I Can’t Believe It: The Problem Is Faith
Biden won.
There’s a large chunk of America that will disagree with me adamantly, but, if history and law mean anything at all to us as Americans, Biden won.
I wish I could be happy about it.
Make no mistake: I am happy about it. It isn’t some swell of “blue-pride,” but it’s something like relief. I don’t agree with all of his policies, and his stance on some things — and the lack of one on others — gives me pause. But when my wife and I watched his speeches and heard his words and just took them at face value, it was hard not to feel a happy ache in your chest. My God, the man sounds like a President; but more so, he sounds like a decent man. His time at the pulpit isn’t spent talking about himself, inciting violence, and spreading disinformation, all in an attempt at self-glorification of a fragile ego. It was like I’d held my breath for four years and suddenly was allowed to breathe again. Time will tell if he is any better, but for now, the future does look a little brighter.
But the problem remains: Biden’s win was not by much. Looking at the electoral map for nearly a week and seeing that the race was much, much closer than originally projected was disheartening. It might be closer to say it was heart-breaking. Never mind that America had decades’ worth of video and audio proof of Trump’s character (the man lived in front of a camera), and still decided to vote him into office. That’s almost forgivable. The things he did were deplorable, and there’s no question he hurt or ruined numerous lives, but it was almost something I was willing to look past, if it meant that people could look at the last four years under Trump’s leadership, and finally see sense.
It meant something to someone, because America voted Trump out of the White House. But it’s very hard to be happy about it when the margin is so small. I don’t like dipping into hyperbole, because I think it devalues the subject you’re trying to endear, but…that’s a really horrible way to find out that a lot of America is okay with low-key fascism. Including your friends and family.
I’m not the only one who’s been having a crisis trying to figure out why this is. I’ve seen plenty of theories, and as is usually the case, I think the truth is going to meet them all in the middle, as they are all corners and facets of the same conclusion.
But something dawned on me recently that I haven’t seen anyone talk about in any meaningful way, and I haven’t been able to reconcile it. But the more I think about it, the less I can deny it.
…I think it’s faith.
I don’t want people getting the wrong idea. What I’m about to tell you is from personal experience. I’m not throwing a wide net here and saying this is how all churches and Christians are everywhere. And, again, to dip into hyperbole devalues the thing you’re trying to talk about…but the things I’m about to talk about, I’ve seen with my own eyes, and experienced firsthand. My conviction wouldn’t be so strong without what I know I have seen and felt for myself.
…
I was raised in a deeply religious part of the country. The South is the hard, polished buckle of the Bible Belt, and it hurts when it hits. One of the main tenets of living as a Christian of any age there is this: “Don’t listen to anything that might lead you astray from your walk with God.” On its face, I can agree with [some of] that sentiment. I still live it, mostly. But the problem I found as I got older is that, to a great many people, this translates to: “If it doesn’t line up with what you personally believe, it is a lie.” Or, more often: “Outside of what you hear in church, there is nothing left to learn.” …which is a problem.
Churches are often echo-chambers. People go to spend time there hearing things that reinforce their ideas, with other like-minded individuals the whole Sabbath agreeing with each other. Churches are often viewed and portrayed as shelters from a corrupt world, congregations hunkering down like they’re waiting out a war in a bunker, safe from sinful fallout. I have seen the relief, the eager acceptance on people’s faces of hearing anything inside a church, because if it comes from inside God’s abode, it must be true. But the thing about about fallout shelters is, they recycle air…and the more you reprocess the air, the more stale and less healthy it becomes. It can even become bad for you. Eventually, you need fresh air…which means sometimes you have to go outside.
That was often why I could hear as a child someone talking about the indiscriminate love of God one moment, but how African Americans needed to “stay in their own space” the next. Everyone is welcome in the church, except that Middle Eastern family in the back row, or that goth girl who always comes dressed in black “like she’s trying to prove something.” How great Jesus was, but how terrible absolutely anyone but republicans were. All without a hint of irony. You almost wonder what century you’re in. Age humbles you to the face that those ideas have been ricocheting off the church walls for years.
