On the Separation of Church and State

 

On the Separation of Church and State

February 28, 2021

 

I’m a Christian. Indeed, I’m an ordained Christian. A lot of people today assume, I think, that that means I oppose separation of church and state. After all, vocal Christians among us complain all the time that the state won’t let them do things they want to do, like have public school teachers lead prayer in class or post the Ten Commandments in the local courthouse. We’ll return to those two issues below. Secular critics of religion say Christians are trying to impose a Christian theocracy on the country. Some people see no reason why the state shouldn’t support churches and especially church schools. We’ll return to that issue too. The United Kingdom has an established church, after all, and also has broad religious freedom. Surely all people of faith would like for the state to support their churches even if that meant it had to support other people’s religious institutions too. Well, actually, not all of us would. I’m an ordained Christian, and I believe strongly in the need for and the benefits of separation of church and state both for the state and for the church. That belief is what I want to write about here.

The law on separation of church and state in the United States is grounded in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. That Amendment reads in relevant part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” The federal courts, most importantly of course the US Supreme Court, have created an extensive body of law grounded in that language that actually goes far beyond Congress passing no law. The law takes the First Amendment to mean basically that church and state must remain separate even though the First Amendment doesn’t use the phrase separation of church and state. The Amendment has two relevant phrases, “no law concerning an establishment of religion” and “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These provisions are know in the law as the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. There is extensive case law on both of them.

With few exceptions, including some very recent ones, the establishment clause has been interpreted to mean that no governmental entity may do anything that amounts to state endorsement or support of a religion or that even in some way favors religious institutions over secular ones. As with any constitutional right, things happen that appear on the surface to violate the establishment clause but that the courts allow. Our currency says “In God We Trust.” Both houses of Congress employ chaplains, usually Christian ones of some sort, and those chaplains say prayers before sessions of Congress. In the 1950s we added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and members of Congress recite that Pledge that way all the time. Most basically however, the establishment clause (which along with the free exercise clause applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment) means that we have no established religion in the US the way they do in the United Kingdom and some other nations. The Christian right may (wrongly) insist that we are a Christian nation and that the US Constitution somehow expresses Christian values rather than the rationalistic values of the Enlightenment that it actually reflects, but the establishment clause does a pretty good job of keeping governments in this country secular.

Religious schools present an interesting issue under the establishment clause, especially in a charter school system. In such a system a public school district pays people or organizations that have set up and run schools that meet the requirements for public education. Sometimes some of those schools are set up and run by religious institutions, and their curriculum includes religious instruction. The establishment clause would seem to dictate that the public school district may not pay public funds to such a school. But those schools are carrying out the district’s mission of educating children, and the district pays money to other, secular charter schools. Does the district not paying religious charter schools constitute discrimination on the basis of religion or impair the free exercise of religion? It’s a tough question to answer. I believe that public money should not be used to support religion in the form of religious charter schools. The current Supreme Court, dominated by conservatives, is inclined to say that public school districts must pay religious schools the same as it pays secular charter schools.

That example of an issue under the First Amendment raises the free exercise clause of the First Amendment as well as the establishment clause. The basic rule there is that the state may in no way interfere in the beliefs or, except in rare cases that have legal implications, in the internal workings of any religious institution. The state may, however, prohibit actions by a religious institution or by religious people if the state has a sufficiently compelling state interest in doing so. Perhaps an example will help. In 1878 the US Supreme Court decided the case of Reynolds v. US. In that case a state government had outlawed bigamy. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormons, argued that their religion authorized or even mandated bigamy and that their free exercise rights protected them from prosecution under the anti-bigamy law. The Supreme Court rejected that argument. It found that the state had a compelling state interest in regulating marriage and could therefore outlaw the act of bigamy without interfering with the Mormons’ beliefs. Under the free exercise clause we can believe whatever we want. The state can regulate conduct even if the conduct is grounded in religion if the state has a sufficiently compelling state interest relative to the conduct.

As the example of Reynolds v. US shows, question under the two church-related clauses of the First Amendment often involve a weighing of conflicting interests and values. Doing that can be difficult, but judges, especially federal judges, do it often. The cases in which they must do it are ones in which a judge’s personal beliefs and preferences can play a particularly important role. At the Supreme Court at least those cases are rarely decided unanimously. The establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the First Amendment often give rise to such cases.

One issue that has often raised what many see as a conflict between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause has to do with prayer in public schools. That issue is also one that demonstrates how misunderstood the First Amendment’s religion clauses often are. Conservative Christians frequently complain that the public schools have banned prayer. They complain that public school teachers can’t start a class with prayer. They complain that there are no public prayers at school sporting events or school assemblies. They believe that these rules by the public schools violate their free exercise rights, or perhaps at least the free exercise rights of the teachers.

They’re wrong about that. To understand the issue we must make an important distinction between prayer led by a public school employee  and prayer led by a group of students for students who want to hear or participate in it. Any public school employee leading prayer for a school generally or for any school activity violates the establishment clause. Any public employee leading prayer which others have no choice about hearing constitutes as a matter of law a state endorsement or at least state support for a particular religion in violation of that clause. Even a very general prayer to God that uses no language specific to any particular religion constitutes state endorsement of theism over atheism and is therefore impermissible under the establishment clause. That’s why there is never a prayer over the PA system at sporting events, for example.

It’s an entirely different matter when a group of public school students want to gather voluntarily for prayer. That’s where the free exercise clause comes in. Many public schools actually get this one wrong. They prohibit all prayer on school property. A public school may not, however, stop an individual student from praying nor may it prohibit a group of students from praying as long as what the students do does not disrupt the proper functioning of the school. Students may not leave class to pray, although as I recall when I was in elementary school so many decades ago Catholic students were let out to go to the local Catholic school for a period of religious instruction. We didn’t worry too much about the First Amendment back in those days. When a public school prohibits students from praying on their own in appropriate places at appropriate times it violates those students’ free exercise rights.

A somewhat similar issue that raises both establishment and free exercise issues is the desire of many Christians to post the Ten Commandments in the local courthouse. On its face doing that would violate the establishment clause. The Ten Commandments come from the sacred texts of  two great religions, Judaism and Christianity. Proponents of putting them up in courthouses say that doing so does not violate the establishment clause because the Ten Commandments are just general statements of broad moral principles to which no one can really object. Actually, the Ten Commandments aren’t that at all, but I won’t go into that issue here.[1] The important point for our purposes is that however broad and general the Ten Commandments may be they are religious statements. They come from the sacred scripture of two different religions. They say they come from God. The proper ruling in this case is obvious. The courts have had no trouble prohibiting the display of the Ten Commandments on public property because displaying them constitutes state endorsement of them and thus violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Sometimes proponents of things like prayer led by public school employees or posting the Ten Commandments in the courthouse say, well, nearly everyone in our community is Christian, so where’s the harm in either of those measure? This argument completely misunderstands the purpose and function of our constitutional rights. The Constitution does not establish those rights for the benefit of a majority of a population. It establishes them precisely to protect minorities among the population. This function applies to all of our constitutional rights, but it appears most clearly in connection with the right of free speech. No society needs a constitution to protect anyone’s right to say what is popular and government approved. All societies need a constitution to protect everyone’s right to say what is unpopular or critical of the government. This function of the right of free speech is sometimes expressed in the saying “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”[2] No one would stop me from saying America is the greatest country on earth. That bromide is very popular among us. Someone might try to stop me from saying that it isn’t the greatest country on earth and enumerating facts to support that statement. A private person could stop me from saying it on private property because that person doing so involves no action of the state. The state cannot stop me from saying it anywhere where I am able to say it because however unpopular what I say might be, the First Amendment guarantees my right to say it and stops any state entity from prohibiting me from saying it. The same principle applies with regard to state support or endorsement of any religion or religious statement. Nearly everyone in a particular community may support the statement and the state’s endorsement of it. The First Amendment isn’t there to protect them in this instance, although it would protect them if they needed protection from the state endorsing or supporting a religion that isn’t theirs. The First Amendment is there to protect those in the society who do not accept religion endorsed or supported by the state and don’t want the state imposing it upon them. That a majority of people may believe or support certain things is irrelevant to an analysis of rights under the First Amendment.

