No Despair, Only Grief. No Apathy, Only Rebellion

Some brief reflections on the 2024 election and what it means for theology

The greatest country in the world, unmatched in its military power, its economic impact, and its imperial sphere of influence, has elected an open white supremacist, an anti-immigrant nativist, a white-collar felon, a fascist and underminer of democratic institutions and an independent judiciary, a vicious anti-worker corporate boss, and a master of lies, deceit, deception and white rage, to its highest office, even after being warned of what such an election could, and now will, entail.

Sitting with this reality has been a hard pill for many Americans to swallow. We are far too enamored with the myth of America that we often don’t know how to separate myth from reality, brutal truth from comforting lies, and inconvenient good for a convenient and accommodating evil. America, after over a decade of increased police violence against Black bodies, an increase in nativist and xenophobic ideologies in public opinion, the collapse of liberalism and the rise of fascism manifested in Trump and the GOP (and only briefly interrupted by a milquetoast, center-left Democratic victory in 2020), is still shocked to learn that yet again, it has chosen this man to lead it.

While some of our greatest minds, such as the late great Toni Morrison, encouraged us to “never lose our shock”, less we become numb and apathetic to wickedness, the collective American shock that we’ve witnessed in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first and second elections are in it of itself an appeasement of wickedness. It is our nation holding up its hands, soaking in blood and covered in flesh, as a knife and a lifeless corpse lay in front of it, gasping and saying “What have we done?”. It is the refusal of a country, engulfed and addicted to its own multitude of self-inflicted crises, refusing to believe itself capable of committing bigger and more “true-to-form” atrocities. It is an unrepentant country refusing to acknowledge that it was ever sinful in the first place. And yet, it is a country in which 6 in 10 of its people claim to be Christian, a religion whose Scriptures tell us that “Pride cometh before the fall”.

I am hardly interested in the plethora of think-pieces that overpaid journalists and pundits will write about what exactly “caused” Trump’s victory. All of their analysis is speculative with hints of evidence at best, and cunning and dishonest self-preservation of bias at worst. It’s a meaningless ritual for some people for what will be a horrifying and gut-wrenching reality for other, more vulnerable people.

They will ask us to condemn identity politics, and pretend that race/racism is irrelevant to, or the entirety of, this election. They will tell us that the Democratic Party must move to the right, becoming indistinguishable from a center-right version of the Republican Party, and completely abandoning any policies that challenge the class interests of the Democratic donor and consultant class. They will tell us that we must abandon higher education, that working class people and white men are two sides of the same coin, that policies that seek the protection of undocumented people and trans kids are electoral poisons. In other words, they will appeal to our worst instincts, our greed, our selfishness, and our anger, in order to profit off our fears for self-congratulatory articles in the New York Times and paid appearances on cable news.

I am equally uninterested in the theological masturbations of centrist pastors who will tell us that “God is still on the throne” and that the mission of oppressed people now is to “try and understand” why so many of our siblings voted to oppress us even more. These theologians are as empty as their theology; as shallow as an empty bowl of holy water. They have nothing to offer other than pious fixations and soliloquies of air and dust. They are useless, and largely protected from the severe socio-economic and political horrors that will befall so many. Their words and statements mean nothing, and their refusal to opt for silence in this moment is an indictment of the god of self-religiosity that they worship.

Needless to say, I haven’t the slightest interest in any of those things.

What does interest me, however, not as a voyeuristic consumer of politics but as a Christian, a lay theologian, and a human being, is what this election and its aftermath reveal about the state of our souls, and what it tells us about what God is up to in the world. How can we make sense of Divine activity in the wake of appalling human activity?

This is not a novel question; indeed it is one of the central questions of theology itself. However, I’m convinced it may need collaborative answers, one that takes on the various theological contributions of giants such as Cone, Gutierrez, Sölle, Barth, Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer, and Williams, as well as writers and authors like the aforementioned Morrison, Baldwin, Wright, DuBois, and Butler.

These contributors, and many more like them, asked us to consider God’s activity in a world of crises, how human beings developed the physical and emotional tools to repress themselves and oppress their neighbors, and what Jesus of Nazareth had to do with it, if He had anything to do at all. They asked us to consider what grace and redemption meant in a carceral world full of prisons, what love and compassion looked like in a world full of erratic hatred and cruelty, and what justice and peace looked like in a world full of weapons and war.

They had many different answers, many different methodologies for reaching those answers, and many different questions to answer in the first place. But though it is not helpful or accurate to lump them all in one box, these prophetic voices, though departed from us, have a lot to teach us when put in dialogue with one another and with the world in which none of them lived to see; the world in which we live now, in November of 2024. We can take comfort in the fact that they all went through one form or another of crises, to varying degrees of social privilege and marginalization, and receive their blessings in doing the work that we have been called to do in this time of great crises and strife.

And yet still, we must remember that theology work is not only done by great names with high contributions, but by the people whom God prioritizes; the people in pews without college degrees, or suburban homes, or disposable income, or the peace of mind that comes with knowing where one’s next meal is coming from, and what one’s place in this country is.

Theologians have much to do, much labor in the harvest of the Gospel, and many mustard seeds to plant to create the world that we want to see. And yet, now we are tired, and must rest, knowing that we have two obligations in this moment; to bless the mourners and mourn with them and to resist apathy and despair, and embrace grief and rebellion, as we carry our crosses.