Prophets in the Age of Trump
American democracy finds itself today in dire need of the restorative power of prophetic indictment. As the first (and, one can only pray, final) term of the destructive Trump presidency winds down, American public discourse is a veritable cacophony of incivility and demonization. We are witnessing firsthand the predictable coarsening and cheapening of what should otherwise be elevated discourse and deliberation in the public square. Truth be told, the fault lies well beyond Trump who is as much a symptom as he is a cause of a profound crisis of the values and practices that are supposed to animate robust and durable participatory democracies. As former Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput’s put it on the eve of the 2016 election, Americans have the good sense to know that “things aren’t right.”
What is needed today is what theologian and legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny calls the “rhetoric of prophetic indictment.” In her book Prophecy without Contempt, devoted to the question of religious discourse in American public life, she reminds readers of the longstanding tradition in American life of “prophetic denunciations” by religious leaders inspired by the model of the Hebrew prophets; those lone voices in the wilderness who boldly called out the failings of God’s people while offering a path to redemption and salvation. America’s history has been decisively shaped by prophetic rhetoric grounded in a religious tradition, from the time of the Puritan settlers to Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights era. As Kaveny explains, there is a clear moral and political purpose to prophetic rhetoric: it helps to restore and sustain a robust, functional democratic politics animated by informed moral reasoning and decision-making in public affairs.
Inviting people to “speak plainly and honestly” about the problems facing the Church and American politics today, Chaput singled out one problem: what he sees as the “hollowing out and retooling” of the most important words of our politics; words like democracy, freedom, representative government, justice. What do these words really mean anymore? The words of public life may sound the same. But their effective meaning appears to be shifting and changing constantly. Chaput assigned part of the blame squarely at the feet of Trump and Clinton, lamenting the “repellant nature” of both presidential candidates. He criticized Trump’s “ugly style” and Clinton’s elitism and sense of entitlement. Chaput conceded that Trump was a “belligerent demagogue with an impulse-control problem” and denounced Hillary Clinton as a “criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and priorities.” Belligerent demagogue or criminal liar: pick your poison. Little wonder that the influential Archbishop thought them both “a national embarrassment.”
If the deterioration of political discourse is one of the main things wrong with public discourse in American today, then what role should religious leaders play, as they have at decisive moments in the past, to help make things right? It is a question worth asking especially of America’s Catholic bishops who, individually and collectively, represent singularly authoritative religious voices in the public square. Is it reasonable to expect them, in the face of a clear decline in the moral tone of political discourse, to engage in a sustained rhetoric of prophetic indictment?
The short answer is, yes.
Sadly, the bishops have tended to be far more diplomatic and political than prophetic in the Age of Trump. With rare exception, they have failed to speak plainly and honestly about the degree to which Trump is harming American democracy by violating the most basic norms of moral discourse in public life. Most troubling of all, the bishops have missed repeated opportunities to use prophetic indictment to call out Trump on the most harmful aspects of his indecorous and corrosive language and behavior. The pattern is depressingly familiar: the sexually predatory and misogynistic language, the scapegoating of the country’s vilified Muslim minority, the ceaseless attacks on the essential institutions of American democracy including a free press. These days the President defends the paraphernalia of white supremacy, vilifies a mythical Radical Left, denies the reality of systemic racism and police violence, and belittles trusted medical experts and devoted public servants working desperately to save human life in a time of global pandemic.
No matter what this President has said and done, whether as a candidate or since his inauguration, the country’s Catholic bishops have, for the most part, chosen diplomacy and accommodation instead of prophetic indictment to denounce Trump’s hateful language and divisive politics. Consider, for instance, their muted response after the notorious Access Hollywood tapes were released, in which the future Commander-in-Chief was heard boasting of sexually predatory behavior. Then-president of the powerful United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, said simply, “Too much of our current political discourse has demeaned women and marginalized people of faith.”
Hardly the stuff of prophetic indictment.
In recent months and weeks, the powerful and telegenic Cardinal Dolan of New York has studiously avoided anything resembling prophetic indictment despite Trump’s overtly racist dog-whistles. To the contrary, in a now-infamous interview back in May, Dolan, speaking on Fox and Friends, singled out the President for praise, lauding Trump for his understanding of and support for America’s faith communities.
It is true that a few weeks later, in an open letter to the people of the Archdiocese of New York, the Cardinal did reserve a few solemn words to acknowledge what he called the “tragic death” of George Floyd and the righteousness of the “rallying cry of ‘Black Lives Matter’.”
But not a word, not even a hint of criticism for the most powerful man in America, who daily uses the bully pulpit of the American presidency to mobilize racial animus for electoral gain.
To be sure, some bishops, and even Cardinal Dolan himself, have criticized openly and strong certain Administration policies. Many bishops have spoken prophetically about the Trump administrations policies on immigration, border security, climate change, and health care. It is the studied silence on the President’s character, temperament and tone that has been so deafening. We know that Trump has successfully amassed deep reserves of political capital with too many Catholics. Trump has made one of his infamous deals with America’s religious leaders and many people in the pew. This one, a Faustian deal: they will forgive or indulge or ignore Trump’s behavior and his hateful language in exchange for the application of his presidential power in defense of the core policy issues that these Catholics deem paramount.
Terms of the deal were set during the 2016 campaign. In a rare moment of shrewd strategic insight, Trump’s team made a concerted effort starting in late summer 2016 to court conservative Catholic voters with a direct promise to deliver on all the galvanizing issues for so-called ‘values voters’ – abortion, religious liberty – which translated into concrete campaign promises to defund Planned Parenthood, for instance, and repeal Obamacare with, among other things, its controversial contraception mandate.
The tour de force in this mission to proselytize Catholics for Trump was the vaunted promise – offered in the form of a widely-publicized list of names, no less – to deliver to the Supreme Court a respected jurist cut from the same cloth as the late Antonin Scalia; not a Catholic judge per se but a constitutional originalist who reliably could be counted upon to temper what many Catholics and Evangelicals have long-decried as a culturally liberal, activist judiciary. Promise made; promise kept. With the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime tenure on the highest court in the land, Trump, notorious for failing to pay his financial debts, paid what was arguably his greatest political debt to socially conservative Christians who handed him the White House. For good reason did Vice-President Pence declare in early June 2017 to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast that American Catholics have a strong “ally” in Donald Trump.
In this present moment, American’s Catholic leaders, the bishops especially, must embrace fully the tradition of prophetic indictment in a robust defense of the moral discourse in politics. This should not be misconstrued as a call for partisan politics. Nor should it be taken as some modern-day inquisition designed to police the moral behavior of the most powerful man on earth. No one expects the President, or any elected official for that matter, to govern as if he were a saint. Catholic leaders need to demand that those who hold public office, especially those who claim to be professing Christians, act and speak in ways that sustain and enrich values and practices commensurate with human dignity and the common good.
A popular axiom has it that history is the great teacher of life. Many chapters in the long and travailed history of the Catholic Church teach us that religious leaders will lose all moral credibility if they dilute the prophetic dimensions of their office for the sake of pyrrhic victories in the policy realm.