Foreign Service Officer: What’s That?

The call from the Marine on duty in the U.S. consulate in this Middle Eastern country came late in the evening. I was the American consular officer, responsible for, among other things, being available for American citizens with problems.

“There’s an American lady here who says she wants help. She’s had some kind of fight with her husband, and she left him,” the Marine said. “ Her baby is with her.”

I hurriedly dressed and made my way from my house to the Marine’s post. The young American woman waited with her months old baby. I took her into the consular section where she could nurse her baby and we could talk.

She was one of many American citizens who show up, sometimes literally, on the doorstep of an American embassy or consulate asking for help. Working as a Foreign Service consular officer for the U.S. State Department, I was privileged to know some of them.

Writes one Foreign Service officer: “The most urgent calls rarely came during embassy business hours — the wee hours of the morning were much more common, no matter the country. ‘We found the body of a young American male at the airport hotel. It appears to be suicide,’ one caller reported. ‘I’m 14 years old,’ pleaded another. ‘My parents brought me here on vacation to visit family. But it turns out they want to marry me off to a 50-year-old man I don’t even know. Please help!’”
—Matthew Keene, “For Americans in Trouble Abroad, a Consular Officer May Be the Only Hope,” Washington International Diplomatic Academy,” March 21, 2021

Some of my own experiences as a consular officer included the following: An American killed by an apparent terrorist. Americans arrested for making booze in a country where any alcohol consumption was forbidden. An apparently mentally ill American showing up at the consulate needing money.

Oh, yes, we used to say. Consular officers have the best war stories, better by far than our colleagues working at more rarified heights. They visit the jails. They make welfare checks on American children of divorced parents when the child lives with the foreign parent. They check the bodies of dead Americans at the morgue before calling a relative in the States with the sad news of the death.

Working for our country is a noble occupation: A soldier serving in a foreign land or one setting up hospitals for victims of Covid-19 in the U.S. A diplomat working out an agreement for free trade or one visiting an American in a foreign jail. A U.S. Supreme Court justice deciding between differing views on the Constitution or a judge seeking the best outcome for a juvenile offender caught shoplifting.

Easy work? Often not, but justifying the honorable title of “public servant.”

The young woman with the baby I mentioned earlier? Her husband, a young man who seemed to deeply love his wife and child, came to the consulate later in the evening, and the two made up. Sometimes we witness happy endings, too.

Immigrants: Push and Pull

Vibrant economies need immigrants. The highly skilled have immigrated for centuries, as they continue to do, spreading skills and innovation. The less skilled have contributed workers to harvest crops, begin new businesses, and save money to prepare their children for better lives.

Immigrants can shore up falling birth rates in developed nations. Countries stagnate if the number of births falls below replacement rates, the recent norm in developed societies. A continuing flow of immigrants lessens fallout from the drop in birth rates.

At the same time, immigration can be uneven and inundate some societies, as in various African and Middle Eastern countries and to a lesser extent in developed nations on the fringes. Wars have upset whole societies. Peacekeeping not only prevents bloodshed, but decreases huge migrations of people, desperately fleeing for their lives.

Differences from the past also multiply today’s movements of people. The world’s growing population means more of us are affected by conflicts. In addition, climate change causes drought and less dependable weather patterns. Finally, social media spreads news of better places to live.

Successful immigration results from managing both the push and the pull factors. Most immigrants are not criminals or freeloaders any more than were the immigrating ancestors of many of us.

Developed nations have obligations to lessen the push factors that send boatloads and truckloads searching for a better life. Some of the factors leading desperate people to flee are the result of decisions made by those nations.

For centuries, developing nations were seen merely as sources of raw materials or military outposts with little regard for the country’s citizens. Since the 1800’s, the United States has often supported dictators guilty of gross human rights violations in Central America, for example.

For the sake of righting wrongs as well as for reasons of self-interest, developed nations would be wise to work on both the push and the pull factors fueling immigration.

That Distribution of Wealth Thing

Why should the wealthy give up money they have accumulated (though not necessarily worked for) only for the money to be enjoyed by those who didn’t earn it? The dreaded “S” word, socialism, haunts these discussions.

But what about our systems of public education? Aren’t free schools a distribution of wealth? We pay for them through taxes whether we have children or not, whether we send our children to them or, instead, pay for our children to receive a private education. Children of the poor may attend them as well as children of the more affluent.

