Dwight A. Moody
Friend and colleague Wesley Allen wrote a book in late 2016 entitled “Preaching in an Age of Trump.” It was a response to the rise of Trump Nation and the shock and awe that reverberated through the political and religious communities. Now almost two years later an expanded edition of that book is needed. Preachers are searching for ways to respond to the cultural landscape so shaken by the tsunami we now call president Trump.
It is not just the language and loose morals; it is not just the tweets and the taunts. Now it is policy and procedures; now it is priorities and practices. Trump is slowly turning the ship of state away from consumer rights and toward corporate rights, away from minority concerns and toward majority desires; away from federal power and into state power; away from global leadership and into national isolation. The waves of disruption are washing ashore around the world.
Trump Nation hails this transformation with messianic fervor. For many, it portends national revival, on par with what historians call the first and second great awakenings. They have suffered greatly, they feel, from the overbearing values of a supercharged Washington establishment. They are ready to scale it back and reassert the wishes of the hinterlands. Small town America, with its religious vocabulary and nostalgic vision are ready to lead the American people into the future. It is the holy revenge of white, Christian America.
But others, also quoting Jesus, see a demonic side to these new political realities. The vulgarity of word and deed are a thin veneer covering a deep distrust of the basic institutions of our American system, including the press, the universities, and the scientific establishment. The President spats and spews like a dictator and Trump Nation roars its approval. Meanness, hostility, and violence are on the rise. Racism and exclusion rule the day. Our divisions of family, friends, church, and community grow more strident every day.
These new realities frighten many people, including me.
I sit with my homiletic friends and ponder what this means to the church and to the preacher. How then shall we preach, is the question of the day; and I suspect it will be the pressing question for decades to come.
No doubt, preachers of all stripes are being pulled into this national cauldron of conflict. Some rejoice, seeing in all this the very hand of God, even the appearing of our Lord and Savior. Their preaching will celebrate in biblical categories the return of the Nation to the plan and purposes of God. Others of us weep, seeing the mark and manner of the beast that devoured Christian Germany in the last century. We fear the emergence in our own country of the tactics that terrorized the world under the banner of the deformed cross we know as the swastika. Our preaching bemoans these attacks on our democracy and warns, also in biblical terms, of the judgment of God that is sure to come.
Preaching in an Age of Trump is more fearful, more fraught with danger and daring than any time I can recall, more perhaps than during the great social upheavals of the 1960’s, where war, race, sex, and drugs carried the day.
My friend Wesley Allen needs to issue an enlarged and updated version of his book. He and others need to show us a way forward. We need to read, and talk and think together how this new cultural environment will shape both our preaching the gospel and our living the gospel.
It is so easy to get sucked into the “us-versus-them” mentality so common to both politics and religion. It is so tempting to translate our ideological dis-ease into nothing but a political campaign to recapture the levers of power. If only we could get our people back into office, things would be back to normal. Or so we think.
But the gospel rises above the political storms that have so roiled the populace. Jesus came preaching the rule of God not the rule of this party or that. His words and his actions were fundamentally subversive to the whole notion of empire, be is ancient Rome or modern America.
Christians and their preachers need to look past the buildings on the Potomac toward the city on a hill; past the rise and fall of political fortunes toward the gospel work that presses upon us every day in every way; past the tribalism that threatens the dignity of people and the peace of nations to the beloved community drawn from every tongue and tribe, every nation and religion; past the lust for power toward the love of people, regardless of race or creed,
We can transcend the division in the nation and in the church only by giving our attention to that which we hold in common with all people everywhere: our divine origins and destiny, our human dignity and depravity, our redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and our call to follow Jesus, denying ourselves and picking up the cross that is at once the seal of death and the sign of redemption.
These are perilous times.
We need Christian preachers that will declare the glory of God and the goodness of creation. We need Christian preachers that will describe the gospel ministry of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. We need Christian preachers that will celebrate the expansive presence of the Spirit of God, pouring out the grace and mercy of God upon all people everywhere. We need Christian preachers that will not be co-opted by political parties, economic interests, ideological visions, even religious establishments, but will return again and again to Jesus, who also came preaching the rule of God, the glory of service, and the power of love.
We need Christian preachers who will quote again the word of God: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and God’s compassion is over all that God has made” (Psalm 145-8-9).