One of the purposes of the establishment clause is actually to facilitate people’s use of the free exercise clause. Any state support for or endorsement of one religion militates against all other religions and against atheism as well. Nations like the United Kingdom with an established  national church may allow broad freedom of religion, but they also may not. Take Russia for example. Unlike its old status under the tsars, the Russian Orthodox Church is not officially established as the Russian national church. The tsar was the head of the church, President Putin isn’t. The Russian Orthodox Church is nonetheless the de facto established national church in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union it has gotten the Russian government to enact laws similar to those in effect under the tsars that give it a privileged position relative to any other church. Those laws make it difficult for any other faith to function in the country, especially if it is a new church start coming from outside the country.

Or take Iran as an even more extreme example. Iran is a Shi’ite Muslim theocracy. The state is officially and aggressively Muslim. The Iranian constitution establishes the state as  a particular type of Islamic state. It also says that Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians may function in the country, but as a practical matter it is difficult for them to do so. Religions not given the constitutional right to function such as Baha’i are oppressed. The condition of religious freedom in Iran has raised strong concerns with international organizations including the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. That’s what can happen when one faith is established de jure or de facto as the national religion of a country. The First Amendment assures us that that won’t happen here.

Separation of church and state actually fosters the health of the church. To see how true that is just look at what has become of the Christian churches where they receive financial support from the state. In the United Kingdom with its established Anglican Church 8% of the people regularly attend weekly religious services. In Germany, where both Protestant and Catholic churches receive money from the government, the figure is 10%. In the US it’s 36%. In Russia with its de facto established Orthodox Church the figure is 7%, although over seventy years under an aggressively atheistic government no doubt plays a role in keeping that figure low.[3] Clearly establishment and governmental financial support do not lead to healthy churches. We Christians are much better off without them than we would be with them.

Finally, of all people Christians should support separation of church and state and the religious freedom it facilitates. Christianity, when properly understood, is a religion of freedom. In Christ we live in God’s grace and not under any set of rules or laws. We respect the right of every person to believe or not to believe according to their own desires and life circumstances. Faith that results from coercion or even pressure is not true faith. We believe that God calls everyone to a life of faith, but God doesn’t call us to force anyone into faith or into church. Separation of church and state facilitates the freedom and proper functioning of both state and church. May we never lose our commitment to that principle that is so foundational for our nation.

 

---

[1] For a discussion of the Ten Commandments see Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible: A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament (Briarwood, New York, Coffee Press, 2019), pp. 78-85.

[2] This saying is often attributed to Voltaire. It actually comes from a biographer named Evelyn Beatrice Hall. She wrote it as a paraphrase of what she thought Voltaire would have been thinking.

[3] pewform.org. A student at Moscow State University who I got to know back in Soviet times asked my wife and me if we believed in God. When we said yes, he said that was the one thing he couldn’t understand about westerners. Soviet atheism had done its work in him and in most other Russians.

It It Isn't for Everyone It Isn't for Anyone

 

If It Isn’t for Everyone It Isn’t for Anyone

February 25, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

 

The Southern Baptist Convention is both the largest Protestant denomination in the US and one of the most conservative. It’s always been conservative, but in recent times it has moved even farther to the right. It has taken several positions that diminish women and restrict their roles in the church and in life. It still thinks all homosexual acts are inherently and unavoidably sinful. In recent days it has expelled a church and its pastor in Georgia because the church accepted a gay couple and their three adopted children into the church. The pastor had been part of the SBC for years, but the larger church nonetheless threw him out because he and his church extended God’s welcome to that family. News reports say one-third of the congregation left the church when it did, but the pastor and the congregation stood their ground. The news reports I read about the incident quoted the pastor as having said two quite simple but truly profound things. He said he’ll preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to anyone, and he said that if grace isn’t for everyone it isn’t for anyone. That so much of the Christian tradition doesn’t understand and embrace these foundational theological principles is that tradition’s great shame, or one of them anyway. They raise two fundamental theological questions that I want to discuss here. Those questions are: Just what is God’s grace? And what does it mean? How a particular part of the Christian tradition answers these questions tells you just about everything you need to know about it. Sadly, most Christian churches still get their answers to these questions all wrong.

Christians talk a lot about God’s grace, but just what is God’s grace? To answer that question we need to make an important distinction and begin by saying what grace is not. Grace is not payment. It isn’t compensation for services rendered. Christians are however forever turning it into what it is not. They say we have to earn it as if God were an employer paying grace as wages or a foundation dispensing grace grants to those who deserve them. But anything we have to earn is payment not grace.

OK. Grace isn’t a payment, but what is it? It is how God relates to creation in love without requiring anything from us first. Grace is God’s free and universal gift of divine love to all of creation. Grace is God’s universal salvation freely given to and for all. Christians confess that God is love. 1 John 4:8. If God is love then surely God relates to God’s creation only as love. Even in our human relationships love given only in return for something isn’t really love. So much of Christianity still doesn’t get it that grace is freely given not earned.

O yes, they may say that grace is God’s free gift of salvation; but then they promptly turn it into something else. In the Roman Catholic tradition they turn grace into a reward for belonging to the church and obeying its instructions. In the Protestant traditions we most commonly turn grace into a reward for proper faith. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved,” we say, citing Acts 16:31. Do this and you will get that. Don’t do this and you won’t get that. Salvation becomes a reward for proper belief. It becomes something you have to earn. So much of Protestant Christianity makes believing the right things, understood as taking as true various alleged facts about God and Jesus Christ, into a work that we must do in order to be saved. But what we earn from God isn’t grace. It’s payment.

One of Jesus’ parables that most of us struggle with sheds a bright light on what grace is. It’s the parables of the workers in the vineyard. You’ll find it at Matthew 20:1-16. In that parable the owner of a vineyard hires workers at the beginning of the day. He agrees to pay them a denarius for a day’s work, a denarius being the usual daily wage. The workers agree to work all day for that much pay. Several times during the day he hires more laborers. Because these laborers were hired later in the day they worked fewer hours than the workers who were hired at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day all the workers come to receive their pay for their work. The owner gives each of them a denarius. The workers who worked all day object to those who worked fewer house receiving the same amount of pay as they did. The owner isn’t impressed. He tells those who worked all day that he has done them no wrong. He has lived up to his side of the employment agreement. He tells those workers that he can do what he wants with what is his.

