Jesus says: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 6:24)
I: Premise
There are many things that make me realize I do not live up to the Gospel – at the end of days, if I am standing before the Lord, and if indeed he asks me who my master has been, I know that I will have to admit that Money has run my life. I spend most of my time seeking it, and keeping it, and spending it.
Neil Gaiman, a secular author under abuse allegations, poignantly explores this worship of money in his book American Gods. These New Gods: Media, Technology, commerce, “gods of credit-card and freeway, of internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and beeper and of neon.”
They represent Market Forces, and are nameless – people worship them, they give them their lives, they sacrifice on their altars – but they work just behind consciousness. People do not remember meeting with these nameless New Gods they worship. Gaiman has a lot in common with his departed friend, Terry Pratchett – who in Small Gods tells the story of Om. Om has vast Temples, and an entire country dedicated to him – and yet only one true believer left. Everyone else just goes along with the church either out of fear or habit.
These humorous secular takes on the state of faith in the modern west unfortunately have a lot to teach followers of Jesus about what we look like – and, further, what we as a corporate body are like in the US etc. Whatever lip service I/we pay to Jesus – who do I/we really serve?
The question, at this point, is not really whether we serve these other gods, but which ones we serve. The call, I think, for all of us is one of repentance – not once, but in an ongoing manner, for the ways we worship other gods. It is very easy to judge the ancient Israelites for worshiping the golden calf or the ways they turned from God before the Babylonian exile (and our biblical authors are purposefully writing to make this apparent to us). However, it is much harder to look at our lives and ask what do we worship, now?
I would like to turn now to an American God.
II: An American God
Philippians 3:19 says “18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. 19 Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenshipis in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Our God is our belly. Christians in his country have overwhelmingly aligned ourselves with politicians who have promised us power and prominence, often justifying these decisions with vague notions of “the economy”.
Wealth.
We have sold our birthright – democracy, earned by our founders and the dissidents/civil rights protestors. These people, from our founding fathers to the abolitionists and suffragettes, fought to make this country something exceptional in the history of the world. Flawed vision was corrected, shifted, widened, to create something remarkable – liberty and justice for all etc. And we have sold this birthright, ours to nurture and contribute to, in the name of wealth. Now, our democracy is facing unprecedented challenges.
III: Authoritarian Tendencies
American citizens have been detained by ICE. An unknown number of migrants have been deported without due process. The government claims they are dangerous gang members, but without due process or any evidence, it is impossible to know if this is true – though it seems extremely unlikely in several cases. This deportation happened in violation of Court orders – meaning that we are currently in a Constitutional Crisis.
The difference between a democracy and an autocracy is not how many problems they deal with – but how they deal with them.
Lawful residents of this country are being detained without charges and moved across state lines (in direct violation of court orders). That is not how democracy functions.
Democracies do not deport or detain people for criticizing the government (as in the cases of a Georgetown Professor, a Columbia student, or a Brown kidney surgeon – all legal residents of the US in good standing). Further, other immigrants, who also had legal status in the US, were reclassified by the administration, rendering them vulnerable to deportation from a country where they legally entered and legally resided.
These mass deportation policies have already expanded to legal immigrants, and travel restrictions have extended to tourists found to have content critical of the administration on their phones. This is not how democracies function. This is directly from the authoritarian playbook.
Instead, democracies go through the slow and painful process of welcoming non-violent dissent and organizing. They try accused people in court, to determine the merits of a case and go through arduous investigation processes. They process asylum applications, and they honor their commitments. Democracy is slow and inconvenient, pregnant with checks and balances which ensure dignity and rights for all. Accepting violations of the Constitution because human rights, as defined by our flawed legal system, are inconvenient is when we stop being a democracy.
Further, democracies do not call for the deportation of their own citizens for dissent or for criticizing the president. They do not float the idea of deporting their own citizens to other countries. It is not, as Marco Rubio put it, a generous offer on the part of El Salvador to take American criminals – and it is a bad sign of democracy that rather than decrying the idea, people are celebrating it.
Dissidents are not “the enemy within” that need to be removed, in a democracy – they are healthy signs of the system working. However, once we start thinking like that, we have abandoned those ideals. I invite you to play a spot-the-difference below: can you tell, in a pair of quotes, which things Trump said and which Hitler said? Obviously, I have tried to edit out references to specific peoples that would give it away (though the two men have some differences in rhetorical style, so maybe you can tell them apart based on that alone). For the sources (and fuller quotes), see here.
| A | B | |
| 1 | We pledge to you, that we will root out…the thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country | I have the right to remove million of an inferior race that breed like vermin |
| 2 | The people will have to atone for the sins of this worldwide poisoning with their blood | They’re poisoning the blood of our country |
| 3 | Not human beings, but animals | They’re not humans, they’re animals |
| 4 | You have to get these people back where they came from, you have no choice, you are going to lose your culture | The end of the cultured people |
| 5 | It’s in their genes, we have a lot of bad genes in our country now | Their inner nature, their genetic composition does not undergo any essential change |
| 6 | This scum of the nation | It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country |
| 7 | I am your retribution | The hour of retribution will come |
Answers: Trump’s quotes are 1A, 2B, 3B, 4A, 5A, 6B, 7A – the rest are Hitler.
IV: To Jesus
I do not know what to do. I cannot, myself, protect this country I have loved or the people who live here. I have been given such a gift, to be born in this place and in this time. I have received so much from this country, and I would never want to see it fall into the authoritarianism it spent decades fighting abroad.
I worry for my friends who are not citizens, as well as my friends who are actively engaging in dissent. Dissent is for democracy.
The so called liberal-mainstream media is capitulating to the regime, with, for example, CNN reporting on the disaster with Columbia University with nonsense headlines like “Columbia University makes policy changes in dispute over federal funding”. This comes after Trump has threatened retribution against the Press, a clear violation of the First Amendment. Trump calls critical coverage “fake news”, Hitler called it the “lying press“.
The FBI is already openly discussing plans to prosecute journalists, and the administration plans to gut public radio, and to stop funding Voice for America and Radio Free Asia. The Trump administration is also targeting law firms that prosecuted cases they do not like, in violation of the 1st, 5th, and 6th amendments and attempting to rescind Biden’s pardons of the January 6th committee.
But
I know
That Jesus is still King
The Lord still reigns
And if, what it will take to spark repentance in us as a nation – to realize we are worshiping other gods – is having to see our democracy crumble, then so be it. It is not say I will not resist. But it was the broken daughter Judah of Lamentations that was brought to her knees to repent by God.
My eyes are spent with weeping;
my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground
because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint
in the streets of the city.
(Lam 2:11)
Jesus says: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 6:24)
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