Sinclair Lewis is quoted as saying, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
He wrote his novels in the 1930s, the time of the first “America First” movement when our nation flirted with fascism. Here it comes again.
But we also have racist Nazi ideology wrapped in the American flag and carrying a Bible — with a president beguiling a white Christian voting bloc that refuses to see the white supremacy in its ecclesiastical blood from our nation’s beginnings.
Stephen Shoemaker
It is documented that Donald Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches, “My New Order,” in his bedside cabinet.
It’s a horror to watch. Trump and his sycophants are firing Black and brown people from government positions at all levels. The firing of Carla Hayden, librarian of Congress, is the most recent example. DOGE is ending the health programs for the most vulnerable Americans, which not so incidentally include many Black and brown children.
Our proposed new U.S. budget includes severe Medicaid cuts. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are being abolished, actions that directly target people of color, and then of course women, especially women of intellect and power. (Misogyny is both fear and hatred of women.) Black history is being erased in all levels of public and private education.
“What we are watching is social eugenics.”
What we are watching is social eugenics. Rid the nation of immigrants of color while giving refugee status for white Afrikaners who claim they are victims of oppression in “their” homeland. Elon Musk, a white Afrikaner immigrant who has given a public Nazi salute, is no doubt cheering.
The victim-in-chief riles up white grievance among white people in our nation as a political ploy. Votes and bucks pour in. The Old Testament calls it “wickedness,” including wickedness “in high places.” We call it human evil at work among us.
No need to bring in Satan. Paul called these anti-God forces “principalities and powers.” Here are the social constructions, the ideologies and supra-personal entities that rob people of their dignity and humanity. Rabbis would exclaim when they saw a human person come down the street, “Make way, make way for the image of God!”
Racism is blasphemy against God who made us all in God’s divine image.
The Republican Party, once named the “Party of Lincoln,” founded to oppose the evil of slavery, is too afraid of the president to curb any excess, any atrocity. The Hebrew prophets warned against “unjust decrees” and others forms of social immorality. Amos issued the quintessential prophetic call: “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate.”
Hating what is evil and loving what is good are equally vital for a good society.
Michael Gerson, child of evangelical faith and eloquent speech writer for George W. Bush, wrote in 2019 of his worry about the “resurgent racism” being led by President Trump in his first term. (Gerson was a national treasure who tragically died three years later, his life cut short in his prime.) He wrote that he had made the “mistake” of pulling James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree off his book shelf and reading of this unspeakably cruel form of racial hatred.
“Hating what is evil and loving what is good are equally vital for a good society.”
“This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation,” he wrote. “It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters.”
Now, six years later in Trump’s second term, the racism is evermore in plain view. He is, to use Gerson’s images, playing with fire and taking the monster out for a walk. It’s like cancer returning after remission and metastasizing all over the whole body.
Langston Hughes, poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a poem, “Let America Be America Again,” that should be read every July 4. Its refrain: “America never was America to me.”
Such was and is scaldingly true. But now we know it in ways we hid from ourselves then. Shall we be bystanders to this recrudescent racism?
Most white pulpits and white male preachers of our nation, including my own and myself, have lived in a place of cultural privilege, and we have been timid to speak of this evil. Now we must name it, not just in our pulpits but in the streets.
Renowned professor of preaching David Buttrick wrote that there is “in-church preaching and “out-church preaching.” It’s time to live the gospel in public. We are witnessing a deluge of wrongs in high places these days, but let us not lose sight of this flagrant human evil.
Stephen Shoemaker most recently served as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He previously served as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.