We have decided that our communities and our nation as a whole will benefit from educated citizens.

Most of us believe roads and bridges and infrastructure should be maintained by our taxes. We believe this even though a poor person who pays little or no taxes (except perhaps sales taxes) can use the roads and sidewalks. We all benefit from cheaper goods facilitated by an efficient transportation system.

What about health care? Won’t the nation benefit from more productive citizens if they are in good health? To be sure, preventive care should be a major part of any health care system, not simply paying hospital bills. Obviously, some systems of health care are more efficient than others, as are systems of education, but the aim is a healthy population that will benefit the nation. Proper health care is an investment, like schools and roads.

The best investments yield gains in the long term. Some distribution of wealth is an investment.

New Order Passing

We live in a new jobs age. The factory based model (husband goes off to work in a factory, assured good wages and healthcare, while his wife stays home with the children) is fast passing. Manufacturing jobs still exist, but they tend to be more specialized, requiring more training. Machines perform more and more of the old labor intensive, repetitive work.

Office work also is changing. Back in the twentieth century, as office workers grew in number, they adapted to the old manufacturing model. Companies created worker bee hives in office towers. Wives and mothers stayed in newly created suburban enclaves.

Then women began returning to the more ancient model: contributing to economic activity as they had always done. As women joined the work force in increasing numbers, the job/home separation became harder to maintain. Long commutes, automobile expenses, and child care problems illustrated the shortcomings of job/home separation.

The pandemic allowed us to try new models, including “office” work done at home, often on a schedule not tied to set hours at a set time. Some loved the new arrangement; some hated it. Many probably would like a combination.

The new model is more like the ancient model. For most of recorded history, work was tied to the home. Everybody worked in one form or another. Neighborhoods offered more than mere lodging.

That is not to see this period as idealistic. It included abuse and class privilege. Those who were different sometimes were shunned and bullied.

Nevertheless, the extreme separation of work from home caused by the industrial revolution is an aberration. The pandemic has allowed us the beginning of newer, more adjustable models.

Democracy’s Fallout

What if, in the United States, the majority passes laws we don’t believe in? What if representative government skews opposite from some of our chosen ideals?

If we are on a losing side, we face temptations. We may try to work the system so that only our kind of voter can actually make it to the polls.

Or we may go to extreme lengths as happened on January 6 and storm the capitol building, perhaps with the intent of physically harming those with whom we disagree.

Instead, perhaps we should begin with the understanding that governments are created by imperfect human beings. Thus, they are going to be imperfect.

In the year 1776, men who believed they had a right to self-government risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to declare their colonies free and independent states.

Of course, these first callers for self-government were not only all men, but all white men. Some of them, calling for this freedom, owned fellow human beings.

The struggle that began in a hot summer in Philadelphia in the 18th century was, we have to understand, only a beginning with much imperfection. To assume that our founding documents and beginning actions were somehow blessed by Jesus like holy writ, borders on apostasy. The founders were sinful men who had some good beginning ideas.

Our history is sometimes glorious and sometimes hideous, like the inability to get rid of slavery, leading finally to a ridiculous war. (Interestingly enough, if we had remained in the British empire, we would have seen slavery abolished in that empire in 1833, presumably without the Civil War.)

The length of time it took to give all citizens voting rights is shameful, as are today’s attempts to curtail recent gains.

We have known some redemption. We led democracies after World War II to stand up to the atrocities of the Soviet Union without a major war. The Marshall Plan, bringing aid to exhausted allies as well as defeated enemies, showed us at our best—and led to strong alliances.

The point is to see our country, not as some god, but as a journey with all kinds of temptations and all kinds of possibilities. Not surprising that we imperfect humans sometimes pull in different directions.

Reacting responsibly to the pulling, as it sometimes goes the way we want and sometimes not, includes refusing violence, even when we’re on the losing side. Somehow, we have to listen. We have to sympathize, while stating our own beliefs clearly but without violence—over and over if necessary.

Our republic is imperfect. We have to live with that. If we cherish beliefs that others don’t, we keep on speaking them, while never giving way to violence. Our black sisters and brothers surely can teach us .

God’s On Our Side Right?

Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, in the Cold War years, I don’t recall racism ever being mentioned in my childhood, all-white, Southern Baptist church. Patriotism, however, often was mentioned.

During the church’s two-week Vacation Bible School, during the summer, we children began the day with pledges to the Christian Bible, the Christian flag, and the U.S. flag. We jockeyed to be the one bringing in the U.S. flag. Not so much the other symbols.

This is not to denigrate my church. The love shown me in that congregation, during my childhood and adolescence, is my most priceless possession after my family’s love. And by teaching me about Jesus, my church was laying the path I would follow toward eventually confronting my country’s racism.

I am disturbed, though, by the worship so many American Christians give to their earthly country.

You need to understand that I’ve lived in enough other countries and cultures, including the Middle East, to appreciate the United States. I am proud of good things we have brought to the world—sending aid to nations damaged by war, even to our enemies, for example.

However, I am disturbed by the tendency on the part of some Christians, it seems to me, to equate the United States with Jesus.

“God’s on our side,” someone said, in commenting on how God would choose their political group in the last election.

Really, the truth is that God has the “side.” We’re the ones who do the choosing.

What measures us is how well we choose God’s side, how well we carry out Jesus’ teaching.

Abortion Babies and Yemeni Babies

Some voters for Donald Trump in 2016 were “single value” voters. That is, they may not have liked Trump, but only one value was important to them in that election. Anti abortionists were one such group.

However, in voting for Trump because he would appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, they elected someone who devalued life in other ways.

Trump went against the will of the U.S. Congress in selling weapons used in the war between Saudi Arabia and the country of Yemen. Saudi Arabia and Yemen have been locked in a power struggle involving Iran for years. The war has resulted in horrific starvation for Yemeni civilians.

The horror led both houses of Congress, including Democrats and Republicans, to vote against selling American weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.

Trump claimed that the need for Saudis to have weapons for the war in Yemen was an emergency, though Congress plainly did not think so. Further, Trump said, American arms manufacturers needed the money. In declaring an emergency, Trump overrode the will of Congress.

Saudi Arabia used American weapons to bomb hospitals and marketplaces in Yemen and to cut off food supplies to that country. Yemen now is suffering mass starvation.

The question: Are babies killed in Yemen by American weapons less important than babies killed in abortion?

That is the problem with assuming one issue as the only one in a campaign. Moral issues are never simple. Believing one can be solved by one election can lead to horrific consequences.

Lost: A Good Name

Whatever meaning we gain from the Trump years, the rest of the world has lost a good bit of its faith in America.

Since World War II, the United States had been the country to reckon with. Dictators might rail against us, but they had to take into consideration our condemnation. Allies might curse our pride, but they depended on us.

Now, although our allies may welcome us “back” with the Biden administration, they are never going to trust us as they did before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. If we went off the rails once, it can happen again.

Indeed, I’m not sure we can trust ourselves. The fact that our system would allow the election of one so unsuited to the office of president is, to say the least, unsettling.

Something has gone seriously wrong when Joe Biden, who takes his Christian faith more seriously than any president in years, gained so little of the white evangelical vote.

That Donald Trump was actually followed into a coup attempt calls for a period of reflection and mourning.

Ritual Appreciation

Several years ago I discovered the Grantchester mystery series by James Runcie They follow a young British cleric in the years immediately after World War II.

The series delves more deeply into purpose and meaning than many “detective” type stories. We know from the beginning of the series that Sidney Chambers is a veteran of fighting in the war. The stories are more than mysteries. They highlight some purpose or higher meaning.

In the latest book, The Road to Grantchester, Runcie provides the background for Sidney’s decision to become an Anglican minister. As we might expect, Sydney suffered horrible wartime experiences fighting in Italy during the war. The first part of the book recounts those experiences, made more terrible by the minimalist reporting style.

The next part of the book recounts his spiritual journey as he chooses and trains for the ministry, a surprise to his not particularly religious family and friends.

One of the insights of the book is how rituals sometimes sustain us in hard times when we are simply hanging on. Great knowledge or insight escapes us. We mumble the 23rd Psalm or the prayer Jesus taught his disciples.

In those desperate times when we may doubt any purpose in the universe or in our lives, ritual can offer us a way to survive. We overcome feelings with a kind of faith that hangs on to time-refined wisdom, sustaining us as it has sustained generations before us.