In my experience almost everyone struggles with this parable. We think the laborers who worked all day are right. They earned more than the laborers who worked fewer hours, some of whom worked very few hours indeed. We think the all day laborers are right. Jesus doesn’t. We learn that God can do with God’s grace whatever God wants. We must assume, I think, that the workers who worked fewer hours had as much need of a full day’s pay as did those who worked all day. It wasn’t through any fault of theirs that they didn’t have the opportunity to work a full day. The landowner here gives to each of the workers according to their need, not according to how much they had earned.

That’s how it is with God’s grace. We think God should make us earn it somehow because that’s the standard by which we work here on earth. Most of us have worked to earn money in our lives. Most of us have to. Whether we’ve been paid by the hour or otherwise, we have learned that the general rule is that the more we work the more we’ll earn. We naturally apply that human standard of ours to God. We expect God to operate the way we do. From Jesus we learn that God doesn’t do that. God’s greatest gift to us is grace, is God’s unearned salvation that God gives freely, unconditionally, entirely without cost, to everyone of God’s people—and all people are God’s people.

Now let me say perhaps before you raise the issue yourself that I’m fully aware of the main objection people raise to this understanding of God’s grace. I’ve heard it over and over again. It goes like this: If God’s grace is God’s free, unmerited gift to every person, then we have no reason anymore to live moral lives. Why don’t we just go raise hell and do whatever we want? The rules don’t apply anymore. God’s going to save me no matter what I do. So what the hell! Let ‘er rip!

People raised the same objection to Paul’s theology of justification by grace through faith so many centuries ago. In response Paul wrote:

 

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. Romans 6:1-4.

 

As is so often the case with Paul, his language here is a bit obscure to us. Set aside for now his talk about death and rising from death. Those words reflect a theology of baptism that most of us don’t share. What is of value here is that when one is in Christ one simply cannot go on sinning but is called to walk in newness of life. That is, we live as new people freed from sin and no longer tempted by it. That’s Paul’s way of saying that once you really know that you are saved by God’s grace it won’t even occur to you to go on sinning. To the extent that you do go on sinning you don’t truly know God’s grace. That doesn’t mean you don’t stand in it. You do. It’s just that you don’t know deep down in your soul that you do. That’s the response to the objection to universal grace that it removes all reason for living moral lives.

The basic lesson here is that God’s grace is universal. It is for everyone. It has to be because if it isn’t it isn’t grace. It becomes something that some people earn and others don’t. If that’s true then grace isn’t grace, it’s payment for services rendered. All of creation and every sentient being in it stands always in God’s grace. If it isn’t for everybody it isn’t for anybody. If it isn’t for everybody it just isn’t grace. If we have to earn it there is no grace. But there is grace! God’s love and salvation are poured out for everyone. We can know it and live into it or not, but our doing not doing it doesn’t mean that God’s grace isn’t there. It is. Always. For everyone. Thanks be to God!

 

Reconciled!

 

Reconciled!

February 21, 2021

 

                WE humans have long sensed that there is something wrong with the world and our lives on it. We’ve thought about what’s wrong in different ways. We’ve said life has no purpose. Or life has no meaning. We’ve said that the problem is violence or injustice. We’ve said we’re all alone in a universe that is indifferent to us at best or is even dangerous and hostile. We’ve said that the problem is that there is no God or that there is a God but that God is judgmental and vindictive and is therefore to be feared not loved. We humans have been quite creative in coming up with ways to talk about what’s wrong with the world and with human life.

Christians have for the most part analyzed what’s wrong in terms of sin. We’re all tainted by “original sin” because Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the garden, we’ve said. We’ve said we’re enslaved to sin, that the devil rules the world, and there’s nothing we do about it on our own. We’ve said that we’re so blinded by sin and our minds are so disordered by sin that there is a chasm between God and us that we can’t even begin to cross, that any crossing of it that’s going to be done has to come from God’s side not our side. We have attributed sin to our physical nature, making the physical sinful and the spiritual divine.

Because we’ve understood sin to be our existential problem we’ve said that Jesus Christ died for our sin. We’ve said that he was both divine and human and that his suffering and death were an atoning sacrifice, a price that had to be paid to God before God could or would forgive human sin. We’ve said that dying was his reason for living because only by suffering and dying as God Incarnate could he procure divine forgiveness of our sin. That notion that Jesus was an atoning sacrifice for human sin, known as the classical theory of atonement, has virtually swallowed the Christian faith whole. For a great many people both inside the churches and outside of them, the classical theory of atonement is what Christianity is all about.

At least some of us today have rejected the idea that Jesus Christ was a God-man who had to suffer and die so God would forgive human sin.[1] To many of us today that theory sounds like cosmic child abuse. It makes God too small by saying that God needs to be paid off before God would forgive human sin. We understand that Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sin has very shallow biblical roots at best. Some theologians today say that it has no biblical roots at all.[2] We have asked why, if all Jesus was for was to suffer and die, the canonical Gospels say so much about what he taught and did during his life. For us the theory of Jesus as a necessary sacrifice to procure God’s forgiveness of sin just doesn’t work.

Fortunately the Christian Bible offers us another, far more powerful and satisfying view of what Jesus was about and of what God was doing in Jesus. It’s in 2 Corinthians. It reads:

 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.[3]

 

A couple of caveats are necessary here. This passage does refer to human “trespasses,” which we can and must take to be a synonym for sin. Sin is not, however, what these verses are primarily about. Also, it is quite possible to read the classical theory of atonement into these verses. Doing that, however, reads into them something that isn’t there. Paul says here that God reconciled the world to Godself, but he says nothing about the mechanics of how God did it. He certainly doesn’t call Jesus an atoning sacrifice that procured that reconciliation. He just says that God “was reconciling” the world to Godself through Christ. The ongoing nature of “was reconciling” certainly suggests something other than the once for all suffering and death of Jesus in which what Jesus came to do is completed. Let’s not read into Paul’s words something he didn’t say.

What he said was that through Jesus Christ the whole world is reconciled with God. That is about the best news there ever was or ever could be. All of the analyses of what’s wrong with the world come down to a belief that the world is radically separated from God. We fear what we’ve been told are the consequences of sin because we think God is opposed to us. We find life meaningless and without purpose because we don’t know that God is with us offering everyone meaning and purpose in service to God and God’s people. Paul tells us that our sense of separation from God is entirely of our own making. As far as God is concerned we’re reconciled. Period.

Our reconciliation with God didn’t take the suffering and death of a God-man to bring it about, although Jesus’ suffering and dying show us a lot about how God relates to the world by entering into all aspects of life with us, even or especially the horribly bad ones. No, what it took to reconcile the world with God was God’s unfathomable love in which the whole world is reconciled with God and always has been. We can know and live into that reconciliation or not, but our not knowing it and not living into it don’t mean it isn’t there. It is. It always is because God is in God’s very nature reconciling love.

So let’s get over this entirely human notion that we are somehow separated or alienated from God. We aren’t. We are reconciled with God, and that isn’t because we deserve to be reconciled with God. It isn’t that because we’ve done something to procure reconciliation with God. For the most part we haven’t. No, we’re reconciled with God because that’s how God wants it. That’s how God sees God’s relationship with us. Because God is reconciling love we are reconciled with God. So let’s get on with living into that divine, universal reconciliation, shall we?

---

[1] That’s not the same thing as denying the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. I do not deny that truth but cling to it with joy.

[2] If that theory has any biblical roots they are in the book of Hebrews. That book calls Jesus Christ both the priest who offers the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate sacrifice himself. To read most of the rest of scripture as expressing the classical theory of atonement is to misread it.

