BLOG 10/17/17. “EVERYBODY TALKIN BOUT HEAVEN, AIN’T A GONNA GO THERE”
Several generations ago Miles Mark Fisher wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago on negro slave songs in the United States. It was published into a book, still in print, which a real treasure. He was the ninety+ year old pastor of the White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina when I met him. The legacy that he left with me was the realization that negro slave songs were not only songs of faith, but also songs of protest against the injustices of slavery and racism. One that has come back to me in recent days is the one that declares: “Heaven, heaven, everybody talking about heaven, everybody talking about it ain’t a going to go there, heaven, heaven.”
This came to me powerfully when I read the report that an ostensibly ‘evangelical Christian’ gathering of several thousand in New York had given President Trump a standing ovation as their champion. First of all was the travesty of such a group obscenely appropriating/hi-jacking the venerable term evangelical for an agenda so blatantly anti-evangelical. But even more, embracing a figure like Trump as having anything at all to do with the Christian faith when he embodies everything that a Christian is not. How does he have the audacity to even call himself a Christian when there is nothing about his character even remotely identifiable as such: a racist, a misogynist, a serial adulterer, amoral, greedy, divorced several times, a pathological narcissist and liar, with efforts to make life even more difficult for the helpless poor, the sick, the stranger within our gates, and the unjustly imprisoned, . . . and on and on. He is the very antithesis of anything Christian, and especially those who are truly evangelical who take obedience to Christ’s teachings seriously.
. . . And this makes a standing ovation for him by that gathering in New York even more of a travesty. Jesus taught that “by their fruits shall you know them.” True evangelicals are servants/slaves of righteousness, known by their love and good works, by their feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, being compassionate about prisoners (primarily debtors in that society), and welcoming strangers. Trump is visibly and provably contradictory of such teachings of God’s new creation in Christ. So, for those who use the cloak of such teaching to obscure their alien political agenda is to be without integrity, and brings us back to: “everybody talking about heaven ain’t a going to go there” in spades.
President Trump’s only real affinity with the Christian faith is his quest for their votes, but he himself contradicts everything good and pure and noble and just that is embodied in Christian faith. So, to own him as a champion puts that whole assembly down for the falseness of its claim to be the followers Jesus Christ.
To be sure, to be profoundly Christian doesn’t qualify one to be a good politician (especially with the radical nature of Jesus social agenda), but to adopt a Christian persona in order to garner votes is to be without integrity, it is the antithesis of everything Jesus taught about self-denying love and all that such requires of those who have true hope of heaven.
“O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry; our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die . . . From all that terror teaches, from lies of tongue and pen; From all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men . . . Deliver us, good Lord.” (G. K. Chesterton).
