The gates of Hell will not prevail.
March 15, 2017
For those of us who are politically to the left of the far right, the time since November 8 has been depressing, and the two months since January 20 have been downright shocking. We may have hoped that the reality TV star whom a minority of voters elected president would suddenly act like one, but it’s clear our hopes have been dashed.
Every day, it seems, a new outrage awaits. Trump’s inauguration speech, with its coarse nationalism of “America First”, was quickly followed by “alternative facts” about inauguration attendance. He followed with the speech at CIA headquarters, where he hinted about stealing Iraqi oil. Then came the chaos at the borders, when Trump’s ill-prepared executive order barred entry by anyone with a passport from one of seven Muslim countries, including permanent residents of the United States.
While our attention is now being held by revelations of the Trump campaign’s frighteningly close ties to Vladimir Putin’s hostile government, Republicans in Congress are pushing their extremist agenda, from eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency to repealing the Affordable Care Act.
But far worse than anything Congress is doing is the reign of Trump and his inner circle. Steve Bannon, a white supremacist and godfather of the “alt-right”, is Trump’s most influential advisor. He was quoted after the election saying “Darkness is good: Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan. That’s power.” But this admirer of darkness would have no power if Donald J. Trump were a different sort of man. An extreme narcissist who cares not a bit for truth or reality, he’s addicted to the adulation of his “base”, who apparently are living in an imaginary world of their own making. Fake news, alternative facts, attacks on the press, bans on refugees: Could anything worse happen to our country?
President Trump reminds me of a narcissistic Roman emperor, like Nero or Caligula, or maybe Commodus. Netflix’s series “Roman Empire: Reign of Blood” tells the story of Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, who becomes emperor when his father dies. The parallel to our times is striking. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher and a great emperor, somewhat like the constitutional scholar Barack Obama, while Commodus was a narcissist who cared only about his pleasure and the people’s adulation. After a bloody and incompetent reign, Commodus was murdered. And the chaos that followed, in which five emperors succeeded each other in just one year, should be a warning to anyone who thinks assassination is the solution.
While the Trump presidency will certainly put our country to the test, Christians need not fear. In the Roman Empire, Christians said “Jesus is Lord, and Caesar isn’t.” Christians today can likewise say, “Jesus is Lord, and Trump isn’t.”
That doesn’t mean that President Trump and his modern-day Rasputin Steve Bannon can’t do a lot of harm. We know from history that Christian countries can fall. The Western Roman Empire fell to Aryan Germanic tribes in the 5th century. Invading Muslim Arab armies wrested historic Christian lands – Palestine, Syria, Egypt, North Africa – from the Eastern Roman Empire, and then went on to conquer Spain. In the 13th century, Mongols vanquished the Kievan Rus, today’s Russia and Ukraine, and in the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks occupied Constantinople and reigned over much of the Balkans. In the previous century, Communism took over the Russian Empire and then subjugated Eastern Europe, brutally suppressing Christianity. Jesus promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His church, but he didn’t say our kingdoms would stand or we’d be free from persecution.
Still, history shows that God’s people also triumph. A Christian community still exists in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, though threatened by war and Muslim extremists. Spain was reconquered over 770 years. The Balkans threw off the Ottoman yoke and later Communist rule. Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia today are again Christian, at least nominally. And Christianity in China is experiencing the most rapid growth in the world today.
The United States of America is not the church, and the gates of Hell can certainly prevail against it. The Trump Administration, supported by Republicans in Congress, could usher in the decline and fall of America. But our country has walked through fire before. The Civil War killed hundreds of thousands and threatened to destroy the country, but in the end, the Union prevailed, and the cancer of slavery was excised. America came through the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War, and it abolished its own form of Apartheid, Jim Crow. We survived the Vietnam War and Watergate. We can now survive Trump.
The crucible of Trump’s reign will test us greatly. We might lose our democracy and turn into an authoritarian state, as happened to Russia under Putin. But if we win, we can usher in a new age, hinted at under President Obama, where we as a country move toward greater freedom, justice and prosperity for all Americans and serve as a force for good in the world.
I believe this can be our future, because: Jesus is Lord – and Trump isn’t.
“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9 (NIV)