It’s an idea we’re going to have to get used to. Donald
Trump may yet become President of the United States of America, which is still
the most powerful nation on earth. How might this come about? There is no
simple answer, and I am no political pundit, but one thing seems clear; that
the fomenting of hatred gets you a long way in politics.
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| Source: The Guardian |
The guile it takes to
foment hatred serves as both trowel and weapon, useful as a means of turning
over the blackest, and often richest, soil of emotions in the human heart, and as
the deadliest of all weapons, the guile which is also known as duplicity, or
deceit. Guile, or duplicity, covers up a multitude of evils, most notably those
which used to be known as the seven deadly sins.
Thinking about the politics of America, which claims in
its own constitution to be ‘one nation under
God’, the rhetoric swirls around as the presidential primaries get under way,
and we detect its heavy religious undertones. The tool of religion, whose purpose
is to ‘turn over’, or convert, human hearts and so open them to the
transforming work of love, becomes the weapon of xenophobic fear and ultimately
of hatred itself, hatred which is spawned in human hearts through pride, greed,
lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth – the seven deadly sins. In and through any
or all of these, using the tools of duplicity and deceit, the demon of hatred
urges a nation on into the night. Perhaps it is time we all thought more
carefully about our politics.
When it comes to duplicity, politics and religion are easily
confused. They merge in the shadows of those outmoded deadly sins. Take lust,
for example. Lust has more to do with power than it does with sex, although the
two often go together. Lust for power is not always immediately recognisable
because it is easily disguised by personal charisma or by flattery, both
pandering to the lowest common moral denominator.
Evil is of its very nature duplicitous. In terms of
politics, evil can be disguised quite effectively, either as what is good for
the nation (because those who are infatuated with one man’s charisma are encouraged
to believe that it is they who represent the nation in its purest state), or,
on the other, as an ideal which they both want and deserve. Once these two
untruths have been firmly established, nobody should be allowed to question the
means or the motives for promoting them. But occasionally the terrifying truth
slips out, as it did when someone recently asked what it will feel like to know
that Donald Trump has it in his power to press the nuclear button.
Either way, fear seems, once again, to rule the day. But
this too is part of the great deception. The period which Christians observe
prior to celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is also a time for
exposing deception. Exposing deception begins with ourselves. The season of
Lent is a season for reflecting on unquestioned attitudes which we may not even
know we have, attitudes to race, gender, power and the unconscious assumption
that somehow ‘might is right’.
Our private assumptions and our most secret prejudices
combine to make the sum total of a nation. So Lent is an opportunity to review,
and perhaps repent of, our politics. By doing this personally we also do it as
a nation, knowing that ‘all have sinned’ in this area at one time or another. As
nations we have all fallen short of the loving purposes of God, and as nations
we are invited to be open to the transforming work of his grace – and to the
new life we share in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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