The Subversive Dorothy Sayers

Years ago I became a fan of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories by Dorothy Sayers. That eventually led me into other writings by Sayers, including The Whimsical Christian, a book of her essays.

I read with interest a recent biography of Sayers by Crystal Downing: Subversive (Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers.)

Sayers, like many of us, groped her way from the Christianity taught her as a child, through rebellion (she bore a child out of wedlock) toward a thoughtful Christian faith.

She is indeed subversive. She speaks for a reasoned Christianity but not a relative Christianity. That is, she accepts Christianity as God’s unique revelation through his entry into the world in Jesus. Wise people may develop wise religions, but the Christian revelation is unique.

She pointed to the dangers of too much relativism in Britain’s experience with Nazi Germany during the 1930’s, Britain didn’t recognize Hitler’s evil for what it was because of a kind of relativism, she said. Hitler was touted by some as simply a national leader with different ideas.

Writing further in this passage about Sayers, Downing says, “German Christians caught up in religious fervor for the Fuehrer had supplanted ancient dogma about Christ’s sacrifice for the entire world with political dogmatism : a problem that has marred and scarred Christianity through the ages.”

Hard not to see a similarity in the views of some Christians that Donald Trump is God’s man for the hour. A belief in the use of political power for a Christ who disdained political power.

Evangelical Dissent

“This week we watched an insurrection of domestic terrorists, incited and fomented by the President of the United States.”

So spoke Russell Moore on January 11, after a mob broke into the U.S. capitol and sent member of Congress into hiding. In a soul-searching article on his website, Moore, a white evangelical Christian leader, denounced the attacks in no uncertain terms.

Polls and opinion pieces vary as to whether any significant change in 2020 occurred in the white evangelical support for Trump from 2016. However, the questioning of such support has increased. Christianity Today recently ran an interview on the subject of Christian nationalism. (“Christian Nationalism Is Worse Than You Think,” Morgan Lee, January 13, 2021)

Voting numbers for Americans without evangelical beliefs are almost the mirror opposite of their evangelical counterparts, with Biden holding a commanding 56 percent to 33 percent lead over Trump going into the election.

President Trump’s advantage among evangelicals, however, comes primarily from white evangelicals, among whom he led Biden 73 percent to 18 percent. African Americans with evangelical beliefs overwhelmingly planned to vote for Biden (69% to 19%).

(Numbers are from “Evangelical Vote Once Again Split on Ethnic Lines And far fewer plan to vote third-party in 2020, LifeWay finds,” Aaron Earls – Lifeway Research, September 29, 2020.)

Many evangelicals, it is said, are favorable to Trump for one reason: the abortion question, the sanctity of life. But how far does this sanctity of life go? Only to one group of people? What about babies killed with American bombs in Yemen because Trump said Americans needed money from arms sales to Saudi Arabia? What about American children who need health care which Trump would deny by abolishing affordable health care?

What about a Trump who relishes division over against a Biden who yearns for healing?

When any religious group attempts to force its beliefs, even admirable beliefs, by political power, that group almost always ends up being corrupted by that power and losing any moral authority.

Police Reform: Robert Peel’s “Bobbies”

London’s famous police officers, called “bobbies,” are named for Robert Peel, a British statesman who established the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. Apparently the idea of an urban police force, bypassing the military or a private force, was a new undertaking.

The three core ideas of Peel’s policies are:

“The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals. If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights. An effective police department doesn’t have high arrest stats; its community has low crime rates.

The key to preventing crime is earning public support. Every community member must share the responsibility of preventing crime, as if they were all volunteer members of the force. They will only accept this responsibility if the community supports and trusts the police.

The police earn public support by respecting community principles. Winning public approval requires hard work to build reputation: enforcing the laws impartially, hiring officers who represent and understand the community, and using force only as a last resort.”

These three core ideas of Peel’s policies found on the the website: https://lawenforcementactionpartnership.org/peel-policing-principles/

Notice the joining of police and community. Rather than abolishing police, we want to change it to a community supported force for good.

Reading JACK While Rioters Rampage

I happened to be reading Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Jack, as rioters attacked the U.S. capitol in Washington.

