Tag: Donald Trump

“Let Obamacare Fail” Is Immoral

Health care has been at the center of the news recently. President Trump and Congressional Republicans are determined to do….something, mainly centered around repealing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as it’s known.

These guys have your future in their hands. Yikes.

Yet, they keep failing to do so, lacking the necessary votes to get it done in Congress. So, after last week’s debacle, Trump decided he had enough, declaring that he would just “let Obamacare fail” and that he wasn’t going to own it.

The concept of “letting Obamacare fail” is highly immoral. It strikes against the oath at the very heart of the medical field, which states “First, do no harm.”

Obamacare has real problems with the way it is built and the way it has worked in the real world. But these problems are all fixable. The mandate needs to have better enforcement. Subsidies could be more generous. CSR (cost-sharing reduction) payments to insurers need to be assured and generous as well. Medicaid expansion needs to take hold in all fifty states.

The three-legged stool of Obamacare – universal coverage, subsidies, and the individual mandate – is a proven model. It’s not perfect; we would be better off with Medicare-for-all, with the eventual goal of single payer. But Obamacare, when it is funded and not sabotaged, works. No one can deny it: more people are insured under Obamacare than were before, and that is a unqualified good. No matter what your opinions on health policy, no one can deny that more people (24 million more people, to be exact) having access to affordable, decent health coverage is a good thing for this country, politically and morally.

That’s what makes the attitude of Trump, and the all-out drive of the Republican Party to repeal Obamacare no matter what, so morally problematic. The talking points about rising subsidies and infringements on liberty and massive tax hikes and death panels are wrong and disingenuous. Subsidies are rising no more than they were before Obamacare. Taxes were raised modestly on a few of the richest Americans. Death panels are just a stupid lie perpetuated by national joke Sarah Palin. And the only liberty Obamacare repeal promotes is the liberty of millions of Americans to die without health care access.

As much as they want to talk about Obamacare failing, the facts are just not with them. It’s not failing; the only way it fails is if they continue to undermine it (i.e. by refusing to pay CSRs, or to enforce the mandate.) And in their drive to undermine and repeal it, they are ensuring that those 24 million Americans who got health insurance will now lose it, and put their lives at risk in the process. All so they can cut the very modest taxes Obamacare imposed on the rich.

In essence, the GOP policy outcome is that millions will lose their health insurance so that a handful of the richest people in America can pocket more money. This is highly immoral, and terribly un-Christian. The GOP is choosing mammon over human beings. It’s callous, and history will judge them harshly.

There are those who will accuse me of being partisan, who will try to posit a moral equivalence between both political parties in this health care debate. That argument is wrong. The Democratic Party is far, far from perfect. I have my gripes with it, trust me. But, in the case of health care, there is only one party trying to take health care away from millions of working families, and it ain’t the Democrats*.

Health care is a basic human right. The fact that America is still the only major industrialized nation that doesn’t guarantee coverage for all it’s citizens puts us as a moral disadvantage on the world stage. Obamacare was a small step in correcting that shortcoming. The fact that a sizable portion of Americans thinks that providing health care to everyone – something the richest country in the history of the world can easily do, if we have the will – is wrong and undesirable is a sad commentary on the state of the American soul.

Here’s hoping Trump and the GOP fails, and we continue on the path towards a better future.

*And don’t try to talk to me about abortion. I have a really hard time believing you are “pro-life” if you support and vote for a party that wants to take away life saving health care for millions of people, including millions of children. You can’t be pro-life if you care more about future hypothetical fetuses than you do human beings alive right now.

 

The Theological Bankruptcy of American Evangelicals (as explained by Tony Perkins)

John Fea, who writes the excellent They Way of Improvement Leads Home blog (are you reading it? You should be reading it), wrote a recent Washington Post Op-Ed titled “Trump threatens to change the course of American Christianity.” The excellent piece ruminates on Trump’s relationship with his “court evangelicals,” as Fea as labeled them, the small group of celebrity-evangelicals who have attached themselves to the president and who hover about the White House waiting for photo ops in the seat of power (people like Jerry Falwell Jr, Robert Jeffress, and Paula White, among others.) The mock title derives itself from the courtiers who were always to be found around the throne of medieval monarchs, always ready for scraps from the royal table and sycophantic approval of all the king’s words and deeds, no matter how immoral they may be. I highly encourage you to read the op-ed.

“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.”

Fea draws attention to a response written by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (himself a court evangelical.) Perkins obviously takes great umbrage at Fea’s piece. He references another op-ed by Fea, from 2012, in which Fea explores the deeply Christian language President Obama used. (For more on the Christian nature of the Obama presidency, I strongly encourage this piece by John Pavlovitz.)

Perkins isn’t convinced, and uses this opportunity to both slam Obama again, and also defend the supposed spirituality of Donald J. Trump. In doing so, he shines a clear light on the moral bankruptcy of much of American evangelicalism (something I touched on Wednesday in my MAGA piece.)

Here is Perkins:

For the last 50 years, [Fea] argues, “evangelicals have sought to influence the direction of the country and its laws through politics. But Trump has forced them to embrace a pragmatism that could damage the gospel around the world and force many Christians to rethink their religious identities and affiliations.” Fea insists that Trump has done little for evangelicals, a charge hardly substantiated by the strides the White House has made on our pro-life and religious liberty agendas. But Fea measures Trump’s sincerity on a different scale: how often he attends church. No wonder he once called Barack Obama “the most explicitly Christian president in American history.” In a column from 2012, he made the staggering claim that the most pro-abortion, anti-faith president to ever occupy the Oval Office was also the most pious.

