Musings on Good and Evil in Democracy, Where Evil Often Wins

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., January 18, 2025

Comparing Jimmy Carter with Donald Trump as Presidents comes as close to contrasting good and evil in politics as I can imagine.  America’s materialistic and hedonistic democracy is corrupted with narcissism and human depravity, and in the cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, the forces of evil often win--as evidenced by Trump's victories.

It’s dangerous to describe anyone as evil in politics, but Trump meets that criteria, and conversely Carter was clearly a good man.  My brief experience in politics began with a loss in Carter’s “peanut blitz” in 1976.  I should have been a better judge of character in politics.  My next run was for City Council in Columbia, S.C. in 1978, where I won.

The race for Columbia City Council was non-partisan.  I wish that all politics were non-partisan.  Trump would not have been so successful if he did not have polarized partisan politics to exploit and build his base.  A third party at the national level is just wishful thinking.  I ran for Congress as a third party candidate in 2016, and got less than 3% of the vote.

I became a pastor in the United Methodist Church (UMC) in 2000, and have witnessed the unholy alliance between the church and partisan politics.  I retired as a UMC pastor in 2012 and began posting commentary at https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/.  Since 2014 I have posted 528 commentaries on the unholy relationship between religion and politics.

The thin line that has separated the faith of white Christians and the politics of Trump’s Republicans has disappeared.  In the November election “Trump gained the support of 8 in 10 white evangelical voters.”  A similar ratio applies to all white Christians who now define their faith and politics with Trump’s radical-right Republican views.

There is a stark contrast between radical-right Republican politics and the teachings of Jesus summarized in the greatest commandment to love God and our neighbors of other races and religions as we love ourselves. It was taken from the Hebrew Bible, was taught by Jesus and is a common word of faith for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

Nationalism is not an explanation for this widening divide.  As a retired Army officer I have a strong sense of nationalism, or commitment to both God and country.  I struggle to follow the altruistic teachings of Jesus, while Trump’s Christians (an obvious misnomer) promote greed, bigotry and hatred; and they wear their distorted values like a badge of honor.

Ayn Rand comes closest to personifying Trump’s distorted narcissistic views that prevail on Wall Street among Trump’s billionaire minions.  America is fast approaching a point of no return to its former traditions of unselfish altruism.  The church, politics and reason have failed both God and democracy.  Where do we go from here?            

Notes:

This is a sequel to last week’s commentary on Musings on Whether Congress and the church can reject extremism in 2025, at https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2025/01/musings-on-whether-congress-and-church.html.

“Trump has not been shy about what comes next. He ran a presidential campaign that was infused with White Christian Nationalist imagery and rhetoric. He vowed in an October campaign speech to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and restore preachers’ power in America while giving access to a group he calls “my beautiful Christians.” “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told an annual gathering of National Religious Broadcasters in Tennessee during a campaign stop earlier this year.  Trump won the support of about 8 in 10 White evangelical voters in November’s presidential election. Nearly two-thirds of White evangelical Protestants in the US described themselves as sympathizers or adherents to Christian nationalism in a February 2023 survey. Scholars have called White Christian nationalism an “Imposter Christianity” whose adherents use religious language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in a quest to create a White Christian America. What might life look like over the next four years for Americans who don’t subscribe to this movement? CNN asked that question of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Christian nationalism. Du Mez is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” Du Mez says Christian nationalism is ultimately incompatible with American democracy. “This is not a pluralist vision for all Americans coming together or a vision for compromise,” says Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University in Michigan and a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. “It is a vision for seizing power and using that power to usher in a ‘Christian America.’” Trump’s victory will embolden and empower the White Christian nationalist movement. In all likelihood, it will institutionalize White Christian nationalism and transform our government, with the goal of transforming our society, placing White Christian nationalists in positions of enormous political power.  Christian nationalism thrives on this us-versus-them mentality. This militancy is linked to always needing an enemy. And in Christian nationalism today, the enemies are internal. Historically the enemies of Christian America were secular humanists, feminists and then more recently Democrats and the woke. This language of an enemy within; It caught some attention in the last week of the campaign, when Trump said those words that resonate deeply with Christian nationalists. That fuels the sense that we need warriors to fight to save your family and Christianity. And to save America, you’re going have to fight fellow Americans who are threatening those values.

In Progressive Spirit (January 16, 2025) Dr. Carl Krieg cited Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society to illustrate that demagogues like Hitler can overwhelm moral people in a democracy.  Germany was the most Christian nation in Europe until Hitler used Nazi nationalism to take it over, and it took WWII to rid Germany of Hitler.  Trump could follow Hitler’s example.