🧵 🪡

I have this internal crisis all while seeing some good and kind people become fully seduced by a classic strong-man bully who parrots enough god-talk to win over the historic "moral majority" crowd.

— Sean Muldowney (@sean_muldowney) August 25, 2023

This is a very engaging thread; so that you know upfront I don’t write in critique. In fact, I’m on the outside looking in, while reliving my own pastoral experience, especially the way it ended.

But I start in the middle, because of that line about “the moral majority.” I think it’s meant as the people who think themselves moral, and in the comfortable majority. But Jerry Falwell coined the phrase as a political statement and tool. Thus idolatry didn’t start with Trump; he just made it via yin electoral politics. Falwell wanted to be a political power, but never a politician. Pat Robertson tried to enter politics on the strength of joining his Christianity (arguably less false than Trump’s, which is completely fictional) to governmental power; he flamed out so badly it is all but forgotten, and he never tried again.

Trump was not sui generis, in other words. The roots of this lay deep in our culture and history. But the analysis of Trump as a false idol, in this thread, is dead on.

(I'm pretty sure I'm totally shutting my mouth this coming election season... or going full IDGAF, we'll see.)

— Sean Muldowney (@sean_muldowney) August 25, 2023

But you know what? There's still time to repent, to get off of this train to nowhere, and return to authentic faith in the true Savior. The one who willingly laid down power and embraced weakness.

— Sean Muldowney (@sean_muldowney) August 25, 2023

Jesus preached the power of powerlessness. It is the only true opposition to the power of the world. Taking on that power by trying to change its mind is to run into Nietzsche, metaphorically if not literally. The best a pastor can actually do is to recognize his congregation are, at best, baptized heathens, and proceed accordingly. I’ve seen churches with episcopal orders (bishops, I mean) bend the knee to the world while preaching the gospel of Christ, and congregational judicatories do the same. The power to stand against the world is not ecclesiastical leadership, it is pastoral servanthood.

But that’s a damned hard lesson, and not necessarily guidance. Which makes that Xitter thread worth reading.