[3] 2 Corinthians 5:17-19.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Where Do We Go From Here?

February 16, 2021

 

We are in a situation we’ve never faced before. American politics have been severely disrupted and changed by the phenomenon of Donald Trump and his rabid, unthinking supporters. One of our two major political parties has been shaken to its core by what the media always call “Trump’s base.” It appears possible that the party will not survive. We face enormous challenges with the COVID pandemic, the economic disaster it has caused, a utterly inadequate health insurance system, a decaying infrastructure, and the environmental crisis that has been pushed off the front pages but is still an existential crisis for all of us. Where do we go from here? It is a question of immense importance today; but it is not fully answerable yet, the pain of the Trump years still being too fresh. Nonetheless, we must be working at finding answers. Even to begin to do that we must understand how the disaster named Donald Trump has affected our politics and especially how it has affected the Republican Party. We’ll start this analysis there, then see where else it is possible to go.

In the four years he was in office Donald Trump did everything he could, in no particular order,  to harm the environment, benefit the wealthy and make life more difficult for the poor, destroy our relations with our traditional allies, ignore and violate the law, commit crimes against humanity at our southern border, and turn the presidency into an autocracy. Congressional Republicans almost if not quite without exception kowtowed to him and were afraid ever to cross him. They enabled all of his destructive policies and actions. Trump had caused immense harm by the time the 2020 presidential campaign began, but then he turned our electoral process into a clown show—or perhaps even a horror show. Trump’s actions during his 2020 campaign and after the 2020 election created much of the mess that our political system is in today.

Trump has weakened the American public’s confidence in our electoral system, the very foundation of our democracy. At least by mid-2020 he began to say that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him and that the only way he could lose that election was through voter fraud. When he lost the election he said over and over again that he’d really won, by a landslide even, and that his victory had been stolen from him. He did everything he could think of to reverse the election’s result. First he tried to get federal and state courts to overturn those results. The courts dismissed case after case, often with sharp comments about how baseless the suit that had just been dismissed had been. Trump got nowhere with the courts, so he tried pressuring state election officials and legislators to change the results of the voting in their states. They wouldn’t, and Trump may have violated election laws in one or more states in his efforts to get them to do it.

So he turned to his base of fanatic supporters. He told them over and over again that the election had been stolen from them. He told them they had to fight to reverse the election of President Biden, not that Trump called him President Biden of course. He knew that some of his supporters were prone to violence. He did nothing to stop them from resorting to it. Trump thought, or at least hoped, that the electors of the electoral college would change the outcome of the election and make him the winner. They did not.

There was just one more step in the process of electing a president, one many of us didn’t even know existed, it being as ceremonial and perfunctory as it is. The Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution provides that the Senate, presided over by the vice president as president of the Senate, counts the electoral votes of the states (and of Washington, D.C., which also has electoral votes). The Senate was scheduled to do that on January 6, 2021. Trump saw the Senate’s counting of the electoral votes as his last chance to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. He told Vice President Pence that he, Pence, had the authority under the constitution to send the election back to the states for a revote or at least a recount. Pence knew he had no such authority, and he told Trump that he did not. So Trump turned on Pence, blaming him for not doing what he had no authority to do.

Trump also began organizing a large crowd of people to come to Washington, D.C., on January 6 to “stop the steal.” A great many people came, some of them armed and ready to use violence to keep Trump in office. As the Senate was starting to count the electoral votes Trump spoke to a large crowd at the Ellipse, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. In his speech Trump used the word fraud over and over again, perhaps as many as one hundred times. He asserted, as he had been doing for two months by then, that there had been fraud in the election and in the states’ certification of their election results. He told them that they had to “fight like hell” to overturn the certified results of the election or they would have an illegitimate president and no country left. He sent the crowd off down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to do God only knows what to stop the Senate from counting the electoral votes and certifying former vice president Joe Biden as the 46^th President of the United States.

Many, though by no means all, of the people at Trump’s rally did indeed walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There they rioted. They erected a gallows in front of the Capitol. They pushed past an overwhelmed Capitol police line and broke into the building. Many of them were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” among other things. They killed a Capitol police officer. They got into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and the Senate chamber. Only quick reactions by Capitol police and the Secret Service kept them from capturing Vice President Pence, Senator Mitt Romney,  and others. They terrified members of Congress, congressional aids, Capitol police, journalists, other Capitol workers, and anyone else who was in the building at the time. They didn’t get Pence’s “black box,” one just like the president’s with codes to launch the nation’s nuclear arsenal, but they came close to grabbing it. Quick action by Senate staff kept them from getting the submissions by the states that the Senate was counting. Five people died at the Capitol that day. In subsequent days two Capitol police officers took their own lives.

This was no ordinary riot, if there is such a thing. This was an attempt by an angry mob to overthrow the government of the United States. It was an attempt to keep in office a president who had lost the recent presidential election and who had thereby been denied a second term. It was all set up and instigated by a sitting President of the United States. . During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump had said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. On January 6, 2021, he didn’t fire a gun. He did something arguably worse. He shot a frenzied mob at the US Capitol in an effort to stop the exercise of the Senate’s constitutional duty to count the electoral votes. On that fateful day the President of the United States attempted a coup against the government of the United States. That he committed high crimes and misdemeanors is beyond question. So is the fact that on that day Trump grossly violated his oath of office. He violated it more egregiously than any American president, even Richard Nixon, had ever done before. This country has never seen anything like it.

In short order the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his actions that day. Trump became the only president in US history to be impeached twice, a dubious distinction he so thoroughly deserves. Trump was still in office when the House impeached him, but Senator Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader in the Senate because two new Democratic senators from Georgia hadn’t been sworn in yet, refused to start the impeachment trial until after Trump was out of office. When the trial did start the House impeachment managers put on a brilliant case that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump was guilty of inciting a seditious attack on the constitution and government of the United States. Trump’s lawyers at the trial were worse than incompetent. They lied and they lied. They talked about almost anything except anything that would have exonerated their client. It is true that they were there to defend in indefensible, never a happy place for a lawyer to be. Still, their performance disgraced the entire legal profession in this country. They did next to nothing actually to defend their client.

On Saturday, February 13, 2021, the Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict Trump of the impeachment charge against him. Seven Republican senators joined all forty-eight Democratic senators and the two independent senators (who caucus and usually vote with the Democrats) in voting to convict. The Constitution, however, provides that a two-thirds vote is necessary to convict in an impeachment trial. Trump therefore was acquitted though a significant majority of the senators voted to convict him. He got away with it at least as far as being impeached for it is concerned. Many of the senators who voted to acquit Trump said they did it because the Senate lacked jurisdiction to hear the case because Trump was no longer in office when the trial was held. I have become convinced that the Senate had jurisdiction, but no court has ever ruled on the constitutionality of an impeachment of a former federal officeholder. It is virtually certain that the 43 senators who voted to acquit Trump would never have voted against him for political reasons and found the jurisdictional issue, flimsy as it is, to be a good shelter to hide behind.

