Donald Trump, Vicarious Buffoonery, and the Anabaptist Imagination

Political disengagement has been an Anabaptist distinctive for hundreds of years now, rooted in Biblical theology speaking of two kingdoms, the surrender of power, and the rejection of civil progress as the primary solution to human need. We don’t vote. We don’t run for or hold office.

But even as we’ve shut the door on voting and political involvement, a vacuum has been built into our conversations that conservative Evangelicalism, which has no qualms about its political ambitions, has rushed to fill. The deep affiliations we’ve developed with conservative American culture, many of them for good reasons, have left us with a political ideology often in sharp contrast to and at odds with our professed allegiance to Heaven’s kingdom.

Our stated non-involvement in politics has pushed the subject to the younger Friday-night-edges of our territory, out of reach of the more mature and wise heads and into reach of the broader culture surrounding us. Instead of good, salt-seasoned dialogue honoring the needs of humanity, we have tended to parrot our neighbors whose trucks and bucks we love. Instead of conversation marked by the quiet reason and nonpartisan independence of truth-loving people, we merely mimic our politically vociferous Evangelical cousins.

The Evangelical pitter-patter to get into bed with Donald Trump has grown out of an existential anxiety about what is felt to be the demise of America as we know it—Christian, militaristic, conservative, and capitalist—and an Obama administration who moved the needle consistently left. Donald Trump’s hyperactive intuition immediately exploited these evangelical fears, and in the 2016 presidential campaign, he wooed its leaders in a series of meetings. Mainstream Protestant America, who has long gone mum on what Jesus teaches about power, His kingdom, and the true realms of strength, found this potential for influence irresistible and intoxicating. And we Anabaptists? Neither could we avert our gaze.

And so, we find ourselves with an elephant in the room, living large in our social spaces and wandering unaddressed across our landscapes. Our relationships with political figures remain uncatalogued and our wink-wink assent to a particular flavor of politician somehow slides through the checkpoint Paul established for the Philippians: Is it good, true, honorable?

What eddies and currents in the souls of our people have enabled the relatively whole sale buy-in to the personality of Donald Trump? How has he so effortlessly become something in our imagination he isn’t? What root systems lay latent in our culture that Trump has awakened?

Donald Trump’s appeal to our people is understandable. He is loyal and generous to those in his circle. He favors pragmatic, results-driven solutions. He has strengthened conservative positions. The gritty, boot-strap American virtues of hard work, freedom, and independence that drove Pa Ingalls to Indian Territory, and that dominate our Monday morning work ethic seems to us embodied in Trump’s bare-knuckle rhetoric and get-it-done persona. His 4th-grade vocabulary and elementary assessments of our world’s issues make sense to our people who are generally unfamiliar with foreign policy or the complexities of large-scale economics. As we shade our eyes with our workworn hands and warily observe what seems to us to be a tidal wave of secular liberalism rolling at us from the urban centers of our country, this man Trump seemed to be the answer. Someone who will point out, push back, and fight such absurdities as are discussed around our fires.

But as the Trump presidency came and went, this has become clear: The vicarious thrills Anabaptists are goose-bumping over come not from the ex-President’s better places, but his worst. Our tickles and titters come not from Trump’s more reasonable moments, but the bombast and the hubris, the rally hoorah, and the inflammatory 3 a.m. tweets. It is our eagerness to identify with the more unsavory elements of Trump’s character that gives us up. Our shameless gulping of the Trump Kool-Aid is a window to the collective soul of Anabaptism, and a look inside tells us more about what we love than a year’s worth of our sermons.

From his insistence on his second day in office that his inauguration crowd was much bigger than Obama’s, to his last day in office declaring election fraud, Trump’s untruths are best understood through the metaphor of an oversized 2nd-grader from the wrong side of the tracks on an unsupervised playground. “My shoes are bigger.” “My fingernails are longer.” “My mustard is stronger.”