The man, Jack, is the wayward son of a loving family (white) headed by a Christian minister in Iowa. He has appeared briefly in other novels in Robinson’s award winning Gilead series, arriving, then leaving again.

Jack knows his sins, despises himself for them, but seems trapped. He is now further trapped as he and Della, a young colored woman, a teacher, fall in love. This is post World War II in St. Louis, Missouri, when romantic relationships between races are not only forbidden but despised.

I read this novel depicting racism, one of America’s greatest sins, even while a mob of white Americans, some waving Confederate flags, attacked the capitol. They are unable to accept the election of a certain president and vice-president. The president-elect is an older white man. The vice-president elect is a woman of color.

May God show mercy on us and help us find our way to repent of the hatred we have allowed to continually fester within us.

Never Mind Those Scenes from the Capitol . . .

The country managed to overcome the drift toward dictatorship this past election cycle, despite having only 18th century constitutional weapons.

We put up with an election cycle that takes two months to complete, based on how long it took early Americans to travel by horseback to seats of government.

A president who this time lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote—but still tried to stay in power—was prevented from doing so even by the antiquated system of the electoral college. Despite enormous pressure from the president, enough members of his own party followed their conscience and complied with the law.

We can forever relish those last hours following the attack on the capitol, after senators and representatives had spent tense hours fearing for their lives. They still returned to the task at hand and in the wee hours finished the one remaining task. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were pronounced the next president and vice-president.

Our leaders, it appears, amazingly, are still elected by law.

Now if we could only change those laws to reflect the country as it has become.

My Grandfather and the Night Riders

My grandfather was the sheriff of a rural Tennessee county in the early part of the twentieth century. During his time in office, a group called the “night riders” terrified local citizens with whom they disagreed, including minorities, attacking and beating them up at night.

They were probably associated with a strand of lawlessness active at the time in the western part of Tennessee. The new century brought changes some didn’t agree with.

I grew up on stories of my grandfather’s attempts to bring to justice those locals responsible for the attacks. My father remembered a time as a young child, waking up and hearing the night riders coming through town, shooting as they went. He remembered his father standing with a pistol, lighted by the lamp just before his father extinguished it.

At least some of the night riders were apprehended and jailed, with help from the Tennessee National Guard, whom my grandfather called in. Some of the local citizens resented his efforts to bring justice and order.

Today’s threats from vigilante groups remind me of those stories my father told. Such groups appear when some feel threatened by changing times. Some resent the calling out of old prejudices, people already uneasy with a world they didn’t create.

Measures instituted to prevent the disease Covid-19 are seen as some kind of attempt against personal liberty, rather than simply ways to save us from suffering and death. Rumors spread, this time with the speed of the internet.

Those of us interested in a safer and saner society can remain patient, even as we act in smaller ways to be kind and compassionate.

Losing Elections in America

The United States has held presidential elections every four years since 1792, frequently switching the winning party. If your candidate loses in an election, you can reasonably assume you will have another chance to vote on a change in four years.

The hope of change “next time,” happening again and again for over two centuries means we settle down and accept whoever is elected, our choice or not.

Except this year the candidate keeps trying to overturn the election results. Despite the most openly scrutinized election in U.S. history, the loser keeps trying to overturn what the vote decided and what the courts upheld.

The U.S. presidential election has worked year in and year out, in depression and prosperity, in war and peace, not because it’s a perfect system but because it overcomes the human tendency to keep power once gained.

Monarchy passes to the royal heir for the rest of the heir’s life span, whether they are qualified or not or whether most of the citizens desire it or not.

Dictators grab power through guns or violence no matter if their citizens favor them or not. They hold power as long as they own enough weapons or means of intimidation.

Representative rule, regularly accountable, means we have hope. It is risky in the sense that it depends on the losers to accept their loss.

To be wedded to a fallible human, whether Donald Trump or another, rather than the rule of law, sets a dangerous precedent.

Trump Vote: Thumb in Your Eye

Trump has enthusiastic support among some Americans. They wear MAGA hats and cheer wildly at his rallies. They make up the true believers decrying a “fraudulent” election.

Why go against all evidence and support a man who has stolen from his own charities, failed in business, constantly lies, loves to insult and belittle, and shows concern only for himself?