Senator McConnell, who had become the minority leader in the Senate after those two new senators from Georgia were sworn in, voted to acquit Trump. After the vote he gave a speech to a mostly empty Senate chamber in which he said pretty much the same things about Trump as the House impeachment managers had said and proved against him. He said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6 assault on the Capitol It seems as if McConnell, who had slavishly supported Trump the whole time Trump was president, was trying to split the baby. Trump’s base, which has essentially become the base of the entire Republican Party, will like his vote to acquit Trump. Several commentators have said that McConnell’s attack on the man he had just voted to acquit was designed to keep more traditionally conservative Republicans and their money in the party. Although I don’t know how big money Republicans actually think about Trump, I will assume that the commentators who said these things are correct, they knowing more about the matter than I do. McConnell was trying to placate  two different types of Republicans at the same time. He may have ended up placating neither of them.

Therein lies the big problem for today’s Republican Party and therefore for American politics in general. For the last one hundred years at least the Republican Party has been the party of traditional American conservatives, business people mostly, who favored limited government, little regulation, spending as much money on the military as possible, using that military freely even in instances where doing so made no sense like the situations in Vietnam and Iraq, and spending as little money as possible on anything else. Starting at least by the 1970s it became the party of conservative evangelical Christians as well, mostly because it took a position against abortion and gay rights in order to appeal to them. Richard Nixon made it the party of southern racists, who had previously always voted Democratic, through the thinly veiled racism of what he called the southern strategy.

The Trumpists who have taken over the Republican Party include many of those conservative evangelical Christians who have been Republicans for a long time, but they present different issues as well. They are mostly white working class men of limited education and financial means, the kind of men who used to vote for Democrats before the Democrats became the party of civil rights and other progressive causes and Ronald Reagan appealed to their simplistic American patriotism and covert racism. They represent a class of people who fear that the country is changing in ways disadvantageous to them. As American demographics change they are losing their former social position that in the past at least put them ahead of Black and Latinx Americans. They are afraid, and their fear makes them angry. Their anger makes them dangerous. The executives of big corporations and old-fashioned Main Street conservatives didn’t invade the Capitol on June 6. The Trumpists did.

The fundamental split in the Republican Party between old-time conservatives and populist Trumpists presents a big challenge to those who want the Republican Party to survive and remain a significant force in American politics. For all of their holding onto the past in so many ways, American conservatives have typically believed in and supported American democracy and the US Constitution. Trumpists don’t. They would be perfectly happy to grab power by force (like they tried to do on January 6), tear up the Constitution (which they were in effect trying to do on January 6), and have their guy rule as an unlimited autocrat (which he might have had their January 6 insurrection succeeded). Traditional American conservatives want no part of violent insurrection. Trumpists are satisfied with nothing less.

Which raises the question of whether or not the Republican Party can survive with this split right through its heart. Perhaps it can, but if it does survive it will only be because the different factions within it know that the consequences of the party splintering would be worse for them than the party holding together. If either the traditional conservatives or the Trumpists split off from the Republican Party and create a new political party, neither those who split off nor those who remain in the party will win many elections at all. The Democrats would be able to gain and hold onto power in a great many states and at the national level. So for now at least we have a Republican Party that includes both the traditional conservative Mitt Romney and Josh Hawley, the latest darling of the Trumpists.

So where do we go from here? It all depends on what becomes of the Republican Party. The two party system that has characterized American politics essentially from the beginning is not written into the Constitution or any other American law. It is however what we’ve had, and the conventional wisdom (which is often neither conventional nor wise) is that American politics are healthier when two political parties are healthy enough to compete against each other more or less equally. Today we have a Democrat in the White House who wants to do many good things. President Biden is not as progressive as I am, but he’s substantially better than any Republican president we’ve had and orders of magnitude better than Trump. The Democrats have a narrow majority in the House. The Senate is equally divided, with Vice President Harris hold the deciding vote. The balance of power tips toward the Democrats, but only slightly; and it wasn’t long ago that it tipped toward the Republicans. In the Senate the Democrats can pass everything they want that all fifty senators of the Democrats’ bloc will vote for. A few of those Democratic senators are however quite conservative, especially Senator Manchin of West Virginia. Biden can probably get anything through the Senate that Manchin will vote for and nothing that he won’t. That balance of power will probably last only until the 2022 midterm elections. The party of the sitting president almost always loses seats in both houses of Congress in midterm elections. Anything Biden wants to accomplish he will probably have to get done in the first two years of his presidency.

The longer term future is very uncertain. Will the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party get stronger or weaker? Will the Republican Party hold together and survive or will it split into two or even more political parties? Only time will tell. Will the Republican Party maintain its current position of prominence in American politics? Will the Democrats hold together, or will the progressives who have supported Senator Bernie Sanders for president break away and form a new, more progressive party? Once more only time will tell. For now the Democrats will be able to get some constructive things done as long as they can keep the votes of all fifty senators in their senatorial bloc. If the Republicans gain control of either house of Congress in the 2022 election all progress will cease as it always does when the Republicans control any of the decisions. So where do we go from here? Only time will tell. 

On the Senate's Second Acquittal of Former President Donald Trump

 

On the Senate’s Second Acquittal of Former President Donald Trump

February 13, 2021

 

On February 13, 2021, by a vote of 57 to 43 for conviction, the United States Senate acquitted former president Donald Trump of the charge of inciting the riot at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, pursuant to the Article of Impeachment that the House of Representatives sent to the Senate. It was the second time the Senate had acquitted Trump in an impeachment trial, and the second time that that result was a travesty. All Democratic senators were joined by 7 Republican Senators who voted for conviction, but the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority for an impeachment conviction. The result of the impeachment trial was therefore acquittal. In their presentations of February 10 and 11 the House impeachment managers proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump incited that riot. It is not a defense to that claim that the evidence does not rise to the level of the requirements of the criminal laws for a charge of incitement, although it very probably does. This is an impeachment trial not a criminal trial in court. What matters is that the insurrection of January 6, 2021, which led to this impeachment, would not have happened but for Trump’s words over the preceding many months. Before the November 3, 2020, presidential election Trump said over and over again that the election would be rigged, and that was the only way he could lose. After he lost the election he said hundreds of times that he had actually won that election by a landslide. He said over and over that the results showing that former Vice President Biden had beaten him handily were only the result of election fraud. He practiced Goebbels’ tactic of the big lie, and it worked. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to support Trump’s claims. Yet he repeated those claims so often that a substantial majority of Republicans and a few other people came to believe that they were true. Trump told his supporters over and over again that they had to “fight like hell” or else they would have an illegitimate president and no country left.

All of Trump’s efforts to incite the fanatics in his base to violence culminated on January 6, 2021, when he gave a speech to a huge crowd at the Ellipse, which is down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. Trump organized the rally to which that crowd came. He invited everyone he called “patriots” to come to Washington, D.C., on January 6. He told them that things would be “wild” that day. He chose January 6 as the date for his rally for only one reason. That would be the day when Congress would meet to carry out its constitutional duty of confirming the vote of the electoral college. At that rally, as the crowd chanted “stop the steal,” he said that the people there had to “fight like hell” to overturn the results of the presidential election, that is, to stop Congress from performing its constitutional duty, or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. Vice President Pence would preside at that meeting of Congress. Trump maintained that Pence had the authority under the Constitution to send the election results back to the states for a do-over. Trump claimed that if that were done he would surely win. Pence did not have that authority, and he told Trump that he did not when Trump asked him to send the election back to the states. Nonetheless, Trump blamed Pence for not doing the thing Trump had asked him to that Pence had no power to do. Trump nonetheless got the crowd worked up against Pence for not doing what Pence couldn’t do. Trump may have used the word “fraud” as many as 100 times in his speech. The crowd chanted “Stop the Steal!,” a slogan that didn’t originated with Trump himself but that he happily adopted. Once again he told them that they had to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, so they chanted “Fight for Trump!” After a while some of them chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” It had to be obvious to Trump that the crowd was agitated and that some of them were intent on violence. Nonetheless he told them that “we” were going to walk down to the Capitol although the permit the organizers had for the rally limited it to the Eclipse. He said they would go to demonstrate peacefully, but in the whole speech he said that only once. He told the crowd that he would go with them, which of course he did not. The thrust of his speech was that the crowd had to go to the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the election results. Clearly a significant number of people in the crowd Trump had asked to come to Washington were whipped into a frenzy and were more than willing to go to the Capitol to do what Trump told them to do, to “fight like hell.”

