The Christian Dissonance

I’ve known for a long time how Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric can affect people. One of the first incidences of the impact of his speech was when, at the beginning of his last successful presidential campaign, two men beat a homeless Mexican man they thought was an immigrant with a metal pole and pissed on him in Boston. The men told police, “Donald Trump was right: All these illegals need to be deported.”

Perhaps this reality has never been more manifestly obvious, though, at such scale, than it is now in Springfield, OH. Donald Trump and his vitriolic surrogate, J.D. Vance, keep repeating false claims about immigrants in the city.¹ This has had a profoundly negative impact there, with violent threats closing schools, forcing a hospital to go on lockdown and local colleges to go to remote learning. These events prompted Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine to write an opinion piece for the New York Times (gift article) about the problems the presidential campaign rhetoric has caused. The two men at the head of the Republican ticket show no remorse for the outcome of their spread of vicious lies.

All this is deeply troublesome, but to me perhaps no more so than because a shockingly high percentage of people who consider themselves to be Christians support this sort of thing, despite the very direct admonitions from Christian scripture and church teaching against it. There is no need to go to the Greek, or the Hebrew, or consult the desert fathers, or do some sort of critical exegesis here. The is no interpretive challenge. The teachings of the Mosaic Law are clear about bearing false witness against your neighbor. The teachings of Jesus are clear about who is your neighbor.

We laughed when Lauren Boebert proclaimed Donald Trump has undergone “testing for his cognitive dissonance…” Humor aside, Christianity Today’s Russell Moore has this to say about that dissonance:

To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their lives, who are seeking to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).

J.D. Vance famously said, “I think our people hate the right people.” Everyone thinks they hate the right people. That’s the nature of hate, isn’t it? The teachings of Christ call us to a different way. If he calls us to love even our enemies, how much more so to people that have done us no harm and may need our help?

1. Claims that they, by the admission of Vance, know are false. ↩︎