The Snap Back
Democratic Control Gives Republicans and Conservative Religious Folks A Comfortable Mode of Engagement to Slip Back Into...if they choose to do so
Is it finally time for the fever to break, and for our national politics to regain some now-distant sense of comity, of common cause, of transcendence? With President Trump out of The White House, and Republicans’ negative reaction to Trump’s inciting a violent mob—from Senator Mitt Romney’s genuine moral clarity to uncharacteristic reports that Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell and Congresswoman Liz Cheney are displeased—some are hopeful that the new administration might bring with it a different kind of politics. I count myself among them. President Biden has been persistent, before the election and since (including in his inaugural address), in his calls for bipartisanship, for a “lowering of the temperature.” For the sake of the nation, while I believe we ought to take this opportunity, the temptation to return to old habits might prove too strong and too easy.
One common misunderstanding of what the last five years have been like for Republicans is the idea that they have lost all sense of right and wrong and that they have no moral compass. While it’s true that Mr. Trump lacks a moral compass, it is this fact that has actually made the last five years difficult for many Republicans. Much has been made in recent weeks of replaying clips of people Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Lindsay Graham saying harsh and negative truths about Mr. Trump before he was elected, and the implication has seemed to be that they forgot those insights or convinced themselves that what they once identified as vices were now virtues. This is not what has happened. For many Republicans and religious conservatives, they have not forgotten who they once were. Instead, Trump has led them to forego crucial aspects of their own self-understanding. Democratic control of both Congress and The White House offers the opportunity to “snap back” to old modes of political participation and thinking about politics that have been undermined by the past four years, and will make it very difficult for our political culture to recover.
The same kind of tension applies to conservative and moderate evangelicals. As Al Mohler admitted, he never had to spend an ounce of mental energy considering who he would vote for (always the Republican) in an election before Donald Trump (I wrote about this at the time, by the way). For the first time, in Mohler’s mind at least, now he needed to weigh the options and admit that both were significantly flawed. I know there’s been disappointment among some of my readers for a lack of opposition to Trump among white evangelical leaders, and that is legitimate. But one important thing to understand is that prior to Trump, an evangelical leader could say they were voting for the Republican nominee and there was very little pushback from within evangelicalism at all. (Which is why, while I’m appreciative of those who have spoken out about Trump and Republicans over the last four years, I do get a little weary of the folks who needed Trump to get them to care about politics, but are now willing to cast such severe moral judgment on others who aren’t sufficiently pro-Democratic for them. If you think it’s difficult and costly opposing Trump as an evangelical, just talk to those who opposed Bush or even McCain or Romney. This is not to disincentivize changing one’s mind, but to disincentivize becoming a jerk when you do so.)
During the Trump years, it was nearly mandatory to at least say something like “he really needs to stop tweeting,” or “I don’t like the way he talks about other people,” before saying you would vote for him. That admission is uncomfortable for public officials, and it has been uncomfortable for evangelicals. With Trump gone, the potential for a clearer narrative returns.
You can already see the allure of this temptation. It is, above all, a temptation to go to politics seeking offense. As I wrote for The New York Times, if you go to politics seeking to be offended, you will find reason to be offended. You can be assured that any given moment, someone in the public square, some public official, is saying or doing something that runs counter to your beliefs and preferences. What I’ve suggested is that we should not approach politics in this way. Our politics should have a healthy dose of what Tim Keller refers to, in a different context, as “self-forgetfulness.” Our own preferences and sensitivities don’t always need to be top of mind. Not everything is about us, and not everything is intended as we might take it to be intended. But finding and identifying such offense does do a few things: 1) It helps us rationalize, wrongly, lowering the standard of our own behavior. Yes, in an ideal world I would not have to do/say this, but look what we’re up against! 2) It reinforces a tribal politics. This politician/party is not like us. They are out to get us! 3) It helps us to forget our values, and artificially reduce the tension in our politics. Of course, I can’t support this party/that politician, did you see what they said!?