Some in the crowd did precisely that. They marched to the Capitol, built a gallows in front of it, broke into the building and marauded through it looking for Pence, Speaker Pelosi, or probably any other member of Congress they could get their hands on. Many members of Congress took off their pins that identified them as such hoping the mob would not recognize them. Some of rioters were carrying the plastic hand restraints the police use when they arrest someone. Some of them were still chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” They came within a few yards of finding him. They came very close to some of the legislators too including at least Mitt Romney. Many of the members of Congress were essentially barricaded in their chambers. They were told to put on the gas masks that were under their chairs. (Who knew that there were gas masks under the chairs in the Congressional chambers?) Some of them had been in the Senate gallery for purposes of social isolation. They crouched in fear not knowing what would happen to them. The Capitol police were largely overwhelmed, but they did manage to evacuate Mike Pence and the members of Congress to relative safety. Many members, staff, and other people in the Capitol that day called loved ones to say goodbye and I love you and the kids thinking they were going to be killed. A few rioters broke into Speaker Pelosi’s office, sat at her desk, and stole items from the office. Five people died in the melee. One rioter was shot by Capitol police. Three others apparently died from medical issues they had. The other death was that of a Capitol police officer, the circumstances of whose death are not yet clear. (During the impeachment trial the Senate unanimously voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to one of the Capitol police officers who had shown exceptional courage and helped save Pence, Romney, and others. In the days that followed the insurrection two Capitol police officers took their own lives. That Donald Trump is responsible for those deaths is beyond question.

Evidence that came out in the course of the impeachment trial is, if anything, more appalling than what we knew before. As the Secret Service was taking Vice President Pence out of the Senate chamber, Trump called Senator Lee trying to reach Senator Tuberville. Lee handed the phone to Tuberville. Trump wanted him somehow to delay the certification of the election. Tuberville said the vice president has just been taken out of the chamber, and I have to go. Trump expressed not one whit of concern about his vice president’s safety. Instead, shortly thereafter, he sent out a new tweet attacking Pence, thereby whipping up even more anger against Pence in the riotous mob. Also during the attack on the Capitol Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House, called Trump begging him to send help to the Capitol, telling him that there was a mob inside the building threatening the safety of everyone there. Trump said, “Well, I guess those people care more about the election than you do.” At no time did Trump ever inquire or express concern about what was happening. He cared only about overturning the results of the election. Eventually Vice President Pence not President Trump authorized the National Guard to come to the Capitol. Trump’s actions before the insurrection were despicable. His actions and failures to act during the insurrection are if anything worse.

In its very brief presentation to the Senate Trump’s defense team focused on several points including that that his trial in the Senate is not constitutionally permissible, that Trump did not receive due process in the House, that everything he said is protected by the First Amendment, that he did not incite the crowd to violence on January 6, and that everything he ever said about the 2020 presidential election was simply ordinary political speech. None of these defenses holds up to even superficial scrutiny. Trump’s lawyers also repeated the rightwing lie that it was something called “antifa” that actually had stormed the Capitol. That one isn’t even worth refuting it is so blatantly and obviously false. Trump’s lawyers also claimed that this impeachment was due to something they called “cancel culture.” This argument too is hardly worth responding to. They contended that somehow the left wants to cancel the constitution. That contention is ridiculous, since it was Trump who was trying to cancel the constitution by subverting the electoral process under that constitution. To discuss their other baseless allegations I’ll start with the constitutionality issue.

Trump’s lawyer argued that no impeachment or impeachment trial of a federal officer who is not in office is constitutionally permissible. This is the only argument they have that has even a patina of viability. At least in common usage and understanding the purpose and function of impeachment is to remove an officeholder from office. Obviously the Senate couldn’t remove Trump from office because he wasn’t in office at the time of the trial. This argument fails absolutely for Trump’s trial and would probably fail in a court of law. At the beginning of the trial the Senate voted that it has constitutional authority to try Trump’s impeachment even though he was not in office at the time. That vote established what in a court would be called the law of the case. That vote decided the constitutionality issue for purposes of the trial. Trump could have moved for reconsideration of that issue. He didn’t. Because the earlier vote was still in effect at the time the Senate voted on the impeachment it was illegitimate for any senator to vote to acquit Trump because the trial was unconstitutional, yet this is reason most of those who voted to acquit gave for their vote.

This argument would probably fail in a court of law too. Some argue that the trial is constitutionally permissible though the person being impeached was not in office at the time of the trial because the Senate has done it before. Prior Senate practice, however, is irrelevant to the question of the constitutionality of the trial. The earlier examples of the Senate trying people who were not in office could as easily have been unconstitutional as constitutional. There are no court decisions that decide the matter. Court precedent might matter. Prior Senate practice does not. More importantly, it seems that the drafters of the Constitution intended impeachment to include impeachment of a former office holder. It had been done in Great Britain before the US Constitution was drawn up, and the drafters of the Constitution apparently knew that it had been. That the concept of impeachment includes former office holders makes constitutional sense. If a former office holder could not be impeached, a president could do whatever he or she wanted very late in their presidential term with no consequences in Congress because there wouldn’t be enough time for the House to impeach the president and the Senate to try the impeachment before the president was out of office. Any federal office holder could avoid an impeachment trial by resigning before the Senate could hold that trial. A court would very probably hold that Congress has the constitutional authority to impeach and try a former federal office holder.

Also, there are a couple of provisions in the Constitution’s impeachment clauses themselves that at least suggest that the Senate may hold an impeachment trial against a former federal office holder both generally and in this case in particular. The Constitution says that the Senate is to try “all” impeachments. There is a valid impeachment here at least because Trump was still in office when the House impeached him. Therefore the Senate may try this impeachment. The Constitution also provides that there is a possible consequence of impeachment and conviction other than removal from office. Once it has convicted an officeholder in an impeachment trial, and only in that circumstance, the Senate may (though it need not) bar the convicted person from ever holding federal office again. If the Senate could not try an impeachment of someone no longer in office and find the person impeached guilty of the impeachment charges it could not reach the second question of whether or not to bar that person from holding federal office in the future. Therefore it is very probably permissible for the Senate to hold an impeachment trial of a person no longer in office.

