Dealbreakers

It is tempting as a fledgling artist without an audience, representation, or a publisher to hide my politics from the public. An inoffensive facade works for many young artists who want to build a following in our polarized world. On the other hand, I’ve never shied from tackling sensitive politics in improv performances, and I did use this platform to write about racism in Upstate NY last year. I’m emboldened by Jim Gaffigan’s recent ‘tweet storm‘ response to Trump’s RNC address; Gaffigan was never silent on Trump or touchy issues like race, but he put his career on the line to speak truth to power.

I, however, have nothing to lose—except my dignity, integrity, and credibility.

This week I decided to dump Facebook. It was a long time coming. Matt Yglesias ably summed up the platform’s failings two years ago. I summarized my grief in this goodbye note:

“I have wasted too much time trying to be a valiant hero, correcting mistruths and speaking with clarity and nuance on political matters. I don’t have the self-control to ignore these problems, or apparently the faith that God will find another person to correct them. I am despaired by the stranglehold this echo chamber platform has over the truth, and the effect that has on our relationships, both personal and political.”

It was a tricky call to leave Facebook. I do believe someday an agent will look for my presence on social media, find a gaping hole, and use it as grounds for rejection. It will be harder for me to keep track of local writer workshops. But a potential hardship in the future doesn’t compare to the personal toll the platform has put on me today; I have dedicated many hours of writing on Facebook which might have been spent on fruitful creativity. What fruit have my thousands of hours of browsing and toiling on Facebook borne? Certainly not transformed hearts and minds. Many restless nights for me and my wife. Despair and anger, sometimes; self-righteousness, mostly. As with any divorce, there were final dealbreakers: FB’s exorbitant income from political ads, and simultaneous refusal to hold those ads to any standard of truth; FB’s failure to respond to an abundance of reports against the alleged “call to arms” Kenosha event page; and a whole slew of misinformation being spewed from friends I respect—people who, if I spoke to them in person, or on the phone, or, Hell, anywhere but Facebook, this type of thing would not be a thing. I simply cannot and should not live as personal editorial superhero to my friends, and I don’t have the self-control to leave it be.

So, I’m dumping Facebook. But I’m not forsaking my responsibility to truth and justice. I’m leaving this post as a bread crumb trail. It’s a final hard word for posterity, especially for my children, so they know where their father stood in these hard times.

Recently, Jerushah Duford, the granddaughter of Billy Graham, published a clear yet gentle op-ed asking Christians to consider the Holy Spirit’s voice calling them away from supporting President Trump. She isn’t the first prominent Christian to make this argument. Christianity Today called for Trump’s removal from office during the impeachment proceedings, for his moral failures. Others have made the case that Christians, faced with Trump’s moral failings, should vote third party.

I don’t have much gentleness left in me. I will try. Lord, give me patience.

I have a hard time understanding any Christian’s support of Trump, merely as a person. To wit, I just wrote a paragraph summarizing his character, then deleted it. Everyone knew exactly how awful Trump was before he was elected: a liar, a racist, a con, a misogynist, crass, vulgar, insulting, without substance or expertise, graceless, self-absorbed, godless. Donald Trump is the embodiment of the Kindergarten aphorism that ‘anyone can grow up to become President’. Trouble is, he became President, but never grew up.

I understand that many Christians pitched their support behind Trump (some begrudgingly, some enthusiastically), because he promised their holy grail: dominance of the Supreme Court, where presumably American laws concerning abortion will be overturned, and religious liberty will be protected. It was a Faustian bargain that has not paid off—but Christians will be the ones paying for it for years to come in the public square, paying with their dignity, integrity, and credibility.

Now we have seen what it’s like to elect a truly immoral man to the highest office in America. This administration is the most corrupt since Harding, and the closest to fascism since FDR. Yet white ‘evangelical’ Christians still overwhelmingly support the President. Here is my question: what is your dealbreaker?

With any leader, there has to be a dealbreaker. I have never supported President Trump politically, but I would point to two dealbreakers that pushed me to vocal opposition against this President.

First, he refused to properly divest from his businesses and put them in a blind trust. This is Trump’s original sin of corruption. The Presidency needs to be above reproach regarding corruption for the sake of its credibility at home and abroad, to establish its legitimacy and maintain a moral high ground. Instead, Trump has thrown any decision he makes into question by abusing his position to fund his businesses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. As of this writing, he has golfed at Trump properties 301 times, and held 88 political events at his properties. These visits add up to hundreds of millions of dollars, taken from taxpayers and given to Trump business as revenue. In addition to these profitable abuses, he has moved more than $2 million from his campaign to his businesses. There’s an additional laundry list of abuses committed by his cabinet. His corruption has endangered our national security in ways we are only starting to understand. It’s gross abuse of power that any self-respecting conservative would disavow in any other leader, yet Trump has been given a blind eye. On a moral level, this is lying and theft, simple grift writ large.

