The Tragedy of Donald Trump. Or, Dordt College Helps Make News

Over the years, several of my posts have mentioned my undergraduate alma mater, Dordt College. (Check here and here for some examples.) Given its location in Iowa, Dordt has offered the B.J. Haan auditorium to all candidates running for their party's nomination in the Iowa caucuses. Of this year's Democrats, only Larry Lessig took advantage of the opportunity (bonus points for anyone who can honestly say he or she even knew Lessig was running) and that the day before he dropped out. (Lessig was the only person who could make Martin O'Malley look like a serious candidate.)

More Republicans have taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by Dordt, perhaps because it's located in Sioux County, 80% of whose residents reliably vote Republican in presidential elections. A few days ago those interested in one of the leading Republican contenders, Donald Trump, managed to fill every seat in the auditorium as well as several remote viewing locations. Known more for his rhetoric than his insights, Trump managed to leave even a supportive audience scratching their heads with this well-reported remark:

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's like incredible.

For news reports about his remarks check the Sioux City Journal (here) and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (here). A recording is available on YouTube here.

Two matters about Trump's remarks cause some regret. First is the risk that some folks who don't know about Dordt's open-door policy for presidential candidates will mistakenly conclude that the college in some way support Trump or his views. Such were the concerns express in Jason Lief's blog here. I frankly don't think that's likely to be the case, especially in light of the remarks of Eric Hoekstra, Dordt's president:

Each time a candidate comes to campus, I have a certain sense of “cringe” for what it says to our students—political speeches are always full of broad-brush promises about what the candidate will do. There isn’t a candidate or party that can be 100% biblical or reformational—at least it seems that way to me. Opening our facilities to political candidates in no way implies an endorsement of their views.
Our choices are:

1.    To invite no candidates and have none of them on our campus
2.    To allow every candidate in good standing with their party equal access to our campus
3.    To pick and choose those who are worthy of having access to our campus and those who are not

We’ve chosen path no. 2. To fulfill our mission (equipping students, alumni, and the broader community to work effectively for Christ-centered renewal), this seems the best path with regard to political candidates. Certainly, option no. 1 would be to abdicate our mission. I don’t believe option no. 3 would be obediently responding to our calling as an educational institution. It would also violate our status as a nonprofit institution because it would be considered political speech.

The vitriolic nature of Trump's remarks and the vacuous nature of his "solutions" causes me greater regret. On a variety of issues Trump speaks to matters that are very real to a large number of Americans. The decline in numbers of jobs for working class Americans is real. The shrinking middle class is real. The ever-deepening penetration of the national-security state is real. Yet, Trump's bombast and undisguised opportunism means that discussions of new solutions to these concerns are (and certainly will be) shunted aside when the Trump balloon bursts.

Populism has a long and storied history in American politics (e.g., William Jennings Bryan, Wisconsin's "Fighting" Bob La Follette, and, more recently, Ross Perot). While its leaders were serious, populism as a movement failed to provide practical solutions to the problems its leaders identified.

More invidious than previous populists, however, is Donald Trump who is not serious. He is a corporatist who has used the power of the government to line his own pockets and is now masquerading as a friend of the people. Frauds regularly populate American culture (and sometimes American politics) but the real damage Trump will leave in his wake is a discrediting of non-liberal solutions to the problems animating his followers.

American political life is currently dominated, on the Left, by Progressive (state-centered) and, on the Right, by neo-liberal (corporate-centered) approaches. Neither a top-down nor a side-over approach to human society fundamentally addresses the real concerns of many real people. Neither is likely to cultivate communities in which human flourishing can grow and thrive.

Thus, Trump's flamboyant personal aggrandizement will in the end serve only to promote more of the same. A same that in which we see a withering of virtue and community and a never-ending growth of social atomism and end-less consumption.

Fred Siegel puts it well in the New City Journal here:

Trump’s a big-city guy with a big mouth who made his money from casinos and TV shows and went bankrupt twice. His appeal lies in his brashness—his willingness to violate politically correct conventions that are widely despised. It was said in mistaken defense of Joe McCarthy that, unlike the liberals, he at least understood that the Communists were our enemies. True enough, but as Obama understands, liberals dined out for decades on the inanities of McCarthyism. Obama hopes that Trump will serve the same purpose. (Emphasis added.)

The New Urbanism:Threat or Blessing?

The recent shift from suburban living to a "new urbanism" concerns some. Props to Anthony Bradley (here and here) for this piece and others like it that express concern that a growing number of minorities and the poor generally are being squeezed from urban enclaves. In other words, the poor aren't moving up, they're moving out because rents are going up. And who's paying the higher rents to live in places from which their great-grandparent fled to the ranch houses of suburbia? White, artsy, hipster, types, that's who.

This may be an accurate description of shifting population trends or it may not. And it may have less to do with race than with economics in generally. Capitalism as creative destruction and all that. My burden here is not to weigh into this debate but to point out a superb organization that works for a city from within the city, not to gentrify it but to restore it. Not by making the city over in the image white, artsy, hipster types but by using the knowledge, skills, and insights of the folks who are already there, regardless of race or economic status.

The Richmond Christian Leadership Institute (click here) is my example. For a quick handle on what RCLI is about, go to this short piece by its founder, Fritz Kling.