Trump’s lawyers also argued that his trial in the Senate was illegitimate because Trump did not receive due process of law in the House impeachment proceedings. This argument is frivolous. It is true that the House voted to impeach Trump very quickly without the committee hearings that are typically part of a House impeachment process. Impeachment however is not a criminal proceeding. No one faces loss of life, liberty, or property (in the sense of a fine or confiscation of property) in an impeachment. The Constitution says that the House has the “sole” power of impeachment. The House may therefore make its own rules for cases of impeachment. There is no law whatsoever that specifies that the House (or the Senate for that matter) must give the subject of an impeachment due process. Yes, it would have more of an appearance of fairness if the House allowed the subject of an impeachment the right to counsel, to present witnesses, and to invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, all of which are elements of due process. No law requires the House to do so. Trump’s rights were not violated in the House impeachment process.

Trump’s lawyers raised one other constitutional defense against the charge that he incited violence. They argued that anything Trump said cannot amount to an impeachable offense because everything he said is protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. This argument too is frivolous. No constitutional right is absolute. I have freedom of religion. That doesn’t mean I can perform human sacrifice, claim that it is a religious ritual, and not be prosecuted for murder. It’s a cliché, but you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Different kinds of speech receive different levels of protection. A manufacturer may advertise a prescription drug. The government may prohibit it from saying that the drug does something it doesn’t do, and that prohibition is not a violation of the manufacturer’s right of free speech. Political speech receives the highest level of protection, but neither is the right to freedom of political speech absolute and unlimited. The public speech of governmental officials is protected, but that doesn’t mean they can say anything they want without consequences. The current case against Donald Trump is practically a textbook example of that legal truth. The First Amendment never protects incitement to violence. The state’s interest in the physical safety of its citizens outweighs anyone’s right of free speech. Words by a person in a position of power and authority may even receive less protection in an incitement case than does the speech of ordinary citizens because that person’s words have a greater ability and tendency to provoke violence than do the words of an ordinary citizen. The First Amendment simply does not allow any person, let alone the President of the United States, to incite others to acts of illegal violence. That’s precisely what Trump’s words did. They are not protected by the First Amendment, and it is irresponsible for Trump’s lawyers to argue that they are.

Finally, Trump’s lawyers argued that Trump’s actions and words before and on January 6 do not rise to the level of incitement and therefore do not establish an impeachable offense. This argument too is frivolous. An impeached person’s actions need not amount to a crime in order to be impeachable. Incitement to violence can be difficult to prove in a criminal case (although the evidence in this impeachment trial may well prove it). Impeachment however is not a criminal proceeding. The House impeachment managers need not prove all of the elements of the crime of incitement to violence in order to establish an impeachable offense. That Trump incited some of his followers to violence is obvious to any impartial observer. For months both before and after the election, over and over again he fed them lie that the election had been fraudulent and that his landslide victory had been stolen from him. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Trump incited violence, and the claim that he did not is frivolous.

Yet despite all the undeniable truths of Trump’s words and actions, too few Republican senators voted to convict to reach the required two-thirds supermajority. ___ Republican senators put party ahead of the truth, reelection ahead of justice, fear ahead of courage, and Donald Trump ahead of the country. Their vote to acquit Donald Trump of the impeachment charge against him is shameful. It is unpatriotic. It is un-American. It is cowardly. Those ___ Republican senators told the world that it’s acceptable for the US president to incite violent insurrection against the government the president heads. There simply is no defensible reason for those votes.

Trump’s lawyers tried to make out that what Trump said on and before January 6 was just normal political rhetoric indistinguishable from the political rhetoric that many other politicians, including some Democrats, had used on many occasions before. They said that many Democrats had urged their supporters to “fight” too. What those lawyers said about this point is of course patent nonsense. Yes, Democratic politicians sometimes urge people to fight for a cause or for the rights of marginalized people. No Democrat has ever done what Trump did. Never before has a US president summoned supporters, some of whom he knew were prone to violence, to Washington, D.C., precisely on the day when Congress would certify conclusively that Trump had lost the presidential election to former vice president, now president, Joe Biden. Never before had an American president spent months telling the world that the only way he could lose an election was through fraud, that there would be such fraud in the 2020 election, that he had in fact won an election by a landslide that he had clearly lost, and that his election victory had been stolen from him. Never before had an American president urged his worked up and agitated followers to “fight like hell” to stop the certification of his opponent’s victory and that they wouldn’t have a country anymore if they didn’t “stop the steal.” Never before had an American president so openly asked his vice president to do something that would have been unconstitutional and therefore illegal had he done it because the vice president doesn’t have the power to do it. Never before had an American president sent out an attack on his vice president when he knew that the mob he had incited was threatening the life of the vice president.

No, there was nothing ordinary about Trump’s rhetoric on January 6 or for months before he gave his incendiary speech on that date. In that speech he said once be peaceful. He said many times that there had been massive election fraud. He used the word “fraud” dozens of times in that speech at least. He repeatedly told the crowd that they had to fight like hell to overturn the results of the presidential election or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. Never before had an American president given a speech of any kind in Trump’s context on January 6. No other American president had ever spent months claiming that he could only or did only lose an election because of election fraud. Never before had an American president asked his supporters to believe that there had been a massive conspiracy against him by state election officials at least in the swing states, many of them Republicans, and by multiple state and federal judges, many of them either Republicans themselves or having been appoint by Republican presidents. Never before had an American president so attacked the most basic foundation of American democracy—free and fair elections. Never before had an American president fed a mob lie after lie about voting irregularities in state after state as Trump did on January 6. This country had never before seen anything like what Trump did in trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election. No, there was nothing ordinary about what Trump said before and on January 6. It is absurd for Trump’s lawyers to say that there was.

The full range of the consequences of the Senate’s unjustifiable acquittal of Donald Trump remains to be seen. It is clear that that acquittal in effect makes the impeachment clauses of the US Constitution very nearly null and void as they apply to the president. If inciting a violent mob to attack the US government in an attempt to prevent the performance of a constitutional duty is not enough for the Senate to convict a president in an impeachment trial, what is? Perhaps betrayal of the country to a foreign power with disastrous consequences for the country. Or clear outright bribery. It seems that anything less will lead to an acquittal at least unless a political party that is not the president’s has a two-thirds majority in the Senate on its own, something that is very unlikely ever to happen. The Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump discredits the US Senate, the US Congress, the US Constitution, and the oath Senators take when they come into office. If the Senate will not convict Donald Trump on the current facts, the president is in effect immune from impeachment. That’s not what the Constitution intends. It is what the Republicans have wrought.

The acquittal of Donald Trump demonstrates once again how partisan our politics have come. It certainly sees that in both impeachments of Donald Trump, and very probably in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, party affiliation was more important to most Senators than were the facts and law of the case. Pursuant to a Senate rule, in an impeachment trial the Senators take an oath that they will do “impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws.” The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and Trump’s acquittal in that case, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this oath means nothing to most Senators other perhaps than forcing them to cover their partisan decision with at least a thin covering of factual and legal justification. The case against Donald Trump was overwhelming. Conviction was the only reasonable and respectable outcome. Yet ___ Republican Senators voted to acquit and thereby prevented the majority of Senators from obtaining the conviction for which they had voted.

This acquittal of Donald Trump demonstrates the power of the extremists in what the media always call “Trump’s base.” The 43 Republican senators who voted to acquit Trump almost certainly did so out of fear that if they voted to convict they would lose their next Republican primary election to a candidate from or at least pandering to that base. That Trump has any base at all is a great puzzlement. The man is morally despicable and politically about as corrupt as politicians get. In his four years in office he used his office primarily to enrich himself and his family. He did great harm to this country and to the world. Nonetheless a majority of people who call themselves Republicans still support him. Sociologists political scientists, and historians will probably spend years trying to explain the origins Trump’s base and his seemingly inexplicable appeal to that base. American politics will never be healthy again (or as healthy as they ever were) until that base fades into history and ceases to be a political force among us.

