After Donald Trump’s conviction in his Manhattan trial, he said, “Our whole country is being rigged” and “has gone to hell.” Then he added, “We’re a nation in decline, serious decline. Millions and millions of people, pouring into our country right now, from prisons and from mental institutions, terrorists. And they’re taking over our country.”
In contrast, Trump said, “I’m a very innocent man. And it’s OK. I’m fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution.”
Trump has been saying “America is going to hell” since he first announced a run for the presidency in 2015. At Trump Tower that day he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with (them). They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Rodney Kennedy
Of all the lies, misinformation and false claims made by Trump, only one stands out as the critical lynch pin of his movement: America is going to hell and Democrats are greasing the skids.
Thinking of a credible defense against the claim of America going to hell, my analogical imagination recalled the famous essay by one of the editors of The Sun, Francis Pharcellus Church, “Is There a Santa Claus?” I found his response to 8-year-old Virginia the best possible framework for a response to the proponents of “America is going to hell.”
No, Mr. ex-president, convicted felon, serial liar, our nation is not going to hell. Many of the very people who support you testify to the reality our nation is not a loser, a pathetic, third-rate nation on the skids to hell. These Americans go to work every day, send their children to school, support their communities, pay their taxes and go to church on Sunday. They are good neighbors to everyone. They are open to diversity, inclusion and acceptance. They will give the shirt off their back, go the second mile, forgive and offer reconciliation to others.
“Many of the very people who support you testify to the reality our nation is not a loser, a pathetic, third-rate nation on the skids to hell.”
The 19th-century social gospel vision still lives in my heart. I relish still the words of Katharine Lee Bates in “America the Beautiful.” Particular phrases ring true for me: “Crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!” “God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.” “Who more than self their country loved.” “May God thy gold refine till all success be nobleness and every gain divine!” “Crown thy good with brotherhood” and sisterhood. “God shed his grace on thee.” “Till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free!”
From the evangelical preachers preaching America’s doom and the return of Jesus just around the corner, to Trump’s “midnight in America” rhetoric, I resist all this doom and gloom. I still prefer the instructions of St. Paul in Philippians 4: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.”
Donald Trump and his evangelical friends are wrong. They have been afflicted by the ideology of a dark skepticism about the future of our great nation. They do not believe unless they are in charge of what passes for true belief. They think nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.
All minds in our universe are little. In this great universe of ours, carefully brought into the fulness of life by the slow immeasurable patience and persuasion of Almighty God, we are but God’s creatures formed from the dust of the earth to praise him. Measured by the infinite wisdom of the universe around us, the tiny minds of evangelicals are but a blip on time’s radar. “They are like chaff scattered by the wind.”
“America will continue to exist as a great nation for reasons secular and spiritual.”
Don’t be afraid. America is not going to hell. America will continue to exist as a great nation for reasons secular and spiritual. I have confidence in our exuberant capitalism to keep the profits flowing. Even as the evangelicals eviscerate the greed of our nation, they dip their wicks in the profits as much as the churches always have. The “hawkers of holiness” are as attracted to riches as Donald Trump is to gilded gold.
The prediction of our demise by preachers addicted to riches is a story both old and new.
The idea of America going to hell is also as old as the Puritans who came to our shores long before there was a United States of America. They were convinced America was going to hell before it could make a decent start.
Yes, our nation, now as always, faces immense challenges. There are signs of an increasing secular nation more interested in “flourishing” than in Christian faith. These signs are not indicators of our impending doom. And evangelicals often conjure false causes for our declension: gay rights, abortion, feminists, the ACLU, socialists, liberals, Democrats.
How dreary would be our nation if we really were on the edge of hell today. It would be as dreary as if there were no faith, hope or love left in our hearts. The music would fall silent; the poets would be speechless; the romance of life would dissipate. We should have no enjoyment, pleasure or excitement left in the dark ending of our world. The eternal life of God — the one who makes all things new — would be extinguished.
Believe America is going to hell? You might as well not believe in life. You might be tempted to believe the purveyors of doom and gloom out to prove how we are guilty of manifold wickedness, to catch the nation in the act of decline, but even if they offered actual evidence of our decline, there is so much positive evidence giving the lie to their claims.
It’s as if no one sees the goodness, cooperation, mutuality, commensality, friendship, empathy, good neighbor actions still unfolding daily from sea to shining sea.
The teachers who faithfully, professionally and with great love teach our children every day in spite of fierce opposition from the warriors of the “culture war,” give me hope we are not going to hell.
The people who serve around the world in our military, our first responders here at home increase my hope America is not going to hell.
The long-distance truck drivers who keep our economy humming indicate we are not going to hell.
Our best scholars, thinkers and professors training next-generation successors accelerate my hope.
Even the boiler-plate positive TedTalks of our day remind me of how much good there is in our midst.
“They are experiencing the consequences of swallowing too many lies, conspiracy theories and false histories of our nation.”
I am convinced the doom and gloom preachers and politicians suffer from refractive eye diseases. Their vision is blurred. They are experiencing the consequences of swallowing too many lies, conspiracy theories and false histories of our nation.
Evangelicals fail to see that America holds the potential for a national vision premised on rights, freedoms and democratic participation as hinted at in its founding documents. However, given that such an America was founded on imperialism and colonialism with their attendants of oppression and exploitation, its twin, the darkness of a perceived destruction.
Claiming “America is going to hell” against a vast preponderance of evidence to the contrary suggests historical amnesia of other eras of temporary darkness from which the nation emerged stronger. Evangelical mistrust of history and the attempt to rewrite history as a glorious Christian past seems to contradict a current rhetoric of doom and gloom. Is America a Christian nation? Or is America doomed to hell?
Robert Jeffress, perhaps unwittingly, expresses the evangelical ambivalence in his book, Twilight’s Last Gleaming: Your Last Days Can Be Your Best Days, by preaching destruction and “best days” side by side. Even Jeffress is not sure as he preaches the soon return of Jesus and revels in the glory of his magnificent $125 million sanctuary in the heart of Dallas.
Sure, America has problems, complex problems, but that is no sign we are going to hell. The greatest realities in the universe are not what we are doing, but what God will bring to pass with a new heaven and a new earth.
You may never have seen angels dancing in the trees. You may not believe all the miracles are literally true, but that’s no proof we are going to hell. “Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders God has prepared for those who love. We live in the hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” And that is the opposite of a nation going to hell.
The doom and gloom preachers and politicians may pile up false cause connections, list all the alleged sins of our culture, but there is a hope the strongest people never can tear apart. The goodness, grace and generosity of God is real. It is much more real than the false claims God is going to get us for being so bad, or that God is passing out cancer, heart attacks or walking around the earth killing innocent people.
Going to hell? No, America is not going to hell. God lives and is on God’s throne. A thousand years from now, ten times ten thousand years from now, when preachers still trot out the same old doom and gloom, there will still be so many good people doing all the good they can for all the people they can to make glad the heart of humanity.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer who serves in New York state and Louisiana. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.
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