In one week, we will know whether or not the most massively funded mid-term election cycle in American history will result in a shift of power. Given Trump’s track record regarding the acceptance of election results, any ballot count that produces a Democratic majority could face Republican legal challenges and, quite possibly, attempts at direct intervention. After all, Trump was indicted on charges related to his efforts to overthrow the result of the 2020 election. His repetitive plea in his rallies for his supporters to vote as if his name is on the ballot “or the Democrats are going to impeach me,” suggests that he sees a Democratic majority as a serious threat to his presidency.
I haven’t written a blog for several months. Friends have asked whether I decided to quit writing about politics because the feedback got too intense. The answer is no, not really. I wrote a new blog several times in the past year, but each time, after formulating what I considered to be a careful response to current events, the events quickly became old news. One week it was the destruction of the East Wing; the next, it was the renaming of the Kennedy Center, or picking a fight with Denmark over Greenland, then a fight with Canada, then a full scale war with Iran. It felt like a game of whack-a-mole.
In the past two weeks we have watched in real time as America’s commitment to the NATO alliance and to the supremacy of democratic ideals dissolves before our very eyes. Trump’s announcement last week that soon there is to be a summit between Russia, China, and the USA to determine how the war in Ukraine shall be resolved demonstrates that Trump is offering unprecedented recognition to Russia. By acknowledging their status as a world power, it appears that Trump considers Russia to be more deserving of respect than any of our traditional democratic allies. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic observed, “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.”
Last Friday, Trump revealed his apparent favor toward Putin with particular brazenness. Two days before the Lindsey Graham sanctions bill against Russia was to go into effect, he waived the sanctions and opened the door for Russia to sell diesel fuel to the U.S. and other world markets. The proposed sale of 2.5 million barrels of diesel sounds like a large number, but actually only amounts to less than what the U.S. consumes in one day. That small amount is unlikely to impact diesel prices in America, but it does significantly change the calculus in Russia’s efforts to reestablish the Soviet era world order. Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, was unsparing in his criticism. In an interview with Sky News, he asserted: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive: as a President of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities.” He went on to state that Trump “has not only betrayed Ukraine in the middle of a war fighting for its very existence, but he is also directly, not indirectly, directly responsible for the deaths of many Ukrainians who will not now be protected” through the intelligence sharing with the U.S. that Trump is declining to offer.
Tom Nichols in The Atlantic observed with profound sadness, “In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.” That statement is among the most disturbing conclusions I have seen in print, yet I search in vain for the uproar from my MAGA friends and colleagues. It is as if the Republican Party has been lulled to sleep. Our allies in Europe readily identify Trump’s behavior as an outrageous breach of trust. But the enormity of his betrayal appears to be lost on many fellow citizens.
I recognize that my tone may be perceived as combative, but I sincerely hope that you will hear me out. I truly desire nuanced dialogue with my MAGA-supporting brothers and sisters. I write as a pastor who, although I no longer speak from a pulpit every week, still feels called to exegete both the scriptures and the contemporary culture. I still consider myself to be a Republican, but I am deeply troubled by how the Republican leadership has carried itself. A mild-mannered response does not correlate to the degree of danger.
How is it that MAGA citizens approve of a president who pardoned 1500 felons from the January 6th attack on the capitol, but then directed the justice department to prosecute his perceived political enemies who told the truth about his actions on that day? How is it that our president can openly side with Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union that Ronald Reagan famously called an “evil empire,” against the Ukraine, a European nation whose sovereignty and security the United States has formally pledged to respect and support? And where are the voices of alarm from my fellow believers?
Upon reflection, I have been reminded of an essay by Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled “Von der Dummheit” (On Stupidity). He wrote it while confined in Tegel military prison. His circumstances were certainly different than ours, but his analysis of the assault on independent moral judgment feels eerily familiar. Bonhoeffer was faced with a Nazi regime that, in order to carry out its agenda, needed large numbers of the populace to look the other way—to willfully choose ignorance. How could well-educated, philosophically astute, and morally conscious people allow Hitler to seize the levers of power? He came to the conclusion that stupidity is not primarily an intellectual shortfall, but a moral one.
His opening paragraph reads like it was shot from a cannon: “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force….Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
Why is stupidity so perilous? Because in the face of compelling evidence, “reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed.” In fact, convinced of their own wisdom, a stupid person “becomes utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.” Bonhoeffer further observes that even when the facts are irrefutable, “they are just pushed aside as incidental.” For example, the fact that Trump refused to call off the attack on the Capitol for several hours becomes, in the MAGA retelling, something incidental—just a big deal about nothing. The mob itself was merely a group of mostly peaceful patriots who were taking in the austere beauty of the capitol building. So Trump’s delay was not criminal—it was inconsequential.
About this time, I can almost hear the alarm bells going off in some of my readers. “Physician, heal thyself!” And they are right. In order to combat stupidity, each of us must admit our own propensity toward it. Stupidity is familiar territory for both the right and the left. “This much is certain,” Bonhoeffer contends, “that [stupidity] is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one.” In other words, stupidity is a moral deficiency rather than an intellectual one.
Bonhoeffer’s “stupidity” is not the same thing as being unintelligent. Stupidity the way Bonhoeffer understands it is more troubling—it is what happens when our allegiance to a group makes us incapable of recognizing facts that threaten the group consensus and thus threaten our belonging. This is a critical distinction. Stupidity happens to groups—every one of us is susceptible. Our moral pitfall is that we allow the groups to which we belong to dictate what truths we hear, but also what truths we reject. Bonhoeffer expresses it this way:
“The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.”
