On the Eve of the Election: Looking to the Days after the Election

 

 “Who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.” 

As readers may know, I am not a fan of Donald Trump. My impression of Trump was formed years ago during the early part of his career. The last four years only has reinforced this impression. The people of the United States have experienced a lot of pain since March of this year. If Trump is reelected, they will experience even more pain in the next four years.

Trump is a man who has negligible empathy for other people. If you listen to his public statements and his private comments and read between the lines, he has written off a large segment of the US population. They are expendable from his point of view. Other members of his administration may express concern for them but he himself has none.

Trump is also a bad influence—not only on those around him but on the nation as a whole. His proclivity to stir up conflict, to encourage division, and to bring out the worst in people do not bode well for this country.

As his biographers have observed, his management style is to foster chaos. He will pit his underlings against each other and encourage their competition for his attention and approval. The late psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Eric Berne identified these kinds of transactions as a psychological game which he called “Let You and Him Fight.” The purpose of the game is to prove to the instigator of the fighting that other people are stupid and manipulatable and the instigator himself is superior to them.

Trump demands absolute loyalty from others but shows no loyalty to them. Whatever Trump does is self-serving. He will adopt a particular course of action because one way or another it benefits him.

These characteristics are not the kind of characteristics that a country needs in a national leader in a time of crisis. They are not the kind of characteristics that a country needs in a national leader when things are going well.

Trump enjoys the support of a segment of the evangelical community. Trump is very good at sizing up an audience and telling that audience what it wants to hear. For a man whose character embodies what our Lord and the apostles rejected as not just as ungodly but also as abhorred by God, it is surprising that he has gained the ear of this segment of the evangelical community. This should concern us.

Rather than evangelicals having a positive influence upon Trump, he is having a negative influence upon evangelicals. This is quite evident from articles, posts, and comments on websites that serve the evangelical community or which evangelicals frequent. A number of ostensible evangelicals have discarded the teaching and example of our Lord and the apostles and substituted for them Trump’s rhetoric.

Trump’s negative influence is bound to have a harmful effect upon the witness of evangelicals but also other Christians as well. It feeds into the damaging stereotypes that non-Christians have of Christians. It reinforces these stereotypes and erects barriers to the gospel. Trump promised to erect a wall but the wall he is erecting will separate Christians from those whom their Lord has commissioned to reach with the gospel. 

In the long term I believe that evangelicals will regret their support of Trump. As the proverb that I quoted at the beginning of this article draws to our attention, we cannot deal with dangerous persons without risking coming to harm ourselves.

Those who believe that they can restore Christianity to its former position of influence in the life of the nation through legislation, presidential executive orders,  and judicial appointments are deceiving themselves. One cannot change minds by edict. If they wish to become an influence in the nation’s life, they must earn it. They must gain the trust and respect of the people whom they wish to influence. They must listen to people not only in their own circumscribed world but also outside it.

Whoever wins the presidential election, this will be the challenge facing evangelicals and other Christians. How then do they gain the trust and respect of their fellow Americans? They must genuinely live their lives in accordance to the teaching and example of Jesus Christ and his apostles. They must love their neighbors as themselves. They must become living exemplars of the Golden Rule. They must love their fellow Christians with the same sacrificial love which our Lord loves us. They must love their enemies—those who hate and despise them. They must be merciful as God himself is merciful and thereby show that they are indeed the children of the Most High.