I get the idea that Christians are supposed to rise above the world, because we are “not of” the world. But I think this becomes an excuse for a great many believers to simply stop learning about the world around them. When you’re told that the world around you is corrupt, you are conditioned to reject it. It doesn’t teach a healthy capacity for wariness, or scrutiny, a way to sort the bad from the good: it simply teaches you to slap anything different out of the hand offering it to you. It conditions people already unprepared for living in the world to be even bigger victims of it. And when they find out the world they’ve been ignoring for years has left them behind, without any idea of how to live in it, it terrifies them, and they will protect their fragility from being ousted through any means possible. That includes some decidedly non-Christian behavior.
Evolution, for example. It’s difficult to have a conversation with a fundamental, evangelical family about it, even in passing, without someone saying in an instantly worried tone: “You don’t believe in that, do you?” “Don’t read into that, that’s the devil’s work.” Pressing wielded interesting results. Oftentimes the family members with horror in their eyes often couldn’t tell me why they were so bothered. They might cite Genesis, but that’s about as far as you get. You find, in my experience, that your family doesn’t condemn evolution because they have any real idea of what it is, only that they have been told that it’s “wrong.” And any attempt to talk about it further — not in an attempt to endear them to it, not to be an apologist for it, not to play “devil’s advocate,” just to have a genuine discourse with someone you care about — is met with increasing discomfort, before someone eventually says in an exasperated tone: “Can we please just change the subject? I don’t like talking about these horrible things.”
Abortion. The death penalty. Sexual orientation. Socialism. Automation. I could go on and on. Almost every taboo idea even casually mentioned in conversation is met with a sudden frightened or angry outburst; and any attempt to get into the matter is met with resistance and frustration. And almost every time, I find the central pattern: the aversion to these things is not from an honest misunderstanding of them, or a well-educated stance on them, but with no experience in them at all. They do not look into these things. They do not have a desire to be educated on these things. They are told to keep these things as far away as possible from their faith, lest the two meet and somehow cancel each other out.
That almost always came from “what they heard in church.” If not from the pastor, or the Sunday school teacher, then from whoever was sharing the pew. Ad nauseum.
I don’t speak from some ivory tower here. I’m not absolved of this. I used to be an incredibly zealous individual, someone who used faith to hurt people rather than understand them. I can say from experience that oftentimes when I felt attacked or unfairly treated, it wasn’t because I was actually being repressed; it was because I had almost nothing backing up my argument, or my faith, except a blind conviction that I was right, and everyone else was wrong. I read nothing but the Bible, and understood just enough to make me angry at people who didn’t. When I was confronted with knowledge outside my own experience — stuff that I’d been told to avoid, stuff I’d been told was wrong to even look into, things I’d be punished for even looking at— it didn’t just anger me: it horrified me. It ended up showing me how thimble-deep my faith really was. I was ill-informed, I was severely uneducated, and I protected that truth with violence and spite. I was basically everything but what Jesus wanted me to be, including demonstrative of his love.
My best friend in the entire world once told me: “You had better know why you believe what you believe. Because someday, someone is going to ask you why, and you’d better know what you’re going to say.”
I found out one day that I had no idea.
When life humbled me to that fact, I started letting down my defenses. I started learning new things. I started willingly searching out other perspectives. I sat down, I shut up, and I listened. And the miraculous thing taught to me was that I was not only capable of experiencing these things, but they were beneficial to me. My faith didn’t spontaneously combust, and neither did I. On the contrary: it bloomed. It taught me about the world around me and how it worked. It taught me empathy, and compassion, things severely lacking in the religious spaces I’d been raised in. It taught me context, and application, and reason. It taught me that I will never stop learning, and God never wanted me to. He wants me to live life abundantly, and I can’t do that inside a building, even if there’s a cross on its roof.
