Belonging to a community, feeling at home in the liturgy, carrying on a long family tradition — all these intangibles made it easy enough, before the election, to ignore much of what the church gets wrong
and concentrate on what it gets right: supporting open immigration, welcoming refugees, opposing capital punishment, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick and the aged and the lonely.
And consider what happens here whenever there’s a flood or a tornado: Long before the government agencies mobilize, local churches are taking up donations, cooking
hot meals, helping people pick through the wreckage — helping everyone, no matter their religion or the color of their skin or the language they speak at home.
In working together, I hope we’ll end up with something
that looks a lot like a Christian nation — not in doctrine but in practice, caring for the least among us and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
By any conceivable definition, the sitting president of the United States is the utter antithesis of Christian values — a misogynist who disdains refugees, persecutes immigrants, condones torture
and is energetically working to dismantle the safety net that protects our most vulnerable neighbors.
My people are among the least prepared to survive a Trump presidency,
but the “Christian” president they elected is about to demonstrate exactly what betrayal really looks like — and for a lot more than 30 pieces of silver.
Every day brings word of a new Trump-inflicted human-rights calamity, and every day a resistance is growing
that I would not have imagined possible, a coalition of people on the left and the right who have never before seen themselves as allies.
