Speculation and Morality

Immediately following the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, the religious chatter about Trump got waaaaay more intense.

His supporters felt that this near miss marked him as protected by God, that it was a sign that he was a necessary part of God's plan for America.  Like King David, like Cyrus of Persia, Trump is the anointed one, the vessel of the Divine intent.  Trumpist theology has always had a divine-right ring about it, which...given that his supporters are essentially monarchists...shouldn't be much of a surprise.

Others had very different ideas, ones that seem a little closer to the reality of who Trump is.  Among some fringe communities of evangelicals who haven't missed that Trump is the exact opposite of Jesus in every way, the failed assassination attempt and the wound to Trump's ear fulfilled the terms of Revelation 13:3.  "There it is," they said.  "There's the head wound, and the wondering world!"  Trump is, they suggest, the Little Horn, the adversary of Christ, whose amorality, worldliness, and pathological falsehood marks him as the Antichrist.  The end times are at hand!

Both are...off.

Trump's "faithful" supporters are off, because, c'mon.   Christ's purposes are never served by lies and bullying.  Christ's purposes are never served by showing cruelty to the stranger, or by refusing shelter to a fellow Christian.  Ever.  Not ever.  Period.  The Gospel must be expressed in our every action, and the dark logics of your theological consequentialism can be used to excuse any evil.  Sure, he's done what he promised.  But just because the devil fulfills his end of the bargain doesn't mean you haven't sold your soul.

As the author of the definitive book on Trump's Antichrist nature, I might seem closer to the latter camp.  At least the folks who are freaked out about him have the advantage of not being bamboozled by Trump's transactional schtick.  And I will admit, the whole head wound thing is a little creepy, as is the depth to which the American faithful now stand in Trump's thrall.

The challenge, though, is that none of that matters.  The question, for Christians, is never about the details of the end times, or about the mechanics of messianic fulfillment.  Jesus was really, really specific about that.  Don't speculate about those things, he said.  Don't trust anyone who speculates about it.

Our task, as Christians, is not to worry about when it all comes down.  Because if you're a Christian, if you've committed yourself to being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, again: none of that matters.  None of it.  If you're claimed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the end times have already arrived for you.

The Christian has already stepped over to a different way of life, one that manifests itself in the values and ethos that Jesus lived and taught.  It doesn't matter where we are in the scheme of things.  We must live, right now, as if that time were fulfilled.  My moral commitments are the same, no matter where we are in the arc of history.  Faced with an cruel emperor, a totalitarian state, a flagrant charlatan, or a decadent mammonist culture, none of that changes.

Love neighbor.  Love enemy.  Feed the hungry.  Clothe the naked.  Show hospitality to the stranger.  Speak the truth, and show grace.  Refuse the sword, and turn your back on the sweet poison of wealth.  This is the basic value-set of discipleship, no matter when, no matter what.

When we get lost in wild end-times speculation, we too easily lose sight of that discipled moral agency.  We start living in a world of abstractions and phantasms, rather than in the reality of our day-to-day choices.  We forget both our Christian freedom and our Christian duty.

 

Creation? Apocalypse? They're All About Me.

A recent Gallup poll reiterated what is a reasonably well known phenomenon in American public thought: A significant plurality of Americans - 46% - believe that God created human beings in their current form.   It's a stat that's been hovering at around that mark for almost thirty years, or as long as the venerable polling company has been maintaining that data.  

It does represent something of a bump from the 2011 data, in which forty percent were creationist, thirty eight percent embraced theistic evolution, and sixteen percent saw no divine engagement in the process.  Both threads in the evolution-support camp have waned in the last year, which is probably interpreted as a good sign for the GOP in the upcoming election.

I don't say that to be snarky or partisan, either.  The sub-data indicates that self-identified Republicans are more likely to be creationist...some 58 percent of them.

Gallup interprets these results as being fundamentally static culturally.  But it remains a to-me-amazing reality that a near-majority of Americans view humankind in a way that is, as Gallup dryly puts it "...at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature."  Which is a nice way of saying: they are completely oblivious to the reality of creation.

And yet, as I reflected on that this morning, I found it reminded me of another common phenomenon amongst human beings:  the assumption that we live in the "end-times."   A surprisingly large number of Jesus-folk work under the assumption that the end of all things is just about to come to pass.  The Rapture is just minutes away, coming real soon.   We're in that time just before the end, and we need to prepare, 'cause the signs are clear that Jesus is returning.  In recent polling, for instance, nearly 44% of Americans attribute natural disasters to the coming of the end times.  This number seems remarkably close to the 46% who are creationist.

Why this belief?

Folks assume this for the same reason they've always assumed this.  We generally exist in the small, tangible world of our day-to-day existence.  We see little beyond it.  We're too busy.  So if it's in the Bible, it must pertain to me.  And as my life is at the center of my universe, and all of existence came into being for this time in which I live, clearly, the end must be about to happen.

And therein may lie a commonality between how we view the end and the beginning.  We cannot imagine a beginning that is so radically different from our now.  We cannot imagine an end that goes so far past the end of our little flicker of days.

And we particularly do not want to imagine that this great, glorious span of created time and space does not have us at the apex.  How could it possibly continue and...um..."leave us behind?"

So to speak.

 

Camping Out for the Apocalypse

As May ticks by, it must be an exciting time to be Harold Camping.  As a moderately progressive Presbyterian, my exposure to Camping had up until that last month or two been essentially zero.   He's a fundamentalist, King James reading, highly conservative self-trained pastor over a radio ministry, but one who seemed to have had some purchase in the conservative community. 

The past tense there is intentional.  He recently alienated many of his conservative pastorly allies by declaring that no-one should go to church, because time for the church has passed.  Stay home!  Listen to your radio!

Most significantly, Camping's ministry has been focused on the return of Jesus and the beginning of the end times experience, which...from his exhaustive shamanic poring over the monkey entrails of scripture...is real soon.  Meaning he's called a date, now less than one week away, on May 21, 2011.  At 6:00 PM, exactly.  This is when the Raptcha will occur, and subsequent hilarity will ensue.  Oh, the horrors of that day!

In this, Camping joins a long line of end times prognosticators, for whom the disappointment of seeing the day go by inevitably unapocalypsed seems only to breed more zeal for finding out the "real" date.  The last few months...with immense natural disasters and historic foment in the cradle of monotheistic religion...must have been really exciting for folks who listen to Camping.

Several things strike me about this most recent in the long and storied line of Yeah-Sure-I-Know-The-Day-And-The-Hour End-Times obsessives.

First, and this is likely because Camping has significant media penetration and resources, this whole May 21 thing seems to have become something of a social event, much more so than any "prophecy" I can ever remember.  It hums everywhere in the collective subconscious, and this goes well beyond the realm of churchy life and conversation.  End-Times Parties are planned.  Snarky Facebook pages are joined.   The web-connected world sees the fleets of snappily decorated Doom RVs, giggles, and tweets about it to their friends.

Second, I am as a Jesus person going to be doing some praying at six o'clock this Saturday.   This will be for one of two reasons.  Reason number one, which has a 0.00000000000000000000000314% chance of being true, involves a major Destruction-of-Krypton type earthquake event, during which the Bahais, the Quakers, a handful of Unitarians, and both remaining Jains turn into energy beings.

I'm pretty much up poop creek if that be the case.

Reason number two, which is far more likely, is that Harold Camping and his followers will be facing a major existential crisis.  Camping is utterly wrong, about the Bible and many many other things, but he's not a charlatan or a monster.  I don't find it hard at all to feel compassion for him.  For those who follow him, this could be the thing that shakes them loose from faith not just in Camping's wackadoodle approach to the Bible, but also in the goodness of the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus Christ.

And that, well, that would be worse than the end of the world.