I think many of Trump’s supporters cheer him because the country’s more favored citizens have abandoned them. Trump appears to accept them.

Many Americans lost out when our traditional manufacturing culture shifted to a more tech oriented society. Some also are suffering whiplash from a changed society in which more young Americans leave organized religion.

These, the disdained, find their champion in one who sneers at the rules and thumbs his nose at the politically correct. He rails against liberal media who appear to his followers as opposed to their beliefs and way of life.

In her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild writes of Republican voters who dislike the party’s favoritism of big business. Nevertheless, they vote Republican because they believe this party favors God and family.

Trump, the personification of the spoiled rich grifter, provided rallies for those pushed out of the mainstream to vent against the America they believe has turned its back on them. They equated his behavior as opposition to the system that failed them.

Trump was a disaster and was voted out of office. Those who decry false accusations of a “stolen” election must accept one of the most certain election results in U.S. history

The winners, however, cannot ignore those who put Trump in office in 2016, many of whom voted for him a second time. Come January, we may experience a very divided government: president of one party, congressional power split, Supreme Court with a majority appointed by the other party.

If the government is going to function with such divisions, we must begin by respecting those who differ from us. That is to say, greatly differ: over everything from gender rights to police power.

The only way we will survive the possibility of stalled governing when we face such great divisions is by accepting that each side will win sometimes and lose other times—even lose on issues dear to them.

We must lose in good grace, then work to change the situation through persuasion and the next election.

In addition, worker training, fairer wages, basic healthcare, and a host of other issues must be
addressed soon.

To Community

Community has no official verb form. Someone I know said we should invent the verb form “to community.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us many things, but one stands out: the need “to community.”

Families and singles are locked down, connecting by Zoom and Facebook. Schools are closed as are gathering places: restaurants, bars, and churches.

Families suffering grief over the death of loved ones must postpone funerals and memorial services.

We can’t interact with our hair stylists or barbers. We dash in for pickup of food, not stopping to chat with staff.

We are born to community, to be part of a group: our family, relatives, and friends. Yet, in the age past, we put community behind things—making as much money as possible, buying as many gadgets as possible, putting tax breaks ahead of community services like health care.

We pay minimum wages to care givers who work with our elderly, as the virus spreads, and to the janitors, so important in a new age of cleanliness.

Have we learned to change our ways? After this pandemic passes into history, as please God it will, what changes will we make?

What will we do, for example, to strengthen that first community, the family? Healthcare, decent housing, education, and time to spend on nurturing?

Have we learned anything?

Advent by Zoom

A long time ago, last Easter, in fact, we could watch the Easter service streamed live from Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Indeed, many of our Easter services last spring came to us via our screens.

Places of worship were reacting to the spread of a new sickness, Covid-19. Many closed their physical spaces of worship, as other gathering places did, to prevent contagion.

Back then, this new disturbance seemed more innocent, softened by kindness. Surely, the virus would go away as other viruses had, without causing widespread harm.

But it didn’t. Simple acts to protect oneself and others, like mask wearing, became political statements. Public health took a back seat to a presidential campaign.

And so the virus spread, far more than it should have. And now many Christians are celebrating Advent by Zoom.

Our church has advanced from listening to Sunday services via a link taped earlier by a few, socially distanced individuals to an improved group experience with newer software.

Not the real thing, no, when we held our first Zoom worship, but we could talk and respond in real time. No matter that we still hadn’t worked out all the bugs of congregational response.

It was for some of us a weepy moment.

I can’t imagine what it might be when, God willing, we are again able to meet in person.

Divine Nationalism

In his book The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe coins the term “divine nationalism.” This is his name for the political battles waged by many evangelicals for Donald Trump.

He discusses one of their names for Trump: a “divine vessel.” Howe says they are “claiming a divine approval for him that he’d never claimed for himself.”

Howe talks of an unsettling aura in the white evangelical embrace of Trump. “Trump evangelicals have taken this earthly object of their adoration and quantum-locked him to God’s will.”

Trump is freed even from “the burden of accountability.” Indeed, Howe says, Trump has become an idol to his evangelical followers. The same evangelicals who denounced Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern are perfectly okay with Trump’s affairs.

Perhaps this seeming moral relativism is one reason the number of evangelicals appears to be declining while the religiously nonaligned are increasing.