After this vote the Republican Party, the party that calls itself the Grand Old Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, is no longer a legitimate American political party. It has been taken over by people more loyal to Donald Trump than to the United States of America, people who do not believe in American democracy and who prefer an authoritarian leader responsible to no one to the American constitutional system of a limited executive and a balance of power between three branches of government. No one who believes in the American system of government can vote for any Republican anymore. No one who is a true American patriot can vote for any Republican anymore. If we are to maintain a two party system in this country somehow some other party must arise to play the role the Republican Party used to play. I have actually considered the Republican Party to be illegitimate for a long time because it advocates policies that benefit only the wealthy. Now there is no doubt that it is illegitimate but for a different reason. Now the Republican Party as it is represented in the US Senate does not support the US Constitution. That may or may not be a tragedy, but the votes of 43 Republican senators to acquit Donald Trump leaves us no other conclusion.

So the Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting sedition is a very bad thing for our country. It cannot be justified under either the law or the facts. Impeachment is a political process, but in theory at least it need not be partisan. Entirely partisan it has become. For partisan reasons 43 Republican senators let former president Donald Trump in effect get away with murder. After all, five people died at the Capitol that day including a Capitol police officer who was bravely doing his duty in fighting back against the mob. During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and it wouldn’t cost him any votes. On January 6, 2021, he shot a mob hellbent on violence at the US Capitol, and five people died. The Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial will go down in history as one of the biggest blunders the United States Senate has ever made. That acquittal is a shame. It is an American tragedy. It will live in history as a stain on our political culture.

Listen to Him

 

Listen to Him

February 9, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

It’s a familiar story to most Christian churchgoers. It comes up in lectionaries every year as the Gospel reading for the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. It is the story we call the Transfiguration. You’ll find the oldest version of it at Mark 9:2-9. It goes like this. Jesus takes his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, up to the top of a mountain. There he is “transfigured” before them. That means that his appearance changed. Mark says only that his clothes became whiter than anyone on earth could bleach them, but other versions speak of his face becoming light as well. Moses and Elijah appear representing the law and the prophets.[1] Peter wants to stay up there with all three men. Jesus doesn’t even respond to Peter’s suggestion about staying there. A cloud descends upon the mountaintop. A voice, presumably the voice of God, says “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Mark 9:7. Moses and Elijah disappear. Jesus and the three disciples come down off the mountain. Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone what they had seen until after he was raised from the dead. Whereupon the story ends. It doesn’t expressly say that Jesus’ clothing or face returned to their natural state, but it’s safe to assume that they did.

There are several aspects to this story that are rich fodder for sermons. I just mentioned one them, Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus. Another is Peter’s desire to prolong his mountaintop experience and Jesus not even responding but leading his friends down off the mountain. Another might be what this story says about who Jesus really is. Then there’s one more, and it’s the one I want to talk about here.

The story of the Transfiguration has a voice, surely the voice of God, say, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” The first part of this statement is very similar to the first part of what a divine voice, again presumably the voice of God, says in the story of Jesus’ baptism. In that story the voice says “You are my Son, the Beloved.” Mark 1:11. The words are slightly different probably because the voice is talking only to Jesus, but it definitely expresses the same message. These two passages differ markedly in what the voice says next. At Jesus’ baptism the voice says, “with you I am well pleased.” At the Transfiguration the voice says “listen to him!” It’s that “listen to him” that I want to talk about here.

I’ll start by noting what the voice does not say. It does not say “believe in him.” Christians are so apt to say that to be a Christian is to believe in Jesus. We take faith to be belief, and we take belief to be accepting as true certain propositions, mostly propositions about Jesus. It certainly is true that the New Testament admonishes us many times to believe in Jesus. Those passages are often in the Gospel of John, and in John to believe is actually not to take certain asserted assumptions as true, but that’s a story for another day. In the Transfiguration story God says nothing about believing in Jesus. Instead we get “listen to him!” God obviously makes that statement to Peter, James and John. They’re the ones who need to listen to Jesus.

So do we. But God’s admonition to “listen” to Jesus raises an important question. What does the word “listen” actually mean? In its most basic sense to listen is to hear something. It is to pay attention to a sound. We listen to music or to a lecture. We listen to people we’re talking with (or at least we should). Hearing what Jesus says is certainly part of what God is telling the disciples, and us, to do here, but to listen has other deeper meanings as well. Consider this example. A mother says to a misbehaving daughter “Now you listen to me young lady!” The mother clearly wants the child to do more than just hear the mother’s words. She wants the child to hear and then to change her behavior in response to what she hears. Hear yes, but there’s more meaning in the word than that.

Several online dictionaries include definitions of “to listen” that include this deeper meaning of the word. One of them, merriam-webster.com, gives one definition of to listen as “to hear something with thoughtful attention: give consideration.” That definition is a start, but it doesn’t get us to the deeper meaning of the word. Here are three other online definitions of “to listen.”

 

·         To pay attention; heed; obey (often followed by to.)” dictionary.com.

·         To accept advise or obey instructions; to agree or consent. yourdictionary.com.

·         To pay attention to what someone tells you and do what they suggest. macmillandictionary.com.

·         “If you listen to someone, you do what they advise you to do, or you believe them.” collinsdictionary.com.

 

The last of these definitions does say that to listen to someone is to believe them, but even it contains another definition that’s more in line with the others. These definitions use words like obey, to accept advice, agree, consent, do what they suggest, and do what they advise you to do.  These words get us to the depth of the meaning of “to listen” that we need if we are going to understand what God says to the disciples in our story.

These definitions tell us that when the voice of God tells Jesus’ three closest disciples, and us, to listen to Jesus God means a lot more than just hear his words. When God tells us to listen to Jesus, God is calling us to hear what Jesus says, then to agree with it, consent to it, and obey it. God is telling us to do what Jesus advises us to do. God is not calling us to passive listening. God is calling us to hear and then to respond. To hear how Jesus tells us to live, then to live that way. To comprehend his word, then do (and not do) what Jesus tells us to do (and not to do). No, God is not calling us to passivity. God calls us not just to hear but to hear and then respond. To respond with lives committed to service, nonviolence, justice, forgiveness, compassion, inclusion, and grace. In short God calls us to hear and to follow. To hear Jesus and to imitate him as best we are able.

Doing what God calls us to do here isn’t easy. After all, living the way Jesus lived got him crucified. He said that the gospel cuts through families like a sword. Matthew 10:34-36. He said my yoke is easy and my burden is light, Matthew 11:30, but he also said take up your cross and follow me. Matthew 16:24. He said that those who want to save their life will lose it and those who want to lose their life will save it. Matthew 16:25. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount he tells us to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Matthew 5:48. I don’t know about you, but I know that I don’t have it in me to be perfect as God is perfect. All I can do is try to be closer to perfect than I have been, and that in itself is plenty hard enough. If Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light it is only because he is always with us to help us do what he calls us to do. So yes, God calls us to listen to Jesus in the deepest meaning of that word. Listen, then act. Can we? Will we? I pray that we can and that we will.

---

[1] For a discussion of what their appearance means to us see my post “On Jesus and Scripture” that immediately precedes this post on this blog.