Trump’s serial reality distortion has always been less about intent to deceive and more about a lifetime of overenthusiastic narcissism, the resulting rebuff at the hands of the New York elite, and the inveterate, chronic inferiority complex it bred. With these psychological monkeys on his back, by far the easiest way through Trump’s day is to muscle reality aside and speak an alternate narrative into existence. Reality in Trump’s world is a moldable commodity, a playdough winners shape as they see fit.

Here, I fear, is where these echoes found corresponding chords in our Anabaptist psyche. Have we, as a fundamentalist faith culture, ended up embracing a faith where the preemption of reality is one of its essential moving parts? When we imagine a strong faith—a deep unshakable faith—is the evasion of hard, conflicting evidence a push-up in our belief routine? Does living our faith include shoving skids under reality to make it portable? Does our commitment to a Biblical faith feel authentic and proven only after it has skirmished with reality?

Trump has consistently exhibited an appalling understanding of leadership transparency and the genius of the Constitutional checks and balances. His staff fires and hires have one common denominator: Unquestioning loyalty.

Let’s put this bluntly. Do we husbands, parents, teachers, ministers, bishops, leaders on any level, see this as admirable? Or maybe we shrug apologetically, but things need to be done. How often have bishops executed ministerial purges and sent brothers down the road for being “unsupportive”? Or how many husbands have dismissed their wives’ objections as being “unsubmissive”? Why are our relationships with our leadership so often framed in terms of loyalty and support instead of transparency and mutual accountability? What is more indicative of humility in leadership than valuing checks and balances and cross-examination from the people we lead? When I suppress discourse from those I lead that does not affirm my view of myself I have opened, not the Word of God, but the Trump playbook.

Trump lives and dies by impulse, by gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgements. Intuition is not to be dismissed lightly, but instincts and feelings are deeply subjective and should be understood as such. Choosing a flavor for your ice-cream cone? Go with your gut. Leading a nation? Not as much.

Or leading a family, a school, a church. Or sorting through the many-layered, emotionally volatile situations leaders face before breakfast. Who enjoys watching a decision that will affect you deeply be glanced at and crossed off on a whim, a feeling, an urge informed by the nearest emotion? Are there strong collective feelings within us we routinely employ to resolve things that deserve protracted thought and consideration?

In his analysis of our nation’s needs, Trump has been consistently reductionist and over-simplifying. Issues are simple for winners.

As a rural population of carpenters, farmers, and businessmen, our worlds shake and move by doing. Hard work, early breakfasts, and highly developed motor skills have left us with a contempt for education and study. Our commitments to uniformity and our monocultural existence have left us with analytical disabilities that handicap our engagement with the more complex issues of life in the 21st century. Same sex attractions? Repent. Homelessness? Get a job. Immigration? Build a wall. Child acting a bit off? Spank it. Issues not immediately resolved by new tires, longer hours, or an expanded church standard fare poorly in our world. Has a simple lifestyle and faith left us with 4th-grade answers for adult story problems?

Somewhere in here, in these conversations, this objection typically arises, “We’re not talking of a pastor, but a President.” This is also borrowed from our Evangelical neighbors, and this sentiment is perhaps the most troubling to hear from our people. Yes, we agree, an effective Christian leader needs grace, humility, openness, and wisdom. He must possess selflessness, he must respect others, including those who oppose him. But on the world stage, wearing a national leader’s shoes, we need something different. Something more effective. We need brash. We need fighting words, we need short-sighted immediacy, we need bar-room name-calling and the tactics of an Alabama day-care bully. We need Trump.

There is some truth to this; being the face of justice and the arm of the law in an unregenerate society does require coercion and sometimes violent force. The Bible acknowledges this, and even speaks a mild blessing on those ordained to keep order. But to so easily abandon Christian virtue, to so willingly dismiss humility, selflessness, and respect as irrelevant and useless in a national leader—is this another peek under the hood of Anabaptism?

Our enthusiasms reveal. What delights us indicts us. Have the Trump years left us better or baser?