We disgrace ourselves as a nation each and every day Donald Trump remains in office. The drafters of the United States Constitution provided a remedy for a criminally insane president like the one we have—impeachment and removal—but our current Congress, as an institution, is too corrupt and cowardly to fulfill its constitutional duty to exercise this power and duty. And that, sadly, is where we are today.
(A duty no Congress in history has ever fulfilled. The closest we came was the forced resignation of Nixon. Since then Republicans turned impeachment into another political cudgel, and have rendered it useless ever since. Feature, not bug.) "The love of money is the root of all evil.” I was assured, in my misguided childhood by people who wanted to be sure my Christian beliefs were well grounded in 1960’s middle class American standards, that the original of that verse said the correct interpretation was “excessive” love of money. This analysis was buttressed by explaining that the original word was “cupiditas.” Which it is; in the Vulgate. The Latin translation of the original Greek. In the original original, the word, according to Bauer, is “love of money; avarice: miserliness.” Difficult to love money without being avaricious. Needing money is one thing. Even the disciples had a common purse. Luke describes the immediate post-Pentecostal church as holding everything in common, so everyone could be taken care of; but no one could be avaricious.
I’ve seen enough, as a lawyer, as a pastor (two positions at which I did NOT excel. I speak from hard experience, not the lofty heights of wisdom), to know that there is no such thing as a moral society. Niebuhr gives us the concepts for this, far better than my limited experience. Basically, a society cannot be moral because it cannot ask its members to sacrifice on behalf of the whole. We make people sacrifice: through military drafts, or economic oppression (call it the Omelas excuse); but we can’t ask them to die for the greater good. Not that directly. That way lies totalitarianism, which we agree cannot be moral.
But can we be moral about who we choose to run our government on our behalf? To be truthful, perhaps our most moral President was Jimmy Carter, but he quickly replaced by Reagan, an empty shell of a man who played a moral character. But even Reagan was not Trump.
Can we not insist on character, at least?
The other “money” related verse that was sanitized in my youth was Jesus’s parable (simile, really) about the camel and the eye of the needle. The “eye of the needle, “ I was told, was a very narrow gate into Jerusalem that an overladen camel (too much stuff; get it?) couldn’t get through. No such gate existed. Jesus meant a real sewing needle. Far bigger in his day than what you’re thinking of, but still not large enough to accommodate a camel. At all.
The point being, the real radicalism of Jesus is almost beyond our understanding. Certainly beyond our willingness to accept. Which is also the nature of morality. The otherwise anodyne (you needn’t even be religious to see its wisdom) “Golden Rule” is beyond our reach. “Do to others what you would want them to do to you.” Jesus rendered that one plainer, too: “Don’t judge, and you won’t be judged.” I learned the complexity of that in seminary. It means don’t join the system of judgement, if assessment, of weighing everyone on some imaginary scale and finding them wanting, and you won’t be subject to judgement yourself. Simple wisdom. Just walk away from it. Leave it behind. You want to judge the poor person? The evil person? The good person? You judge yourself. Is that moral? Or is that just another system?
Maybe ethically, to invoke Aristotle, I can say someone’s actions are not increasing my happiness, so I should not model my behavior on that person. Although by the world’s standards, Trump is certainly successful ;isn’t that what it means to win the Presidency?), and Aristotle’s ethics is that I should model my behavior on Trump’s. But would that even be good ethics, much less morality?
We may be moral men and women. We should certainly try to be. But we will inevitably be an immoral society. Even Socrates recognized he had to sacrifice his life for Athenian society; he couldn’t ask Athens to sacrifice its authority, for him.
Trump is an abomination. But even for the Hebrew prophets, the standard for the king was character, not morality. Even David behaved immorally; but he was still regarded as Israel’s greatest king. David had character. When he was confronted, he recognized his sin. And Jeremiah, in the Exile, told the king what was most important:
Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness,
his upper rooms by injustice,
making his own people work for nothing,
not paying them for their labor.
14 He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace with spacious upper rooms.’
So he makes large windows in it, panels it with cedar and decorates it in red.
15 “Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?
He did what was right and just,
so all went well with him.
16 He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the Lord.
Jeremiah 22:13-16
For the leader, for the government, it is ultimately a question of character. And in a democracy, that question is always laid at the feet of we, the people. Our history does not show us as ever having done very well with it.