Perkins himself reinforces a point I make often about so much of American Christianity: it can be boiled down to exactly two facets: opposition to abortion, and opposition to LGBT equality. For the court evangelicals, and for the millions of people who follow them, this is the sum total of what being a Christian in America looks like in 2017. As long as you oppose abortion and oppose gay marriage, you can brag about sexually assaulting women, show a profound lack of knowledge about Scripture, and govern in a way that not just neglects the needy, but goes out of its way to actively do harm to them. Actual beliefs about God or Jesus are beside the point; hence the growing evangelical-Catholic alliance.

Public practice of Christianity doesn’t include any theological grounding, nor does it include traditional forms of Christian social action, such as missions, or care for the indigent. The only public form of Christian action that matters is woman shaming in front of Planned Parenthood, and protests at the Supreme Court anytime they hear a case concerning the LGBT community.

The proof is in the numbers: on Election Day 2016, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, despite his clear indifference to faith, his hateful and disgusting comments about just about every group in America outside of straight, white men, and his overwhelming greed and hunger for power. This from the same group of Christians who had a collective aneurysm over the moral shortcomings of Bill Clinton just 20 short years ago.

The court evangelicals are the logical outcome of an evangelical movement that has prostituted itself out to right-wing political power. The evangelical movement has simply become a church-based stamp of approval for whatever regressive piece of public policy or proclamation of hate speech emanates from the conservative movement this week. As long as a politician promises to fight anti-discrimination measures and roll back Roe v. Wade, they will get the evangelical endorsement and can go to Washington to roll back taxes and take away health care and demonize poor people and minorities as much as they like. Empire and power are the means they see to God’s kingdom, rather than the way of love and weakness shown by Jesus. And by God’s kingdom, they just mean a world with no abortion and no gays. Everything else is a sideshow.

But don’t take my word for it. Just ask Tony Perkins.

 

P.S. I’ve said a lot here, and in the past, about what Christianity isn’t. But if it’s not all these things, you may ask, then what do I think it is? Glad you asked: I’ll be writing a series on that soon!

The Heresy of Make America Great Again

By now, I’m sure you’ve seen coverage or video of First Baptist Dallas’ “Make America Great Again” hymn and all-around freedom fest on Fourth of July Weekend in Washington DC. If you haven’t, and you think you can stomach it, here it is:

I’ll give you a minute to go vomit, if you need to.

The “Make America Great Again” song – and really, the whole MAGA concept – is about as anti-Christian as one can get. The fact that a major church in America can really build an entire brand around MAGA just shows the theological bankruptcy of much of American Christianity. Most Christians, it seems, regard no more than a few verses of the Bible – those having to do with “gnashing of teeth” and Jesus being the only choice and those allegedly about sexual orientation – and discard the rest, especially those places about justice and compassion and mercy and caring for the least, the lost, and the alien.

The Way exemplified by Jesus, as we read it in the Gospels, is anti-empire. Jesus consistently stood against the coercive use of power – economic, political, military – in pursuit of human achievement. Jesus understood that so often power is used by one tribe or group against another, and that as a result, people suffered.

Instead of wielding power and promoting an “us-against-them” ideology, Jesus showed that abundant life comes through love of neighbor, through spreading a big tent over all humanity, and welcoming everyone in, especially those on the margins of society. Jesus stood against empire, showing its moral bankruptcy through his use of the power of love for its own sake.

MAGA and Trump are empire at its worst. Trump’s governing ethos has been the coercion of power in the pursuit of money and influence for a small group of people over and against every one else – against foreigners and immigrants and black people and LGBT people and Muslims and liberals and poor people. Trump cares only about himself, and his most ardent followers care only about themselves. They live in an economy of scarcity, in which the stuff of life is rare and must be hoarded and kept away from the undeserving and the sinners. A Christianity that sides with MAGA is nothing but pure heresy, a disgusting perversion of the words and deeds of Christ.

Jesus’ Way is the Way of Abundance: abundance of love and compassion and mercy and life, for all people. Jesus stood with the least against the powers because he knew abundance was the reality of God’s kingdom, and the only way to show it was to raise of the weak and show that their elevation didn’t mean a reduction of others. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” indeed.

Christianity isn’t about nationalism and America First and conquering others and victory. Christianity doesn’t take sides, and certainly doesn’t identify with America. Christianity is about universal love, and radical hospitality, and weakness conquering all, and about relinquishing power. Christianity is where losers are admired, and winners pitied in their emptiness. Christianity is about always – ALWAYS – critiquing and standing against those wielding power, even when they are “our guy” or are on our team.

The very best of early Christianity understood that Christianity’s equation with and coercion by empire was a tragedy, not a triumph. They realized that critiquing empire meant critiquing even those leaders who were themselves “Christians”, those leaders who had once stood with them. In the modern context, this means radically critiquing even the leaders were help put in place. Because the Way of Jesus never identifies itself with power; it always, stands with those who are powerless.

Making America great again isn’t what is needed. What is needed is “Making the Kingdom come on earth, as in heaven.” And that only comes from each and every one of us operating with an attitude of abundance towards each and every other human being, from putting the needs and well being of others first and above our own, of practicing the radical and overflowing love of God towards others. Only then will things be great.