It also taught me that people in my part of the country are taught to fear the world and reject it without actually learning anything about it. They are taught that their faith is so fragile that a news article or a science textbook can destroy it. They are taught that anything outside of what they understand is bad for you, and anything that supports what you believe is automatically good. And often, they are taught that things like “proof” and “evidence” should be avoided if they conflict with what you already believe. God can protect them from everything as long as they stay inside and plug their ears.
On some level, some Christians, some people of faith, are primed to believe only what they’re told.
I think Trump’s base are so committed to the man, despite what the evidence might say about him, because they don’t care about the evidence. They have been primed their entire lives to ignore the evidence, because they have lived lives constantly being told to ignore anything that would shake the foundations of their faith. In God, and then, because of the increased politicizing of God, in country. It’s not a huge leap. And I think that goes hand in hand with the deep insecurity so many of them have that they are not well informed enough to make up their own minds.
I’m not saying all Trump supporters are on some level “stupid.” That isn’t fair. I know for a fact many are not, in the same way that many Christians are not. You can, in fact, measure intelligence in different ways. That whole thing about judging a fish by how well it climbs a tree still holds true. I know many Trump supporters and republicans who pride themselves on staying abreast of their political situation, and are knowledgeable in a great many things. But this does not make a person blameless. It is entirely possible to delude yourself into a willful ignorance, because working on yourself is harder than admitting you’ve made a mistake. It certainly takes more work, believe me. God knows that I struggle with normal things that other people would laugh at me for.
But…again…we have a mountain of evidence. Much of it not skewed by some political angle, but raw, transparent. Audio. Video. Interviews. First hand accounts. It isn’t difficult to find, especially in our digital age. And this was well before Trump was ever POTUS. The cheating. The failed marriages. The adultery. The scams. The veritable trail of failure after failure, victim after victim. It’s all there. What exactly is the excuse?
Full disclosure: I didn’t want Trump to be President in 2016, and Clinton wasn’t exactly my first choice either. I voted Libertarian. But when the news broke that he’d won and America was doing a collective double-take, I sort of shrugged it off. I knew about the allegations and the past misdeeds, and I wasn’t thrilled about them. I thought he was a bad man. But I also thought that he had the platform to prove me wrong. So I was complicit in this sort of dazed indifference that gave Trump a chance, even when I knew better. So even if I couldn’t exactly march to D.C. and depose the man, I feel like I had a hand in it, if only because I failed to take it seriously. I was late to that party, but I showed up.
And…again…I was almost willing to forgive all of that. Far be it for people to research, to get online, to even thumb through some articles and newspapers the old-fashioned way and find it, I was willing to overlook it all — if it meant that people would be subject to the same insanity I was for four years under Trump’s slapdash reign and see once and for all that the man wasn’t cut out for the job. Bare minimum, he wasn’t cut out for it; maximum takeaway, he is a terrible human being who has had a hand in the deaths and ruination of thousands of his own people. People had to see that. His own base had to see that.
Right?
…November 10th. Over 200,000 people dead. His base is still saying that the election was rigged.
The best I can figure is this:
Evidence be damned, Trump was the republican choice. Patsy or aspiring dictator, the man was the tool by which the GOP would get what they wanted, not the least of which was more money and more power. He was the best of a bad situation and they were going to use him for it. All it would take is giving him what he wanted, and appealing to his own fragile ego. And no matter how shameful some of them would act, they would still be the party of conservative values. God and country, pro-life, etc., preserving an America that hasn’t been a reality for decades. This was still the party promising to protect Christian America from socialism, immigrants, LGBT rights, and all the other societal boogeymen they had no real understanding of. Some people here in the South don’t even know what a trans person is, but they know it’s not something they want walking around. They don’t know what Muslims actually believe, but they’re not Christian, and that’s enough to hang hatred on. And abortion is killing babies, no matter how you slice it. Any party who defends stuff like that must be of the Devil. Trump would get the vote.
But let’s not pretend his shaky bravado and sleazy charm didn’t have something to do with it, though. Spray tan or not, he appealed to the chauvinist and the alpha males throwing their weight around, and the racists and the biggots, and yes, even some people in their pews, because he was saying exactly what they wanted to hear. Many of them are seeing the world change around them and are fighting the sentiment that they must adapt to it, as humans do, to make it in whatever’s coming. When a fascist, racist, rapist kumquat of a man comes along and says that they don’t have to, that it’s been working great for him so far because he’s rich and famous and successful and basically gets away with everything, of course that’s what they gravitate to. He promises to bring back the world they were comfortable living in. People can be casually hateful again. God could be spoken in the same sentence as demeaning women or minorities. Pride “trumps” everything else. Machismo is back in style. The meek are no longer inheriting the planet, that’s fake news.
“Fake news.” That’s got to be the ultimate condemnation of all of this. What else would you call something that directly conflicts with your fragile worldview, your Faberge egg of Faith? You see Trump hug a flag, and it means he’s a model American. You see Trump hold up a Bible in front of a church, and it means he’s a man of God. It’s enough to make you ignore the crowds of people he gassed in order to get that shot. It’s enough pastors will tell their congregations to vote for him, even if he’s a thief and an adulterer, because he’s the only man who’s going to somehow protect your God-given interests. It’s enough for a mother to post on her Facebook graphics praising him as “God’s Chosen Warrior.” It’s enough for family to jump up at the slightest mention of Trump’s name and go into a ten minute rant about how he is the greatest President to ever live, but won’t stomach a single word to the contrary. Their faith is at stake.
And now, Trump has become the very epitome of that idea. He cannot handle he lost. He will not accept it. He will not do his research, he will not accept anything that doesn’t support his narrative, and his base are violently doing the same. In the scientific method, you don’t change the facts to fit your hypothesis. That’s exactly what he’s trying to do.
…it’s hard to stomach the anger, even for the sake of being objective. And it’s going to be even harder to forgive and forget. Being a man of faith, I have to try. As a friend recently told me, “Whoever wins, we’re going to have to live with ourselves afterward.” But the effects of this election, that electoral map, are never going to be lost on me, and I urge you don’t let it be lost on you either. Over half of America voted for change, for a return to common human decency and meaningful change for this country…and just under half voted for regression, and four more years of raging Id.
It’s difficult to stomach when it’s people you love and care about. It’s difficult to return home and see how much you’ve grown and how little everyone else has. Some have regressed, some have doubled-down. And things you once didn’t notice or were willing to overlook are now insufferable. These are your family, your friends. These are people you rely on for their opinions, for your stability. You love them. Once, red or blue meant nothing to you, because they were equally imperfect options. Not anymore. Some of them saw their friends die from Covid-19, they saw people of color get murdered on TV, they saw their President throw tantrums and make fun of handicapped people and sow violence in his own country with his base, and they just…didn’t seem to care.
They didn’t look at the evidence. If they did, it didn’t sway them. And when pressed, they get angry and upset, and will hide behind parroted Proverbs and Psalms, because they think it’s God’s duty to protect them from things that make them uncomfortable. It’s hard — so hard — to see people who raised you, who molded you into who you are fall into something like this, and you know exactly why.
Closing thoughts, because I’m tired:
I have faith that things can still change, can still improve. I think that America can find its way again. But it will have to be well-informed, deeply scrutinized, and rely on facts in order to do so. It will have to be open to other perspectives. It will have to be privy to ideas that make it uncomfortable. It will have to accept realities that conflict with their own worldviews, and be mature enough to accept that things are changing.
And to fellow Christians, to my Southern churches, I make the same plea. Research. Look into things. Be open to possibilities. If your faith is so fragile that even hearing the other side will destroy it, you need to strengthen it, not protect it. And if you have more faith in a man to protect your interests than God, well, I don’t know what to tell you.