One example of this? How about the response to Congressman Emanuel Cleaver’s prayer to open the first session of Congress earlier this month. This might seem like a long time ago—indeed, it was a whole insurrection ago!—but before the insurrection there was this:
Now if folks had just heard the prayer, they might not have thought anything of it. But shared by people with a political agenda it took on dark meaning and required a response. And what’s more, if you’re positioned in a certain way in the public, a heated response is easy and might even help your standing as someone who “calls balls and strikes” and is “willing to critique both sides.” What Cleaver said as a “light-hearted pun,” folks on Twitter were now condemning as “gender ideology.” What? Why would you even want to read something like that into something so silly? One worship leader, literally one of the leading Christian music artists in the world, issued a statement on Twitter about it. It’s the only political comment he’s had in the past three months. There’s nothing on the election. Nothing on the insurrection. Nothing on the inauguration. But he tweeted about this.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver was asked by a colleague to deliver the opening prayer for the body in which he serves. Rep. Cleaver is a pastor. Now, to be honest, judging from the prayer Rep. Cleaver would probably not be my pastor. My point is not to defend the prayer, though I’ve known enough conservative evangelical Christians who invoke Ricky Bobby’s prayers from Talladega Nights at the kitchen table to question whether this no-prayer pun rule is quite as sacrosanct as they made it out to be for this drama. I can also imagine Cleaver believing he was praying not for national consumption, but with and for colleagues and friends, which is the actual reality of what he was doing, and that a little attempt at making people smile during such tense times might be in order.
Here’s what Cleaver said when a reporter asked about the backlash his prayer received:
Cleaver said he was “deeply disappointed that my prayer has been misinterpreted and misconstrued by some to fit a narrative that stokes resentment and greater division among portions of our population.”
He noted that his full prayer, which called for peace and an end to tribalism in Congress, had received little attention compared to the final word.
“Rather than reflecting on my faithful requests for community healing and reversion from our increasingly tribal tendencies, it appears that some have latched on to the final word of this conversation in an attempt to twist my message to God and demean me personally,” Cleaver said.
“In doing so, they have proven one point of my greater message — that we are all ‘soiled by selfishness, perverted by prejudice and inveigled by ideology.’”
My point here, again, is not to defend the prayer. My point is that when I say that “the problem is not that we take politics too seriously, but that we take politics too seriously in all of the wrong ways,” this is the kind of thing I’m talking about. It is asinine to take something like this and say “is this what you voted for,” but we have an asinine politics. People who lectured the Congressman about what “Amen” means before learning that he was, in fact, a pastor, should be provoked to self-reflection, but we have a politics which greatly disincentivizes self-reflection. If you’re grasping to say something here like “what is more important than prayer?!” I would ask you to take a deep breath, and again ask if that is really what’s on the line here…is that really where we want to take this episode?
But the fact is that it’s an awfully convenient, comfortable place to take such an episode, and our new political situation will make it even more tempting. With Democrats in control of the White House, the Senate and the House, the comfort for Republican elected officials to resort to an oppositional posture—all critique, no compromise. no solutions and no responsibility—will be alluring after years of responsibility for Trump. Conservative Christians, including those who are not all that politically active, will face a similar temptation.
I’m not saying here that people should only comment on what I think is worth commenting on, as surely we all have different interests, points of emphasis, etc. What I’m suggesting is that you should make sure you are, in fact, the person who needs to say something about an issue or shiny object. Is this, whatever this is, really what you’re saying it is? And is it really a conviction you have? Or is it just a convenient line that you can use to ingratiate yourself with one group or another. Maybe you have a real burning conviction about the national debt, for instance, and so if policies are taken over the next years that might add to the national debt, you’ll feel like you have to speak out. But do you really? Did that conviction lead you to take a similar action over the last four years, when Republicans generally didn’t care to talk about the debt, and President Trump supported policies that led to an increase in the national debt to the tune of $7.8 trillion? If not, maybe consider whether you’re operating on principle or whether there’s more than that in the mix, and pause before hitting send on that release or taking up sermon time with public comment.
Our willingness to accept half-baked provocations from politicians and media voices is what makes them think they can keep shoveling them out to us. If that doesn’t change, the fever won’t break. If Republicans and conservative media know they can wave a shiny object, and enough people will use it to reaffirm a disqualifying narrative about Democrats, that is exactly what they will do. We should resist being manipulated by these kinds of ploys.
Let’s give each other a chance.
I’ll be writing soon about how the left might fail to take this opportunity for a healthier politics. To have access to that, and all of the other content we provide here at Reclaiming Hope, become a subscriber and join our community of political and religious leaders, journalists and engaged citizens: