An American Waldensian Society Board Member Reflects on the Recent Elections in the United States
This week’s Democratic landslide in the US may signal that broad sectors of this troubled land are questioning the cruelty and corruption that have characterized a decade of Trumpism.
But cruelty and corruption are addictive. More so when combined with a generalized sense of insecurity and a loss of trust in public institutions.
This is a good time to remember a lesson learned long ago by our Waldensian siblings: no faith tradition, no economic system, no ideology fully embodies the Creator’s dream for humankind and for all of Creation.
Waldensians, as a minority community, have long understood not only the power of resistance and persistence, but also the need to forge alliances in a common struggle. As we review this week’s election results, many of us have been mindful of this vital legacy.
Many pause to inhale deeply a sense of hope. Some grieve their losses and fear even more polarization. I believe that the election represents a repudiation of cruelty and corruption rather than a vindication of the other party. Institutional paralysis and incompetence run deep.
Now, like so many times in the past, we must get back to work.
Together, in the routines and relationships of our daily lives and in the administration of our life in common, we must pursue justice and peace in building the common good. We are still learning how to love God, love one another, love ourselves. We are still learning that special care must be provided for the sinned against, the stranger in our midst, those with weakened defenses.
Our common interdependence reveals both our brokenness and the universality of grace. This is an essential mystery in building the beloved community.
As I have reviewed the actions and ideas that have motivated many of the most powerful actors on the world’s stage, I am convinced anew that all people of good will are engaged today in a kind of spiritual warfare (Ephesians 6:12.) (Walter Wink develops this idea eloquently in his trilogy on “principalities and powers.”)
Here are two signposts for the struggle ahead:
1. The social fabric of our communities has been torn asunder and will not be easily repaired.
For example, many of our neighbors here on Oregon’s south coast live in fear. Last week, for the first time, ICE agents came to our town and, in two separate incidents, picked up two of our neighbors.
Because like-minded citizens had received appropriate training and were able to activate an emergency support network promptly, those neighbors were provided with needed legal assistance and released the next day. But the child of one of those detained, now in third grade, has been too terrified to return to school. Only a handful of neighbors dared to show up at the community center to celebrate El Día de los Muertos with pozole and live mariachi music.
Recent cuts to food security programs have increased demands for food assistance. Those living with addiction, mental illness, without shelter, or in their vehicles are hunkering down for a cold, wet winter.
Like-minded citizens do what we can: supporting health and housing advocacy, providing job training, food and warm clothing, keeping watch for those who would kidnap our neighbors.
But that which divides our community is palpable. It is rooted, fundamentally, in fear: of loss, of change, of the other.
2. The richest and most powerful people alive today have learned to use sophisticated algorithms – and the emerging tools of artificial intelligence – to dominate public discourse and policy agendas to further expand their own wealth and power at the expense of the common good. A select few of these tech titans understand their reason for doing what they do in cosmic and apocalyptic terms.
Last week I was listening to Ezra Klein interview Canadian professor Quinn Slobodian on his new book “Muskism”. Slobodian carefully documents how the richest and most powerful individual on the planet understands himself to be paving the way for and the willing servant of a super-intelligence that – he hopes – will rule us all in the quite near future.
Many of his fellow tech giants share similar views.
As Slobodian traces this emerging ideology, he describes how these tech entrepreneurs have come to understand the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II as a “mind virus” that infected human consciousness with such naïve concepts as sustainable development and human rights. The core fallacy of such endeavors, according to Musk, is empathy. Nature itself, Musk insists, proclaims only one final truth: the survival of the fittest. Might makes right. Only the strong will survive.
Although the billions of dollars spent by Musk and the other tech giants in their attempt to influence this week’s elections did not prevent the so-called “Blue Wave,” they did further poison public discourse by shamelessly promoting racism, suspicion, division, misogyny, and hatred.
Spiritual warfare, indeed.
Worthy of note is that a number of the winning candidates in this week’s elections grounded their political platforms in the ethical values of their faith traditions. In addition to traditional candidates who seldom mention religious affiliations, candidates in this election cycle included liberal Protestant clergy, articulate Muslims and Jews, and Native Americans unashamedly rooted in their ancestral traditions. This was worthy of note for a political party that has often been uncomfortable with explicit religious discourse.
I’ll close with one example, taken from the victory speech of Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, Senator-elect from Texas:
There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.
My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, love God and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.
Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy, not just my neighbor who looks like me, not just my neighbor who prays like me, not just my neighbor who votes like me. I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself.
Perhaps the fever is breaking.
If so, as the fever breaks, we’ll need to learn again how to see one another as neighbors, how to order our common life with justice and integrity, and how to see in one another an image of the sacred.
This reflection was written by American Waldensian Society board member and retired Presbyterian mission co-worker Dennis A. Smith.
