There’s a video circulating online of Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, speaking at a State Department conference. Imagining photographs of anti-Trump protesters whom he calls left-wing terrorists, Miller says, “Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way.”
The historian’s caption was five words: We’ve seen this film before.
I watched it twice. I am not writing because I am offended. I am writing because I am deeply concerned, and I believe the church should be too.
I should say plainly who is writing. I live with CIDP, a neurological condition in which my own immune system attacks my nerves. On any given day, if I try to walk without aids, I may look intoxicated. Words can be hard to find. I may wince in pain in the middle of a conversation. You might see my hand tremor or watch me simply drop a glass of water at the dinner table. Every three weeks, a nurse comes to my home to give me the infusion that keeps me going. I also am a transgender woman.
Eileen Monte
By the standard Miller offered, I would not pass for normal on either count.
Neither would millions of Americans who are disabled, visibly different or simply do not look the way someone believes they should. When a man with that much power judges people by how they look, all of us land somewhere on his line.
I want to be fair to the reader who winced at those last two paragraphs. Many good people believe Miller was talking about violent rioters, not about people like me. To them he was describing conduct and calling it by a blunt name. Some readers also hold, sincerely and out of love, a traditional understanding of gender that my life does not fit. I am not asking you to give that up to keep reading.
I am asking a smaller question. Should anyone, from any podium, teach Americans that a person’s body tells you whether that person is good? Miller urged his listeners to trust their instincts. That instinct is exactly what I want us to examine.
The historian is right that we have seen this before. In the 1930s, Germany’s government taught its people that physical and mental difference marked a person as less worthy. It began with words. Respected professionals wrote of “life unworthy of life.”
In May 1933, students ransacked Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, one of the first places in the world to care for transgender patients, and its library was burned in a public square days later. In 1939, the state began killing disabled children and adults in a program known as Aktion T4. Disabled people were among the first the Nazis murdered by gas, before the death camps were built.
“Disabled people were among the first the Nazis murdered by gas, before the death camps were built.”
I am not saying Stephen Miller is a Nazi. I am saying the idea he voiced has a history, and that history is not ambiguous. Every step down that road began with a respectable voice saying some people do not look normal.
Scripture saw this temptation long before Berlin. In 1 Samuel 16, God sends Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint a king from among the sons of Jesse. Samuel sees the eldest, Eliab, and is sure he has found his man. God stops him: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature … for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
Notice who nearly got it wrong. Not a pagan king or a tyrant, but a prophet, a faithful man doing God’s work. Reading worth from the outside is not a fringe sin. It is an ordinary human instinct, and it lives in pulpits and pews as easily as at podiums. Samuel was spared his mistake because he listened when God corrected him.
The son God chose was out in the field with the sheep. No one had thought to bring him in.
So here is my concern, stated plainly: Words spoken this close to power do not stay at the podium. They give permission. They teach a nation what to notice and whom to fear. If Christians do not answer them, our silence will be all the consent the powerful need.
The answer is not to call Miller names. It is to do what God told Samuel to do: Look again. Look at the man in the wheelchair at the back of your sanctuary, the teenager who does not look like the other kids, the neighbor whose body tells a story you do not yet understand. Then look past all of it to the heart, because that is where the Lord is already looking.
We have seen this film before. We know how it ends. We do not have to watch it again.
Eileen Monte is a transgender woman writing from Fort Worth, Texas. She seeks to take on the political machine working to legislate trans people out of public life and the inherited fear it runs on. She is not a historian or a member of the clergy. Just a person of deep thoughts, stubborn convictions, and five kids who keep her honest.