October 10, 2021
Text: Matthew 25:31-45
My father was a pastor in the United Church of Christ. He taught me the Social Gospel. Faith is not so much a matter of Christian belief as it is of practice. Faith is a matter of following Jesus. For me that has been best expressed in the Matthew 25 passage we read earlier. It ends:
Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did for me.”
And that’s perhaps the simplest description of my faith. The individual’s response to the Gospel is love for my brother or sister. The community’s love-response is justice: the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
In accordance to that faith, I want to talk this morning about the condition of American democracy. It’s in bad shape. We are in the midst of the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War, treacherously close to authoritarianism.
But should we talk about democracy here in worship? Why is the preservation of democracy such an integral part of my Christian faith?
Part of the answer is that I believe democracy is the best form of government for protecting the values of our faith. It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. A democracy is any country ruled by the will of a majority and, as we all know, majorities don’t necessarily protect justice for everyone, especially, the poor, people of color, or other minorities. So, democracy alone is not good enough for justice. Justice requires, at the very least, what’s called a “liberal democracy.” In this case the word “liberal” doesn’t mean progressive or left-leaning. It’s an older meaning: the protection of the minority and of human rights. It means not only majority-ruled, but also committed to justice: free and fair elections; fair legal procedures; freedoms of speech, the press, religion, assembly and so on. It’s why the Bill of Rights had to be added to the Constitution, to keep the majority from trampling on the minority.
Unfortunately, even a liberal democracy doesn’t guarantee justice, but I believe it will, over time, be the form of government most likely to move toward it.
So, my faith requires that I commit myself to liberal democracy. And, just to be clear, whether you’re overtly “political” or not, each of you on these screens works for liberal democracy … whether that has meant providing care for young immigrant mothers, building a school to give oppressed people an education, offering therapy to people oppressed by their inner demons, listening to a friend in pain, or so many things you all do.
… I’m going to talk this morning a lot about the Republican Party. Now, I am only too aware that it’s inappropriate to speak about partisan politics in a Christian worship service like this. So, let me differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate politics within a liberal democracy. Legitimate politics is the way we tussle over the best ways to govern our nation, over the best ways to bring about justice; it’s a conversation about what’s best for this country. Illegitimate politics is work against democracy itself. The discussion about how to respond to that does belong in church.
I’ve struggled against the politics of the authentic Republican Party since … forever, but those struggles have always been about legitimate political differences … no matter how wrong-headed their ideas seem to me. Their ideas may come from a worldview I don’t share, like, the exaltation of capitalism, but they’re part of legitimate political dialog: listening to one another and trying to understand one another. Whether it’s gun rights, abortion, poverty, climate change, racism, gay rights, even immigration, I can disagree … often vehemently … even condemn beliefs as unchristian, but they’re positions that can be argued about and put to a legitimate democratic vote.
Years ago, Gail Arnall asked me to sit down with her deeply conservative, Republican brother, Bill; she wanted to listen to her conservative brother and her good liberal friend talk about values and politics. We had a good talk; actually, quite invigorating. We probably disagreed about almost every policy position brought up. But we wanted to listen to each other; it turned out we had very similar values; we just disagreed about the best way to get there. We were part of the back-and-forth of democracy.
But Bill’s Republican Party no longer exists. It still advocates some conservative positions, but underneath it’s working against democracy and towards authoritarianism.
It’s hard for me to talk about my country as authoritarian. One reason is that we usually think of authoritarianism in absolute terms: a sudden coup or military take-over; single-party rule; no meaningful elections; state-controlled media; loss of the freedoms of speech, religion, press and so on.
But we live in what’s called competitive authoritarianism. The basic institutions of democracy — elections, courts, legislature, press, and so on — continue to exist. But they’re gradually subverted:
- Elections still take place, but the governing rules are tilted toward one party.
- Partisans are appointed to the courts or to parts of the government that should be nonpartisan, like the Department of Justice or the Census Bureau.
- The party becomes increasingly subservient to the authoritarian leader.
- The press is either subtly threatened or sidelined as “fake news.”
