Searing insight can come from unexpected places. Take Billy Graham, the most prominent evangelist of the 20th century, who also turned out to be a prophet for our times. Back in 1980 he was being urged to support Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for president by Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority evangelicals. He refused and said, “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.” How true that has proven to be.
The Trump conviction in New York provoked intense tribal responses. And those responses leave me asking, what do I believe and where do I belong?
Tim Costello can’t understand why so many of his fellow Christians, both in the US and Australia, support Donald Trump.
For those on the right, Donald Trump being found guilty of criminal offences simply provided proof that the Democrats had weaponised the justice system through a Democratic prosecutor and a Democratic judge, and furthered their sense that the whole system is broken. For the left, the overwhelming feeling was that, finally, 12 ordinary jurors had held Trump accountable after he had escaped such censure his whole career. To everyone around the world, on display was the utter polarisation of American politics – the contempt each side shows for the other, and even the potential for a civil war in the land of the free.
As I said, this leaves me in something of a personal crisis. I have believed all my life that whatever the ebb and flow of history we were moving slowly towards greater justice and more democracy. It was an optimistic faith, some might say a........