This is fascinating. People who are loners are less susceptible to the moral defect of stupidity. It is a sociological problem. Jonathan Haidt famously observes that the groups to which we belong “both bind us and blind us.” They bind us in relationship to one another—they define our loyalties. But they also limit that which we are willing to see.
It is instructive to recall that immediately following the January 6th attack on the capitol, after the Senate was reconvened, Lindsey Graham gave a moving speech in which he adamantly condemned the actions of the insurrectionists and of Trump. “Enough is enough,” he said. “I’ve tried to be helpful. … But count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve had it.” Yet within 48 hours, Graham met personally with Trump and then travelled with him to Texas the following week. He began urging fellow Republican Senators not to convict Trump in the coming impeachment trial, arguing “there is no way we can achieve our goals without Trump.”
What changed? Certainly not the facts of the attack on the Capitol. What changed was the social environment in which those facts were interpreted. Not what happened, but howGraham saw what happened. In the span of six weeks he went from “I’ve had it!” to “There is no way we can achieve our goals without Trump.” Bonhoeffer would not have been surprised. “People are made stupid, or they allow this to happen to them.” Graham apparently determined that loyalty to the group was more important than loyalty to his principles.
The irony is that the policy on Russia Graham had long championed was ultimately undermined by Trump himself. Graham had been a determined supporter of Ukraine and an advocate of sanctions against Russia. The legislation was enacted after Graham’s death, and Trump signed it into law. Yet two days before the sanctions were to take effect, Trump waived them. The cause Graham had championed so vigorously was suspended by the very individual of whom he had said, “we cannot achieve our goals without [him].”
In closing, allow me to reemphasize one of Bonhoeffer’s core convictions: stupidity is a human problem. The human propensity to sacrifice one’s faculty of discernment in favor of group loyalty is not unique to any particular political party. Current research demonstrates that people’s sense of identity is more closely tied to their political affiliation than ever before in our nation. And the stronger our group loyalty, the more likely we are to ignore truths that don’t fit the party line. Our group identity both binds us and blinds us.
Please know that I earnestly seek to “first take the plank out of my own eye, [so that] I will see clearly to remove the speck from my brother’s eye.” By its very nature, that act of writing a blog opens oneself up to criticism. I read any and all critique earnestly. I refuse to see my critics as my enemies. I remind myself that the gut-level discontent I sense when I listen to Fox News is probably very similar to the feelings my critics have when they listen to MSNOW. Ultimately, however, the issue is not our relative comfort levels with various news broadcasts. Bonhoeffer compels us to recognize that unless we are willing to challenge our own political community when that community acts contrary to our professed convictions, our faith is of little value.
We need to hone our ability to hold onto our time-tested convictions while at the same time, being willing to test our conclusions against evidence. That includes evidence that may be presented by someone who holds an opposing view. In our day, however, arguments are often presented with such vehemence that valuable context is lost. This is true both of the left and the right. Much of the criticism that is levied by one party against the other not only lacks discernment, it is disingenuous
For example, during the Senate Judiciary hearing of Jack Smith last month, Senator Ted Cruz hammered Smith on the fact that he had subpoenaed the January telephone toll records of several Republican senators but not of any Democrats. He implied that this was an exceptional breach of prosecutorial power. In reality, however, the investigative rationale for examining toll records is well established. Cruz is himself a lawyer. It appears that he deliberately left out valuable context in order to call Jack Smith’s integrity into question. On the other hand, Cruz avoided any reference to the fact that the President of the United States deliberately sought to suppress the will of the people in a presidential election that he had lost. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, Cruz strained out a gnat but swallowed a camel (Matthew 23:24).
The Democratic Party is not immune to similar hypocrisy. The initiative on this fall’s ballot regarding fairness in school sports is a classic example. The left has based most of their argument against the measure on the assertion that it would force female participants in sports to undergo invasive and uncomfortable medical procedures in order to prove that they are biologically female. The opponents’ statement in the Voters’ Pamphlet makes no mention of the core issue: Is it fair that biological males compete against girls in women’s sporting events? Instead, they have chosen to emphasize the narrative that young girls will be poked and prodded by a stranger. That implication, however, does not square with the language of the initiative itself. It states that the student’s personal health care provider shall verify “the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following; The student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” As was the case with Ted Cruz, opponents of the measure appear to intentionally leave out important context in order to bolster their argument.
The reality that both sides bend the truth in order to sway their audience should not serve as an excuse to simply accept the status quo. Our cultural moment calls for people like the men of Issachar, “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” Bonhoeffer warned of the danger of stupidity, not because he thought it was inevitable, but because he believed that discernment was possible. But discernment requires that we recognize our human inclination to avoid information that does not fit the preferred narrative of our particular group. That does not mean pretending that every claim is equally valid or every failure equally serious. It means refusing to let our political loyalties determine in advance what we are willing to see
My hope is that all of us will more fully recognize, as Bonhoeffer did, that our group identity can often make us stupid—it blinds us to truths that are uncomfortable. In our current political landscape there are many uncomfortable truths.
As followers of Jesus, however, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. He is a discerning Spirit, who gives gifts of discernment. He helps us to see beyond the narrative our particular tribe finds comfortable—he helps us see the world as God sees it. May God grant eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts with the courage to follow the pathway of principle over preference, even when that pathway is costly.
