them, it's usually not fantasizing about sex, so does verse 28 apply? A literal interpretation of verse 28 is, in my opinion, really far too problematic. That's not to say that Jesus isn't saying something important about lust, or that lust isn't necessarily a sin in itself, but making it the exact equivalent of adultery? It doesn't hold water as far as I'm seeing.

So why do Christians want to make that leap to literal interpretation? I think a lot of conservative Christians have this desire to take the Bible as literally as possible...but not encourage cutting off hands or gouging out eyes, I guess? As I've heard it said many a time, cutting off your hand will maybe stop you from masturbating, but lust is in your brain, and you can't cut that off. I think there's more hyperbole going on in the Bible than a lot of conservative Christians give credit, even--and maybe especially--in the words of Jesus.

Agnostic Theism

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about a crisis of faith that was induced by a very powerful email sent to me by Steve Wells, the editor of the Skeptics’ Annotated Bible. If you don't care to follow the link and read it, the short version is that he claims followers of God are a lot like Trump supporters: it doesn't seem to matter what the object of adoration actually does, it's somehow all excusable because we just have faith he's terrific.

I see this in Trump supporters, but as a Christian who is appalled at Trump’s politics and personal life, it's jarring to see that sort of misplaced devotion framed with God at the center. It's especially jarring because really, he's right. Christians are going to do that; it's sort of our thing, isn't it?

There's a lot of unsavory stuff in the Bible, but we just assume God had a good reason for drowning everyone in the story of Noah. There's a lot of unsavory stuff in history, but you chalk it up to “free will” and maybe man's fallen nature. Then, there's a lot of unsavory stuff that we're living through right here in the present, and for me at least, it gets harder to explain how there can be an all-knowing, all-powerful God who supposedly loves humanity.

Watching the acceleration of genocide in Gaza for the past 16 months, as Israelis seem to have no conscience and the American government seems to have no limit to what we will support, it got to me. I was suffering just watching it unfold on my phone; how much more the Palestinians actually living through it?

And then Americans handed over the government to President Trump once again, with virtually the blessing of the Democratic party, who showed very little interest in winning through taking the moral high ground. President Trump, upon taking office, quickly took us on a refresher course on the Third Reich, attacking transgender people, rounding up non-white people into concentration camps, and consolidating political power.

Where is God in all of this? I've been struggling for a year with my faith, and in that time, God has answered none of my prayers and the world has proceeded to go from bad to worse. It feels like something is broken, both in the world and in my connection to God. I've been through hard times, and it felt like God was somehow with me through the struggles. But this last year? I talk to God and it feels like nobody is listening.

I see so many videos of the Palestinians in this brief ceasefire coming home to see Gaza in piles of rubble and bones, and they praise God to be alive. Where does that faith come from? I can't fathom it. I only praise God that so many of my friends and family are not alive to see the destruction of what they once held dear. Is that really faith of any sort, or just cynicism?

I continue to call myself a Christian because I don't know what to label what I seem to have become in the last year. I've prayed, probably more than any other time in my life. I have gone to church and studied the Bible. I've talked to pastors. I just keep wondering that same question; where is God in all of this? He doesn't seem to be in Palestine or America.

"Process"

I now have over twenty subscribers to my Substack, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, because I believe all of my Substack posts combined have less than twenty likes. I suppose it's not like I've written any Pulitzer Prize worthy stuff, but I do wonder why the subscribers are there. What exactly are they subscribing for?

I thought I would talk about my writing process, because I think it's a little unusual, and that may be a big part of why my writing in general isn't better. Sometimes (I don't think it's happened since I joined Substack) I turn out something really extraordinarily good. When I was in college, I took a creative writing course, and the instructor told me my final piece was the only one out of the class that she thought was suitable for publishing. I was surprised, both because I didn't think it was that great, and because there were works by other students that I thought were quite extraordinary.

But this is the thing--well, two things--about that story. It was a story about caffeine addiction, and it was mostly autobiographical, which is to say, I didn't make much of it up. Secondly, my method of writing it was to drink four large cups of coffee and let myself loose on a ream of notepaper. The story just came out of me like I couldn't contain it.

That's not completely atypical of my writing process for most things I write, except for the caffeine. I don't plan it out, write an outline, make a rough draft, edit and revise. When I know what I intend to write about, it just comes out on paper, then I double check for typos. The advantage of this odd, very personal process is that my writing has a certain rawness to it that I like, and it's very cohesive, because it was something that I could hold in my head all at once. The drawback of this process is that I've never developed the discipline for the longer process of rough drafting and revising that would work for writing that could potentially be greater than what I could hold in my head all at once.

Like most writers, I'd love to write a book, but I could certainly never produce a novel, because I don't believe that I have the creativity to craft a plot of a story longer than twenty pages maximum. I could write a collection of essays, but it seems proper that they would be cohesive to a central topic, and really (obvious to anyone who has read much of my writing) my mind tends to be all over the place.

And then there's blogging and Substack. I don't know what, among the many things that I write about, really interests people. I get few likes and even less feedback, even though one of the main reasons I write is the hope that it will spark dialogue. It's not that I'm really writing for a target audience anyway, as I mostly just use it as an outlet to put what's in my head out there to see what others think. A lot of the time, what I'm about is not giving answers to what is going on in the world, but coming up with questions that I think need to be asked.

Is that really sufficiently good writing? Twenty-odd people may think so, or maybe people on Substack freely subscribe the way some people on Facebook make "friends" with 600 people. I don't know, I just keep writing. Give me feedback sometimes, though?