Whom You Vote For Says More Than You Think About, Well, You

I have a friend with whom, during our graduate school years, I shared many hands of bridge in the basement card room of the late Bishops’ Hall at Emory University. I also shared with her, during those intellectually caffeinated years, any number of sobering theological questions about sobering theological issues.

She taught, for almost two decades, at the internationally-esteemed University of Gottingen and then, unwilling to let the German church die without doing her bit to help it acclimate itself to the philosophical, sociological and psychological changes of 21st-century Europe, she left the world of tall-towered academia for the world of stained-glass window, pulpit and pew.

We have stayed in touch through those years via snail mail, a couple of annual telephone calls (really expensive), and then email, international cell phone calls (really not expensive) and Skype. And, though I have always had great admiration for her academic and pastoral gifts, I had never, until the past few weeks, much noted that she also possessed the gift of prescience.

Apparently, however, she does.

Well over a year ago, she told me that Donald Trump would be the next American president. I laughed. She has the prototypical European disregard for Americans in general and American conservatives in particular and her perspective on the good sense of the American electorate---be it on the left side or right side of the great divide---is very definitely jaded.

Hence, I reminded her in a correspondent email that she had been guilty before of painting the overriding character of Americans with a pretty wide brush and that she might want to choose a brush with a finer, more detailed tip before she made another ridiculous assertion such as the one she made that night.

The American people, I assured her, had much better sense than to elect a serial liar, common carnival barker, an acknowledged grifter and fraudulent rip-off artist to the most powerful office on the planet. “He gives snake-oil salesmen," I told her, "a bad name.”

Until I received an email from her this past week, the issue never arose again. There was no written content in the body of the email, just a download. And the download proved to be a selfie she had taken---her lovely self holding a wide paint brush and directing a wicked wink across the European continent, the Atlantic Ocean and 120 miles of South Carolina low country and coastal plain right at me.

I responded with a quick email consisting of three words: You Are Deplorable.

And she responded with a quick email consisting of these two sentences: "No, I’m not. But the guy who will be your next president certainly is."

She is right, except that, this time, her brush wasn’t wide enough. That Donald Trump is a deplorable human being is almost beyond debate. Ana Navarro, a prominent Republican activist, recently asked, rhetorically, if Trump was "raised by wolves." And then opined that he is not qualified to be a member of our species, describing him as “unfit to be human.” And Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent and staffer for the Republican National Committee who is running a quixotic campaign for the presidency, noted that he believes Trump to be “a fraud and a con man” and, in reference to Trump’s treatment of the Muslim Gold Star parents, “inhuman.” But, as Hillary Clinton rightly noted in a recent speech, many of his supporters---some active, some passive---are equally deplorable.

As my friend and I have discussed off-and-on for the past 40-some years, those Germans (including a number of her family elders) who stood by in silence and, without a word of protest, allowed the Third Reich to commit its atrocities during World War II were just as much a part of the murderous butchery as those who actually did the shooting, the bayoneting, the beating and the strangling on the edges of the mass graves at horrific places with names like Buchenwald and Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The point is simple. It is not difficult to understand. And, though it unfortunately won’t, it should give all of us pause as we prepare to elect a candidate to lead not only our country but also the Free World---each facing dire and increasingly powerful external and internal threats to its cherished freedoms.

The point?

To fulsomely and uncritically support a candidate who is personally/professionally deplorable is to be as deplorable as that candidate.

To wit…

To uncritically support a blatantly racist candidate is to identify oneself with that candidate’s racism. In the case of Donald Trump, it is to identify oneself not only with his racism, but also with the racism of the groups with which he has had and still has murky relationships---the Ku Klux Klan, the White Supremacist Movement, the White Nationalist Movement, to name three (his campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, who heads up the Alt-Right rag, Breitbart News, is all in with the White Supremacist movement). Needless to say, one would not want members of these groups standing in his/her front yard handing out their brochures.

To uncritically support a candidate who is xenophobic and nativistic is to identify oneself with that candidate’s xenophobia and nativism. This is particularly consequential and onerous for confessing Christians, given that it is an egregious violation of “hospitality”---“welcoming the stranger,” “welcoming the foreigner”---which is one of the overriding Judeo/Christian values found in the Bible.

