We Aren't Facing Anything New

 

We’re Not Experiencing Anything New

January 29, 2025

We live in times that are distressing at best. The American electorate has made the American fascist Donald Trump president again, as incomprehensible as their doing so actually is. He and his sycophant followers have set about destroying the rule of law in this country, the rule of law being one of the foundational principles of our republic. He and his sycophant followers have set about destroying our federal government. They have a couple of reasons for doing so. One is so that everyone the government employs, for it will always have to employ someone, is loyal to Dear Leader Donald Trump not to the US Constitution or that hoary old notion the rule of law. The other is that fascists like Donald Trump always destroy the traditional institutions of the government they have conquered because those institutions represent potential centers of opposition to the fascist government’s demonic plans. Trump wants in particular to put the Department of Justice under his heel, largely because some career, professional lawyers in that department had the unmitigated gall to investigate and prosecute him for at least some of the crimes he has already committed. Some of our traditional governmental institutions will still exist. There will still be Congress, though it already is stacked with Trumpist toadies who bend the knee before the Dear Leader every chance they get. We still have the federal courts, though during his first term as president Trump loaded them with fascist ideologues who obey him not the law. Even the Supreme Court now does Trump’s will rather than legitimately rule on and apply the law, so how much hope we can have in the courts to save us from Trump is, tragically, an open question.

We have never before experienced anything like Trumpist fascism in this country. Yes, there were a lot of fascists and Nazis in this country in the 1930s, but they never took complete control of our government the way Trump and his minions have today. We are experiencing something unique in American history. We are, however, not experiencing anything unique in world history. Fascism has a long history, and Donald Trump is following its playbook to the letter. He came to power legally just like Adolf Hitler did in 1933. His agenda is to create a federal government loyal only to him just as Hitler made most Germans take the Hitler oath. He is trying to submit the entire federal government, and state governments too, to his will just like Hitler created a personal dictatorship after he came to power. Trump has a model he is following, though he may not be smart or educated enough to know that he’s doing it. Some of his followers, like those who wrote the fascist document Project 2025 that Trump has set about putting into practice, surely do. Yes, Donald Trump’s fascism is new to the United States, but no, it is not new to the world.

Neither is opposition to fascism new to the world. It’s new to the US because we’ve never had to face it before the way we must today, but fascists have always had opponents. They have understood the evil of fascism and spoken out against it. They have characterized fascism’s evil in their speech and in their writing. I recently came across one such statement made in opposition to Hitler’s Nazism after he came to power. It’s by Eberhard Arnold, a cofounder of a Christian society called the Bruderhof. In meetings of his community throughout May, 1933, he said things like this:

One gets the impression that under the tyrannical despotism of the present government, one can no longer rely on any law….It really is politics of the dirtiest kind that treads law under foot, a wickedness that cries to heaven, a revolting, lawless frivolity…. Let us ask Go that we may hold on to freedom of conscience in these times of bondage….We have to represent…the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ.[1]

Arnold succinctly states the basic premise of fascism, namely, that the law doesn’t matter, only the directives of the dictator matter. So while Donald Trump is something new in our country, he and his fascism have a history in other countries.

We are faced with American fascism, and as Christians we have to ask: What are we to do? A school Arnold  ran fled Germany for Liechtenstein. Fleeing America, however, isn’t a viable option for most of us Americans, though Canada is awfully tempting. I think Arnold gives the best answer there is to the question of what we are to do: “We have to represent the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ.” That statement, of course, raises two vital questions, namely, what are the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and how are we to represent those politics? We Christians must struggle to reach answers to both of those questions today.

The first question is relatively easy to answer. The politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are the politics of love. That means several things. It means that these politics are nonviolent. It means that these are the politics of inclusion not exclusion. Of restorative justice for the poor and the oppressed. They are the politics of the radical equality of all people. They are the politics of freedom, all kinds of freedom but most importantly freedom of conscience. Jesus never made anyone believe anything. His parables, for example, raise questions for us to answer but don’t usually give the answers themselves. So the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are most definitely not the politics of white supremacy and Christian nationalism. The politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are, then, precisely the opposite of the politics of fascism.

How we are to represent those politics is a much more difficult question. Few of us have a public voice of any significance. Few of us lead active opposition movements. There are, however, several things we can do nonetheless. We still have freedom of the press, at least of sorts. We can write letters to the editor of our local newspaper proclaiming the politics of peace and justice. We can work to get the visual media to cover any gatherings or public events we may hold in which we condemn fascism and proclaim justice. We still have representatives in Congress. We can call and write them urging them generally and in more specific ways to oppose the Trump administration’s fascism. We still have elections. We still can vote, and many (if not all) of us usually have non-fascist politicians for whom we can vote. We can contribute time and money to their campaigns. We still encounter people who spout the fascist line. When we do, we can call them on their lies and proclaim the divine truth of peace and justice to them. Some of us have family members who support Trump and his fascism. We can try to change their minds. When we can’t, we may have to shun them, exclude them from our lives, as a way of making our disgust with their politics known. We can join any local organizations we have that work for peace and justice. We can support the ACLU. We can support the Southern Poverty Law Center. We can support any other national organizations we know of that stand for truth and justice.

