Who would Jesus vote for?

Allah Akbar vs. God is Great.   Live Churches vs. Dead Churches.   Baptists vs. Episcopalians.

This election is a struggle about identity.   The sign on the campaign wall could read, "It's the identity, stupid."

I had written last month that a student of this election didn't need to have studied economics.  Study anthropology instead.  Bernie Sanders talks about how wealth is earned and distributed and election commentators keep trying to understand the "working man's" resentment and grievance.   But Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders are each motivating voters by appealing to something other than money.  They are identifying and firing up their tribes.

And religion is part of that tribal identity.  This is why the issue of whether Obama says the talismanic words "Islamic terror" actually matters.  It is important to white, Christian conservatives that mere crime (gang killings, workplace killings, and incidents like the black-white racially motivated killing in the Charleston church) be differentiated from "real" terror, i.e. Muslims killing Muslims and non-Muslims motivated by Muslim triumphantalism.  Allah Akbar.    Their Allah inspires murdering savages--not great.  Our God is the great one, the bringer of peace and salvation from sin.

There is a struggle for triumphant leadership within the Christian churches of America.  The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was led by politically active liberal ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr. being the most prominent, but others led the anti-Vietnam war movements.

Connie Ihm

One reader, in Medford, Oregon, Connie Ihm, responded to an earlier guest post which posited that Christian faith caused people to be better and more moral--and more governable within a constitutional democracy--because such a document would only survive if it governed a moral people.  She wrote,  "Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive."  

She went on, "I am a registered Democrat not only because I was raised with parents who voted Democrat but because after I started to follow Jesus, I believed the Democrat party more closely matched what I believe Jesus purposed;  Forgiveness and caring for others; our family, our neighbor and the stranger as we try our humble best to imitate Jesus’ love for others as created in God’s image.  Jesus said to render what is Caesar’s to Caesar and to God what is God’s.  He wouldn’t let himself get drawn into political agendas."

Click to see "Victories" ad: Christianity triumphant.

Ted Cruz was the purest example of the Christian Church triumphant.   His TV ad--'Victories" presented him as the man who led the fight to place a cross at the top of a public park and a Ten Commandments monument at a state capital.  "We" win.  The godless and believers in false gods lose.   Members of Christian-triumph churches note with pride that this version of Christianity is winning adherents and old style "establishment" churches are losing members and are "dead" in spiritual life.  Episcopalians and Methodists down; independent evangelical churches up  Here's the scorecard:  Evangelicals over Mainline Protestants

Connie Ihm writes that her faith changes people personally and internally.  Its power is to change souls, not to dominate a polity and shape laws, nor to judge behavior of others.

Responding to a description of modern secular and non-triumphalist-Christian society as morally degraded mutantcy, she wrote: 

"Am I a moral mutant because I vote Democrat?  . . .  We need laws of course.  Every society needs laws.  

As society changes so do the laws.  As people we are constantly coming up with ways to break the laws so we need new ones to cover the results of our fertile imaginations of ways to get around them.  As concerns believers and his followers; Jesus got it down to 2 laws or rather commandments for his followers; ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.   And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

God blesses a Godly community but destroys one with sin within it.

Ihm says it is not about rules and judging.  It is an emotion of submission and love, not law enforcement.   She is a Christian non-combatant in the political wars.   For her, it's personal.  Just personal.  Not focused on political action, this strain of Christianity loses out politically to the other version of Christianity because the other version understands God as a rule-writer and judger, who wants believers to create a Godly community and many of its members organize for political action.  From America's founding it was understood that a Godly community requires the faithful to create laws for the community on the role of men and women, on religious doctrine, on proper dress and eating, on civil laws, on homosexuality, on the nature of marriage.   John Winthrop said the very survival of Boston required that they keep the faith and create a community fully knitted together.  That requires a government, conscious of its Christian heritage, obedient to Christian rules, and unapologetic in the triumph of Christian values.   True when John Winthrop said it and still true. The tribe is Godly and God is Great.    

(ISIS, the Islamic State, has the same understanding of the need for political Islam and control of territory: the faithful must create a polity of the faithful.   To create a Godly community it is not enough to have faithful people in private service to Allah.  Not all people are properly faithful and unGodly behavior offends Allah and defiles the community.  Allah, like God, demands an obedient community, and people should have great pride in  the effort to establish it.  The caliphate is Godly and Allah Akbar.)

Marco Rubio said it most succinctly but Trump said it most effectively:  we are in a war of civilizations.  Them versus us.  Trump knows what to do in a fight:  WIN.

That politically active strain, the one identified and nurtured by Ted Cruz (emphasizing religion) and Donald Trump (emphasizing white ethnicity) has has largely unified the Republican Party for this election, a unity impaired somewhat due to Trump's behavior and style.  But the Trump is appealing to a lot of Americans, and when Trump stays on that message he is broadly persuasive to a great many voters.  America first. America pride.  We are Christian and proud.  "Merry Christmas!" No apologizing.  We are not one of many, we are central.  It is our country, people like us, people who were born here, who speak English.   Our values created this country and we don't need or want to dilute them or pollute them with other values purporting to be equal and requiring us to share space or resources.  We can "take America back."  We can make America great again.

Hillary represents the opposite brand: global, multi-ethnic, respectful of international norms and institutions.  

Hillary was brought up in the Methodist church.  Trump says he is Presbyterian.  Both are mainline churches.  The difference is that Hillary presents her faith rather more as Connie Ihm presents it: a personal enrichment that leads toward a Matthew 25 version of Jesus: feed the hungry, clothe the naked.  Churches of all kinds serve the poor, naked, hungry, sick.  Service to the poor is not the differentiator.   The difference is the spirit of triumph and winning: Christian identity.   Hillary does not lead a Christian tribe, at war with the secular and the infidel.

Trump does.  The fact that Trump is obviously un-churched ("Two Corinthians) actually makes my point.  His being un-schooled in his faith demonstrates that his appeal is not about faith but about tribe.  He represents traditional possessors of power, the reassertion of the legitimacy and power of "normal" Americans--white, Christian identity in a war of tribal identity against Islam, multiculturalism, globalism, and foreigners.   

Trump's tribe is the traditional American tribe.   Hillary's tribe is the group the traditional American tribe defines itself in contrast to.  Trump's tribe is still bigger on election day, especially if his tribe is motivated to vote.