The moment that really broke my trust in President Trump’s authority was his demonization of refugees. This feels like decades ago now. If you may recall, Trump advanced the baseless claim that terrorists were infiltrating our hitherto airtight refugee system. With zero supporting evidence, he launched an executive order that banned all refugees from Syria, neutered refugee immigration from most other countries for six months, and cut our country’s already relatively small annual limit on refugees in half. Beyond the irresponsible disrespect for facts on the ground (refugees are screened rigorously for several years in squalid camps, and they don’t know what country will give them sanctuary—not very good staging grounds for terrorists; zero refugees have ever committed acts of terrorism on American soil), the Biblical imperative to welcome refugees is clear. God’s call for hospitality to strangers and foreigners is repeated throughout the Bible. Put simply in Deuteronomy 10:19, “you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” There is no room for ‘America First’ in God’s Kingdom. Trump condemned some of the most vulnerable people in the world, people who are fleeing horrible violence, and did it under a wretched lie, casting refugees as the violent ones.

That did it for me. I started openly ‘protesting’ the President on Facebook, for whatever that was worth. I put together an improv benefit show for one of the local refugee NPO’s. Maybe my little activism against Trump stems from my 90’s kid personality—I loathe hypocrisy, and I can’t stand to watch people and institutions I love betray themselves with bad arguments based on falsehood. I’ve always been politically minded, studied History at a conservative Christian college. In the long view, I don’t think the Presidency should be this important or influential, and we’d solve a whole lot of problems if the office was put back in its historic place. I’m an Independent! Grew up a conservative Republican. But I became convinced (probably sometime after realizing how many terrible things Bush did) that as a Christian, I can’t dedicate my allegiance to any one Party, because it’s too easy to let Party politics dictate what’s right and wrong. If Jesus is truly who He says He is—prophet, priest, and king—only God and the Bible should have top authority over morality. Anything less is idolatry.

So—speaking specifically to my Christian brothers and sisters—what will your dealbreaker be? What evidence will it take to show that our President is not worthy of your support?

I will highlight one last dealbreaker. It should be an obvious pick, maybe it’s surprising I didn’t mention it earlier: family separation at the border.

You know what happened. President Trump, in an attempt to curb illegal immigration, rounded up thousands of asylum seekers and separated parents from their children. Not willing to trade immorality for incompetence, the administration did not adequately prepare for these detentions, and irresponsibly failed to track many of the family connections before tearing them apart. There are families that will likely remain permanently separated because of our government.

I’d like to interrogate some responses Christians made online to this:

1 – ‘Obama did it first.’ — That’s not true. And even if it was, you’ve just implied that sin is not sin, because someone else did it. This deflection is rooted in idolatry; it is a kind of moral relativism that says only my ‘enemy’ can be corrected, or worse, only my ‘enemy’ can do wrong.

2 – ‘Abortion is worse.’ — Do you have room for condemning both? And why should anyone believe Christians’ condemnation of abortion if we do not likewise condemn this blatant disrespect for life and family? It’s also worth noting that there’s a non-trivial difference between the government legalizing a sin and the government actively perpetrating a sin.

3 – Jeff Sessions defended his ‘zero tolerance’ policy by claiming Romans 13 justifies complete obedience to the government’s orders. My church believes the same passage shows Christians should respect government authorities, insofar as they uphold God’s commands. You know, like the Law that says honor your father and mother, care for the orphaned, love foreigners, and love your neighbor as yourself. If the government breaks those Laws, my church’s tradition says, Christians are under no obligation to respect the government’s authority on those matters.

Plenty of leading conservative Christians condemned the policy. And the administration did eventually rescind it, but the problems it created are hardly resolved. I raise these three points in particular because they’re common themes I’ve noticed in conservative Christian discourse: comparing President Trump to President Obama, a singular focus on abortion, and a misguided belief that Christians owe any government leader (or, at least, the ones they happen to support) their full faith and deference. These bad answers give tacit approval of grievous sin at best, and at worst effectively deify the President.

I want to be clear. I’m under no false impression this essay will win any hearts or change any minds. But I hope it will prick your conscience.

I do try to charitably look for goodness in Trump’s presidency. Recently, his wife made the Rose Garden wheelchair accessible, and the Israel/UAE deal is probably a net positive. But look — any relative comparison, good or bad, is besides the point.

When a leader does something immoral, we shouldn’t just say ‘Shucks, there he goes again’.

When a leader does something immoral, is unrepentant, and continues to do egregious, immoral harm to others, we should declare their actions as unacceptable, and seriously consider removing that leader from office.

Anything less might as well be a deal with the devil.

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For my children: I hope you have the courage to stand up for what is right, and call out what is wrong, and that you’ll do it with more kindness and gentleness than your daddy. I love you.

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This essay isn’t exhaustive. You might find your dealbreaker below:

Federal police in unmarked uniforms detaining people in unmarked vans in cities where they weren’t invited?
A catastrophic failure to lead in a global pandemic?
Voter intimidation?
Here’s a new one — how about casually encouraging voter fraud?
Will it be one more silly, unnecessary lie to add to the ridiculous pile?
Or maybe it will be a lie concerning a matter of life and death?
Maybe calling neo-Nazis “very fine people”?