Your humble author and most of the readers of this blog are Christians. Many of us belong to Christian churches. We can work within our churches to educate people on the evil of Trumpist fascism. We can, perhaps, lead our churches in passing and publicizing resolutions condemning the fascist actions of Trump and his flunkies in government. Publicizing such resolutions is vitally important. So is acting on them. Churches so often pass resolutions on issues of the day, then those resolutions and the people who passed them just sit there doing nothing else to support appropriate causes. We can work to stir our co-religionists to action not just to words.

We still have freedom of assembly. Trump, of course, would eliminate that freedom for anyone who opposes him, but he hasn’t managed to do that yet. We can join groups that work for justice, or, if we can’t find any, we can create one. We can participate in public demonstrations against Trumpist fascism. Perhaps you can think of other things we can do. I urge you to consider other nonviolent ways of opposing Trump and his MAGA movement and then to act on any you think of.

Perhaps most of all we can pray. Our praying doesn’t actually change God, but it can change us. Living into God’s unbounded love can give us courage when we face obstacles or dangers. It can energize us in our efforts to do what is right. It can unite us in common purpose. It can show the world that the gospel of Jesus Christ condemns racism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism. It can show the world that the gospel of Jesus Christ condemns Donald Trump and nearly everything he sets out to do.

So no, we are not faced with anything new, at least in terms of world history we aren’t. We can see that Trump is following a tried and true handbook of fascist governmental takeover and dictatorship. We can also learn from the examples of the brave people who have stood up against fascism in whatever way they have encountered it. Will we be able to stop Donald Trump from creating a truly fascist US government? I don’t know. Although he has a great deal of support among the American public, he also has low approval ratings for an incoming president. We can hope that his extreme, often illegal actions as president will erode his support, but it remains to be seen whether they will or not. We can only hope and pray that they will. May it be so.

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[1] Quoted by Marienne Wright in her essay “The School That Escaped to the Alps” in Plough, Winter 2025, No. 42, p. 30. Plough is a truly excellent quarterly publication of the Bruderhof. I would never call fascism a “frivolity,” but never mind.

Donald Trump's Attack on the Government

This is the text of a letter I just sent to my local newspaper. 

It is clear that Donald Trump has something specific in mind with his parade of reprehensible, utterly unqualified people whom he has nominated for important positions in his administration. He has nominated vaccine denier Robert Kennedy, Jr., to be Secretary of the Health and Human Services. He has nominated serial liar and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel to be director of the FBI. The list of Trump's nominations of despicable, unqualified men and women for positions of power in our federal government just goes on and on. We have to ask why Trump insists on nominating so many utterly unqualified people to important positions in the government. It seems there can be only one explanation. Donald Trump is an American fascist, and fascist leaders, when in a position to do so, typically set about destroying their government's traditional institutions of power because they want to be in complete control of all aspects of their state. Trump clearly has set out to destroy the proper functioning on a broad range of American governmental institutions and to destroy Americans' trust in those institutions. Will he succeed? Only time will tell, but today we live under the frightful possibility that he will. We must all urge our United States Senators to vote against most of Trump's nominees. We must do what we can to make it clear that the American people will not stand for what Trump is trying to do. Perhaps we can't stop Trump, but we can at least make it clear to history that a great many of us opposed Trump and what he was up to as president.

It's Not That Hard to Understand

                                                It’s Not That Hard to Understand 

January 19, 2025 

Tomorrow the American fascist Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States of America for the second time. Talk about not learning from your mistakes! This time he actually won the popular vote though he got only 49.8% of it. He had a clear electoral college victory over his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris. Nearly half of this country’s voters voted for Donald Trump last November. Enough of them in enough states voted for him to make him president-elect, and tomorrow he will become president once again. I have never understood how anyone with half a brain and even a dim awareness of who Donald Trump is could possibly vote for him once let alone twice.  