What I want to say this morning is that the national Republican Party has become a danger to the democracy. There’s lots of evidence I could give you, but let me concentrate on only three bits:
- Trump and many Republicans’ insistence that he won the election,
- the unwillingness of the Republicans to remove Trump from office after his impeachment, and
- the Republican statehouses’ partisan attacks on the electoral process.
Stop the Steal
The first is President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign. After multiple recounts and more than sixty unsuccessful lawsuits, there is no evidence of fraud. Yet he continues to travel the country angrily condemning the Democrats’ “stolen” election. We learned just this past week that just days before the Jan 6 insurrection, Trump was dissuaded at only the last minute from appointing an acting Attorney General who would have used the Justice Department to defend Trump’s claims.
The experts have repeatedly said that this was the most secure election in our history. Nevertheless, due to ongoing but unsubstantiated claims of fraud and “irregularities,” less than 20% of Republican voters believe that Joe Biden won the presidency “fair and square.”
This is the first time in our history that the fairness of the nation’s elections has been so deeply and widely challenged. Democracy depends on free and fair elections; it depends perhaps even more on the perception of free and fair elections. But large swaths of American voters now believe there is widespread fraud in the electoral process. In the future, they won’t trust it, especially if they lose. A small percentage has already responded with violence. That does not bode well for our country.
Senate Failure to Remove Trump from Office after Impeachment
The second danger from the Republican Party is their failure to remove from office a clearly unfit President Trump even after the House impeached him … twice.
The framers of the Constitution were very concerned about an authoritarian leader, like the English king they’d just dismissed. So, they wrote into the Constitution the “Separation of Powers.” The president, the legislature, and the courts must all keep each other honest — checks and balances. But they didn’t foresee the political party system that would bind the president to parts of the legislature because of party loyalty. If the president and one wing of Congress are from the same party — as they were during Trump’s presidency — the Constitution’s balance of power to prevent authoritarianism doesn’t work. A clearly unfit president will not be impeached and removed from office
You could see this after the January 6 insurrection. On the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol. He continued,
An intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories was orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.
McConnell obviously knew the president was unfit. Yet only minutes before he gave that speech, he had voted not to find Trump unfit to serve.
The Republican Party could not remove a clearly unfit Republican president. The authoritarianism the Framers so feared was happening.
Since then, the party has lined up more and more passionately behind Trump. At this point, there’s probably nothing that Trump could do to earn him the censure of the Republican Party.
I suspect I don’t need to convince anyone here of the danger Donald Trump poses to our democracy. But he has already all but officially announced that he will run for the presidency in 2024. If he is healthy enough to run, the Republican party will certainly nominate him. In 2020, out of a total of 158 million voters, a change of just 90,000 votes spread over three states would have kept Trump president for another four years. It was that close. Given the extreme gerrymandering underway and the Republican suppression of the vote, Trump could well win in 2024. We did elect Joe Biden and a barely Democratic Congress; that doesn’t mean the authoritarian threat is gone.
Republican Statehouses’ attack on the electoral process
And the third threat to our democracy is happening in Republican statehouses across the country as they suppress the vote among the poor, people of color, and minorities. 2020 had record turn-outs in large part because the pandemic forced states to change procedures to encourage voting, things like early voting and mail-in ballots. In the first six months of this year, however, and using the false excuse of voting “irregularities,” 18 Republican-controlled statehouses have passed more than 30 laws making it harder for people to vote: things like
- doing away with same-day registration,
- limiting early voting and mail-in ballots,
- imposing stricter standards on voter ID,
- reducing the number polling places from areas of high Democratic concentration,
- making purges of voting rolls easier, and so on.
- Georgia had the weirdest one: forbidding giving food or water to any person waiting in line to vote.
The given rationale for these changes has been to prevent voter fraud. But there hasn’t been any fraud, so there’s nothing to protect against. Nevertheless, states are passing laws right and left to suppress voter turn-out.
Something else is happening in these Republican-controlled statehouses. It turns out that election officials have significant power in deciding important election details. For instance,
- they can disqualify a vote because the little oval on the paper is not completely penciled in,
- they can decide on the number of polling place or ballot boxes and where they should be located.
