Here at the start of a new year, and pondering the year ahead, I am thinking again of hope. Or the lack of it for many of us.
For example, I'm really not looking forward to this being an election year. The anxiety, anger, freakouts, and despair are going to be through the roof. We are all about to come collectively unglued. Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be a train wreck.
It seems like democracy itself is on the brink. On the right, there is growing outrage at Trump being preemptively disqualified from running for office. On the left, should a Trump victory look likely, there is fear about his pledge to become "dictator on day one." As Trump promised his followers, "I am your retribution."
Are we bearing witness to the unraveling of the American experiment? I don't want to be alarmist, but sometimes it seems so. My personal theory is that social media will eventually kill liberal democracy. As we know, the algorithms of social media funnel us into echo chambers of outrage. This funneling affects perceptions of reality. Given that the algorithms cause us to chase our anger, we come to increasingly feel that politics is a zerosum war between good and evil rather than a pragmatic process of compromise as we balance competing goods. Politics is now about defeating the forces of darkness. Human psychology and the algorithms of social media are locked in a spiraling feedback loop. The moral pressure created by this escalation, I fear, will eventually crack our democracy as a will to power will come to predominate, an ends justifying the means, win at any cost, approach. Social media and human fear will mix to create the perception that democratic norms and procedures cannot be counted on to defeat evil, so democracy will have to be suspended in order to eliminate these moral threats. Our tolerances for this will to power will slowly increase. Eventually, a tipping point will be reached.
My youngest son is a graduate student in history, studying Germany in the modern period. He and I talk a lot about the rise of Hitler. And one of the scary things we discuss is how that very enlightened culture succumbed to the darkness. A culture that produced Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Goethe and Einstein didn't have the intellectual and aesthetic resources to prevent the rise of Nazism. And given the current intellectual and aesthetic state of American culture, do we really think we have it within ourselves to prevent our own looming disaster?
And yet, as a student of history, I also know each generation succumbs to narcissism, believing "things have never been worse" than they are today. I remember talking a very liberal friend off the ledge of her panic after the election of Donald Trump. In her estimation, the crisis of Donald Trump was the greatest crisis in all of American history. To help her gain some perspective I reminded her of chattel slavery, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War. My friend had two college-age sons at the time, as did I, so I shared with her, "I know Donald Trump is bad, but I'd rather be living now, with President Donald Trump, than with our dead children coming home in flag-draped boxes from the Vietnam War." Sometimes it's good to step back to get a little historical perspective. Times have been worse.
Here's my gloomy question in sharing all this: Who knows where any of this is going? Maybe we are in the final days of a dying and decadent empire. It's happened before! I don't see why we should be particularly spared the vicissitudes of history. Being "America" doesn't make us bulletproof. The world goes sideways. It will again.
Having shared all that, here's my news: I'm not alarmed or concerned. To be sure, my heart breaks for the suffering of the world and I feel called to act in ethically responsible ways. Whatever power or agency I possess I will make those available to others within my sphere of influence. But my loving and righteous actions in the world will not motivated by panic or despair. Eschatologically speaking, I care very little about the fate of America. Which is why I've never understood Christian nationalism, its theological illiteracy, the panic and anger that exposes its spiritual immaturity, and its deep and abiding paganism and idolatry. No matter who wins or loses the coming election my deep reservoir of peace will not change. I have no real expectation that America should be anything other than a dumpster fire. All nations are. History is, as Tolkien said, a long defeat.
And here's the wonderful thing: Christians know how to live through dumpster fires! The church has done this over and over again, as nation after nation has come unwound. We're experts in this work. Just read the book of Revelation. Not as a conspiracy theorist using it as a magical scrying glass to detect "signs of the end times," but as the apocalyptic vision that breathed peace, courage, and hope into seven churches living in the midst of imperial dumpster fire that was Nero's Rome.
So here is my New Year's resolution, for all of us: "Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save" (Ps. 143:3). Act with compassion and integrity, but do not put your hope in the outcome of 2024 election. Do not put your hope in "making America great again." Do not put your hope in defeating the Orange Dictator.
Resolve, rather, to put your hope in the Lord.