After all, these are just a few of the undeniable facts about Donald J. Trump. He is an unsuccessful businessman who has somehow made himself rich (though he won’t disclose documents that would tell us just how rich) despite having had to file multiple bankruptcies. He has been married three times and has been unfaithful to all three of his wives. He thinks women are just people he can “grab by the pussy” because he’s famous. He has been found civilly (though not criminally) liable for sexual assault that has been called rape by some of those who know the facts of the case. He has been convicted of thirty-four counts of fraud. The Department of Justice has found grounds to prosecute him for mishandling classified documents as he left office in 2021. It has found grounds to charge him with four criminal counts of violating federal law in his illegal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has said he won’t be a tyrant “except on Day One” of a new presidential term. He does not believe in the rule of law. He makes it clear that he wants the Department of Justice to abuse its power by prosecuting his political opponents and those who have charged and prosecuted him though there is no evidence that any of them did anything illegal. He is a megalomaniacal narcissist who cares nothing about anyone but himself. He has no understanding of economics or of foreign affairs. He gives not one good God damn about this country’s traditional allies, especially those in NATO. He loves tyrannical world leaders like Vladimir Putin and wants to be like them as president. He does not believe in or support our country’s history of democracy or the civil rights of anyone who is not like him. He claims that he will end “birthright citizenship” though the 14th Amendment makes that way of becoming a US citizen a constitutional right. He says he will impose large tariffs on imports from countries as diverse as China, Canada, and Mexico and denies that American consumers will end up paying more because of them though that effect of them is undeniable. The truth means nothing to him. He lies about something or other essentially every time he opens his mouth. He has vowed to repeal essentially every federal environmental regulation. He has promised to reduce taxes for rich people even more than they have already been reduced, a move that will have disastrous consequences for poor and middle class Americans. He wants to cut Medicaid and Social Security to pay for those tax cuts. He wants to undermine if not repeal the Affordable Care Act. He understands the US Constitution hardly at all and cares about it less. He has at least suggested that once he is again in office he will refuse to vacate it at the end of his term. 

Yet a plurality of American voters sufficient to win the election voted to make him president for a second time, and one thing seems clear to me. Trump is as much a symptom of what’s going on in this country as he is a cause of it. Only a disordered electorate would ever elect Donald Trump to the most modest office on any ballot much less to the American presidency. The American electorate has never made anyone nearly as unqualified and as dangerous as Donald Trump president.  

What could possibly explain the disastrous decision the American electorate made last November? Part of the explanation is that relatively undereducated white American men resent the advances toward equality people of color, women, and sexual minorities have made in recent decades. They long to return to an imagined past in which they were the privileged, and they won’t vote for anyone who wants to move forward not backward, especially if that candidate is a woman of color like Kamala Harris. Part of the explanation is that voters care more about the price of bread than they do about bigger, more significant issues. All of those things matter. 

But there is, it seems to me, a deeper, more powerful, and more important dynamic at work here. Every empire there has ever existed has declined. Rome is the classic example of this dynamic but is hardly the only one. Every empire that has ever existed has eventually gone out of existence. The US is today’s world empire. I believe that we are entering that phase of our imperial existence (or may already be significantly advanced in it already). A plurality of Americans have lost faith in democracy. They have ceased to care about anyone but themselves, not that they ever cared all that much about anyone but themselves. Empires decline. We are declining. 

Democracy is fragile everywhere. The French Revolution may have been waged in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity , but it produced the massive, continent-wide destruction of the Napoleonic Empire. In the 1920s, Germany had a democratic constitution. It produced the far, far worse continent-wide destruction the Nazis inflicted. In the early 20th century, Japan had a more or less democratic government modeled to a considerable extent on Bismarck’s Germany. It produced the horrors of the Japanese Empire in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Democracy died in all of those instances. It is dying in the United States today, and Donald Trump is the most visible manifestation of that death. 

Hardly any Americans are aware that their country is an empire and that it is dying, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a dying empire. That doesn’t mean that the country known as the United States of America will disappear any time soon. After all, it took Rome centuries to fall. Powerful forces in this country will try to keep it going. Most Americans will still call it the greatest country in the world, which it is not and never has been. We will be the world’s greatest military power for a long time to come. The world will not be able to ignore the US for a long time to come. 

None of which changes the truth that the US is an empire in decline. No solid, healthy country would ever elect Donald Trump to anything much less elect him as the country’s leader twice. That the US has done that is all the proof we need they we are declining. We’d do well to do what Great Britain has done—recognize its loss of status and, more or less, learned to live with it. But Americans won’t do that. They’ll keep on proclaiming us the city on a hill everyone else should imitate when we are in truth no such thing. They will keep spending obscene amounts of money on the military to prop up our power around the world. Yet our decline will continue over time. The decline of empires always does. That we have elected Trump is all the proof we need that this country’s end is coming. It won’t happen soon, but happen it surely will. 

On Making a Joyful Noise

 On Making a Joyful Noise 

January 12, 2025 

For 

First Congregational UCC Bellevue Choir Retreat 

Rev. Tom Sorenson 

Scripture: Psalm 100 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of your hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. 