Ordinarily, these decisions are made by local, nonpartisan officials. This year Republican legislatures are transferring many of those functions to partisan state officials or to the legislature itself. These officials will have a great deal of power to decide how election rules are enforced and how later challenges will be enforced.
There is no real question that these changes are intended to skew elections toward Republicans; many will openly admit it.
Norms
There’s one thing that I should emphasize: None of what I’ve mentioned here is illegal or unconstitutional. But a well-functioning democracy can’t depend only on laws. There must also be an almost infinite series of “norms,” unwritten guidelines as to what’s acceptable. For instance, presidential candidates shouldn’t threaten their opponent with prison if she were to lose. Losing candidates should accept their loss and not claim election fraud without overwhelming evidence. In most of the world’s democracies that have become autocracies over the last fifty years, the beginning gradual changes were also not illegal, but they did violate essential norms. In the US, it’s completely legal for a state government to do away with same-day registration or limit early voting. No law is broken. What is broken are the norms that make democracy possible.
Perhaps the clearest example of norm-breaking is Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision in 2016 not to bring President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court for a Senate vote. As Majority Leader, McConnell had sole control of the Senate calendar. He had every legal and constitutional right to hold off the vote until after the 2016 election. But it was an unprecedented breaking of Senate norms that eventually stole one Democratic-appointed Supreme Court seat and gave it to the Republicans.
At this point in our history, the greatest danger to the democracy will not be around laws but around norms.
Why here? Why now?
Why do I believe it’s important to bring this up here, now, as part of our worship service?
- First of all, this is not just the usual political crisis like the debt ceiling. We’re watching a turning point in our country’s struggle for the soul of democracy.
- Second, there is much hope. Most of us across the political spectrum still value democracy enough that we could be educated to see the danger and do something about it.
- One possibility for hope is to develop coalitions with people progressives have often disagreed with, traditional Republicans who also see the current danger. People such as Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Liz Cheney and a few others. Democrats and Independents will need to find compromises with traditional Republicans so that we can come together to isolate the anti-democratic wing that dominates the Republican party.
Here’s an international example: During the wide-spread poverty and dislocation following World War I, countries like Italy and Germany were under attack by small, far-right fringe parties that quickly gathered populist and nationalist strength. In Germany the regular conservative parties tolerated the Nazi Party because they were all anti-Communist. The conservatives opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis … until it was too late.
This was happening in Marja’s home in Finland, too. The far-right Lapua Movement there threatened the country’s 10-year-old fragile democracy. As in Germany, the more moderate Finnish conservatives at first tolerated Lapua because its anti-communism was useful to their own agendas. As Lapua became more radical and violent, however, Finland’s traditional conservative parties recognized the threat. So, early on, Finnish politicians across the ideological spectrum formed a coalition to isolate Lapua. I’m sure this required painful compromises from the left, moderate, and true conservative parties. But they joined together to vote out Lapua, which quickly fell apart.
I don’t know what temporary compromises are necessary today, but the current turn toward authoritarian populism threatens all of us. We’ll need to work across ideologies to isolate the radical right and dismantle it. Afterwards, we can get back to the traditional partisan struggles that are so crucial to our democratic future. - Another sign of hope: There are perhaps two million small organizations in the country that operate democratically. This church. for instance. Their members — especially the young — are gaining experience in how democracies work. They may well serve as our models once this present difficult hour has passed.
- This struggle will require some theological work on our part. Am I correct that opposing the Republican Party is really the only position faithful to the Gospel? What kinds of compromises are consistent with our Christian faith as we build coalitions? How do we approach churches that have found themselves on the other side?
- This struggle will require that many more people understand the depth and danger of what is happening. Part of my hope is that education in churches and other religious organizations, schools, popular organizations like the Festival Center and others will give more of us some understanding of the depth of the threat so we can develop a coordinated resistance. Can we at Eighth Day do some of that education? Can the groups that struggle against climate change, racism, inequality and so on educate their members to recognize the need to fight what threatens us all.
What will be faithful responses? How will all of this happen? I don’t know. But we must be awake to the stirrings of small resistance movements and willing to bring the resources of Eighth Day to the struggle.