To uncritically support a candidate who is intolerant or unaccepting of religions other than his/her own---or, the one that he/she claims---is to identify oneself with that candidate’s intolerance even as it serves as a recruiting tool for and a primary driver of world-wide terrorism. And even as it exposes as delusional the idea that our country is an equally hospitable home for all religions. (One of the more laughable memes of the Christian Right goes to the idea that Christians in the U.S. are “persecuted for their faith.” It gets even more laughable when groups of those Christians shoulder their AR-15’s and hold Friday afternoon protests outside mosques within which faithful Muslims are participating in their weekly prayers.)

To uncritically support a candidate who is disgustingly sexist---and, quite honestly, kind of creepy about it per his own daughter---is to identify oneself with that candidate’s sexism. As a decidedly anti-Trumpian friend told me earlier this summer, “I’m just glad I don’t have to explain to my two adolescent daughters why I’m voting for a guy who consistently humiliates women on the basis of their appearance and has publicly characterized particular women as ‘fat pigs,’ ‘overweight heifers,’ ‘ugly cows,’ or ‘not attractive enough to work in my company.’”

I could go on and on and on, but there is no need for it. You and I both know the myriad of other deplorable ways in which this deplorable man mocks, takes advantage of, defrauds and fleeces people---few of whom have the means to fight back. I’ll leave it to the esteemed NYTimes columnist, Charles Blow, to sum it up:

“Donald Trump is a deplorable candidate---to put it charitably---and anyone who helps him advance his racial, religious and ethnic bigotry is part of that bigotry. Period. You can’t conveniently separate yourself from the detestable part of him because you sense in him the promise of cultural or economic advantage. That hair cannot be split.

“It doesn’t matter how lovely your family, how honorable your work or service, how devout your faith---if you place ideological adherence or economic self-interest above the moral imperative to condemn and denounce a demagogue, then you are deplorable.”

Charles Blow is spot-on, which is why I take neither my support for or my vote for a particular candidate lightly. And why I try to maintain a critical distance between myself and even/especially the candidate(s) I support/vote for. I work at being relatively clear-eyed about politicians of any stripe.

On the macro level, my vote reveals the nature of the hopes I have for my country’s present and future. And because I am both a confessing and professing Christian, my vote reveals the nature of the hopes I have for both the present and future of the entirety of God’s Creation---not just my species but also the other creatures of and, indeed, the Creation itself.

On the micro level, my vote reveals even more about who I am. And who I am not. What I value. And what I do not. What my values are. And what values have no place in the value system by which I seek to live.

Macro and micro taken together, my vote becomes a very personal witness---“personal witness” being a term that can reference either a faith-based confession or a purely secular statement as to the values which serve as the governing center of one’s life. In voting a particular way, I am revealing and claiming, for all to see, my personal identity---who I am, what I am about and what values/norms form my personal core and govern, when I am at my best, the way I live out my days as a member of the human community in general and the American community in particular.

If the discussion of what your vote in this election may reveal about you at both the macro and micro levels is a bit high-minded, let me break it down for you in simpler, more proverbial terms:

Rendered in Latin, this familiar proverb is perhaps not very familiar to us: qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. Rendered in English, however, few of us can claim to have never heard it: If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Look, no political candidate comes through y0ur door without a little bit of mud on his/her feet, a mix of sand/clay/dust in his/her shedding hair, a couple of big ticks in his/her ear that desperately need treatment with a pair of pliers and either a small, medium, large or extra-large offering of fleas.

Every four years, we have to decide which of the two presidential candidates we are willing to "lie down with," so to speak. Quite frankly, most election cycles give us two candidates that are almost equally flea-bitten, which means one must give his/her choice some serious thought.

This year, however, the choice is made easier by the fact that lying down with one of the two candidates would probably result in a permanent infestation of those little critters who bite makes you itch and drives you to scratch uncontrollably.

That’s not very high-minded, but it makes the point in a way that no one can say he/she doesn’t understand.