I don’t know about you. I won’t ever claim to speak for any of you. That’s not my role, and I have no intention of doing it today. But speaking only for myself, I have to say that I don’t find the times we’re living in to be particularly joyful. There is just too much trouble everywhere. I mean, just look at the world around us. Violent Russian aggression against Ukraine. Violent Israeli assault on Gaza. Violent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Jordan. Oppression of women in Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The growth of right wing political movements in many nations including our own. A president-elect about to take office in this country who seems to all appearances intent on destroying our federal government for the benefit only of the uber-wealthy. Assault on the personal autonomy and integrity of women in many of our states that our president-elect apparently intends to attempt to spread nationwide. Irresponsible environmental policies that threaten to cause even more extensive damage worldwide than they already have. A threat that wildly irresponsible trade and taxation policies will make life harder for ordinary Americans. Hundreds of thousands of unhoused people in what we claim is the richest country on earth combined with an apparent unwillingness to do what would have to be done to address the problem in a serious way. Not a pretty picture, is it? It certainly isn’t to me. 

Then we encounter scripture passages like the opening lines of Psalm 100 that we just heard. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth, serve the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing.” And I have to tell you: When I read passages like that my first reaction is: Yeah. Sure. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to do that in today’s world? It just doesn’t seem possible. A joyful noise? Serve God with gladness? Come into God’s presence with singing? I have to confess that I just think: I don’t think so! Not today. Not in the foreseeable future. The world is just too ugly for that. 

But then I get to thinking a bit more. These verses talk about music. “Make a joyful noise.” What’s a joyful noise? It isn’t the noise of hotrod cars or motorcycles with punctured mufflers that we often hear in the neighborhood where I live. It isn’t the sound of traffic on the freeway. It isn’t the sound of cries of anguish, despair, or grief that we sometimes hear and sometimes make ourselves. It isn’t incessant, unavoidable, and mostly immensely stupid advertising on television. It isn’t the speech of most of our politicians. It isn’t the demand we hear to deport hundreds of thousands of decent people who play indispensable roles in our economy and who only want peace and a better life for themselves and their children. It isn’t the lies some of our politicians tell us about the threat those people present. It isn’t the demand we hear to let politicians, mostly male, decide what women can and can’t do with their own bodies. In other words, it isn’t most of the noise we hear day after day. 

So what is a joyful noise? For me, and I hope for most of you, the most joyful noise we hear is music. Music in general, but more specifically the music we make together in our choir. Some of that music is meant to be joyful. Some of it is more serious or somber than we usually think of joy as being; but joy is both happy and deep. Deep, serious music can be joyful too. I don’t know about you, but I always feel substantially better after we have sung together than I did before we began. I often remember the old saying: The one who sings prays twice. We pray with our lyrics, and we offer a different kind of prayer with our melodies and harmonies. For me, music can be a joyful noise when it seems not much else in the world is. 

So as we enter this new year so full of doubt and promise, let me share with you one way that I see music, especially our music. To me, music is a refuge. It is a shelter. It is an escape from a world I’m usually not much pleased with. Sometimes it is a place of peace. Sometimes it is a place of excitement. Sometimes it is a place of inspiration. Sometimes it’s a place of challenge. Something it’s not, ever, is a place of despair, or depression, or fear. The world often oppresses our spirits. Music can raise our spirits better than anything else. The world often gives us violence and injustice. Music can, I suppose, be used in support of violence and injustice. I mean, the Nazis certainly used it that way. But the music we sing is sacred music. It is music of hope and of love not of hatred and despair.  

In other words, whether it is expressly joyful or expressly more somber, it is a joyful noise. It speaks of what should be and of what could be but is not. It points to God’s promise that God is with us always and never abandons us, no matter what. It speaks of the hope we can have only in God in this world that so often seems so hopeless. It is, to a considerable extent, a voice that looks the world in the eye and says: No! You are not how things are supposed to be. You are not the way things one day will be. It looks the world in the eye and says: Nonetheless! Nonetheless, we will have hope! Nonetheless, we will make a joyful noise in a world so often full of very different kinds of noises. We will make a joyful noise because be believe that God is with us every minute of every day. 

You know, I and other ordained preacher types can use a lot of words to try to convey what God is trying to tell us through Jesus Christ, the one we call Lord and Savior. We can give sermons that are probably too long. We can write books that are definitely too long. But nothing we can do has power that remotely approaches the power of music. Words mostly touch our superficial cognitive abilities. Music goes much deeper than that. Music touches the soul in a way mere words never can. Our words may struggle to be joyful. Our music finds it easy to be joyful. It is joyful because it always points beyond itself to the love of God, and it does that more powerfully than mere words ever can. 

So, let us say together: Nonetheless! Nonetheless, we will make a joyful noise to the Lord! We will sing. We will sing with our voices from the depths of our souls. We will sing with joy to the people on earth and to God in highest heaven. Maybe, like me, you can’t find much joy I the world today. So be it. God is still with us, and there is still music. We can still make a joyful noise to the Lord. So let’s keep doing it, shall we? Thanks be to God! Amen.