Human society could be described as moving from a garden to the city (from Eden to the new Jerusalem). The middle classes escaping the cities in the decade after the Second World War didn't escape the fallenness of their own human nature, and their descendants won't find a heaven on earth by reversing the direction of migration. No matter where you are there's much to be done and organizations like RCLI are the catalysts that can make it happen.

Renewed Part 4. World-and-Life View Thinking: Threat or Menace?

Warning: On the longish side.

Carl Trueman wrapped up Westminster Reformed Presbyterian Church’s Renew Conference Saturday morning with an address on whether Christianity is a world-and-life view. In brief, Trueman’s answer was that there are multiple Christian world-and-life views, as many as there are Christian traditions. World-and-life views (worldviews for short) are, for Trueman, so inextricably bound up with doctrine as to make any generic worldview something to be eschewed. Pan-denominational worldview thinking is dangerous because it undercuts doctrinal truth by substituting pragmatic results. In short (and in my words), worldview thinking is evangelical in the peculiarly American sense of the term. Contrasting with Trueman’s commitment to confessional orthodoxy, worldview thinking will always come up short.

Trueman cited several examples from recent history in support of his characterization of worldview thinking as a cover for evangelical pragmatism. First is the about-face in the evangelical reaction to Roman Catholic candidates for president of the United States. In 1960, evangelicals were opposed to John F. Kennedy because they thought he might be “too Catholic” and put loyalty to the Pope above the loyalty to the Constitution. Fast forward to 2004 when evangelicals were opposed to John F. Kerry because they were concerned that he wasn’t Catholic enough. What happened over those 44 years according to Trueman? Morality—in terms of opposition to abortion—had come to trump doctrine. Not that abortion isn’t a great evil. And not that there should not be civic cooperation between evangelicals and Roman Catholics on issues like abortion. Only that such cooperation should not be couched in terms of a generically Christian worldview. Protestant and Catholic common opposition to abortion, according to Trueman, comes not from a common worldview but in spite of different worldviews.

In addition to evangelical and Catholic rapprochement along pragmatic grounds covered by the fig leaf of worldview, Trueman pointed to the appointment of the devout Roman Catholic Dinesh D’Souza as president of The King’s College in New York City, a Protestant institution. Such an appointment could be explained from Trueman’s point of view only because of shared conservative political beliefs, fleshed out in terms of an abstract “worldview.” Worldview cast at a level of generality sufficiently high that it can be shared by Catholics and Protestants cannot do the heavy lifting necessary to run a college so for Trueman it must be political pragmatism, and not worldview, that provides the unifying core for a place like King’s.

Lest it be thought that Trueman casts bric-a-brac only at Protestant/Catholic pragmatic ventures, he leveled the same sort of criticism at the thoroughly Protestant Gospel Coalition whose members agree to disagree about important doctrinal matters such as baptism but must share a complementarian view of gender roles in the Church churches. Trueman didn’t have time to address how it is that there can be a common civic platform among doctrinally discreet ecclesial bodies but one can assume it has to do with a “two-kingdoms” approach. (See some of my many posts on two- vs. one-kingdom thought here, here, and here.) Had Trueman reached this topic I would like to have asked him if the two-kingdom approach amounts to a worldview. I suspect the answer would have been, “No, it’s a doctrine of the Church,” but that’s a hard claim to substantiate given the diversity of opinion on the subject within a denomination as small as even the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Trueman’s ecclesial home in America.

As one who prefers to identify himself as a confessional Protestant instead of evangelical, I find much to like about Trueman’s critique of worldview thinking. From my observation far, far too much that passes for worldview thinking is an excuse for not thinking. Pigeon-holing those with whom one disagrees as modern, pre-modern, or post-modern is certainly not the same as actually coming to understand what she or he is saying. As Mark Steiner noted earlier, evangelicals must earn the right to be heard in the public square and sloppy, simplistic worldview categories simply won’t cut it.

Yet I don’t believe sectarianism is the answer. Narrowing world-and-life view to ecclesiastical doctrine leaves too much of the world out of the picture. Even a tradition with as robust a set of doctrinal statements as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church cannot find the answers to all of life’s persistent questions therein. Surely there is some level of “worldview” specificity below the broad categories of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation but above the specifics of the Westminster Standards from which we can begin the process of analyzing and critiquing modern culture and the world of ideas. At least I hope so since the Westminster Standards have only so much to say about my field of the law—contracts. And although I may be wrong, I believe my scholarly writing and teaching substantiates that conviction that such a middle level exists.

All in all, much grist for the mill. I certainly enjoyed Trueman’s provocative ideas, straightforward explanations, and earnest demeanor. I learned much and at the least my own thinking has been sharpened.

Creation and Creatureliness: The Blessing and Beauty of Work

Usually I try to write something that even if not original at least reflects my original response to what another has written. But I've finished reading two other prolific bloggers who, while I suspect disagree on much in terms of their approaches to theology, have nearly simultaneously made thematically similar observations. The first here by D.J. Hart on the natural blessing of good, hard work as exemplified by one of his second-order heroes, H.L. Mencken, and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. Why, Hart in effect muses, are many Christians so heavenly minded they are of little earthly good? God's creation is good and the results of those who work it well should be admired.

The second is an extended quotation from Wendell Berry that bemoans the disconnect between current American evangelical "Christendom" and the historical rootedness of the Church in the beauty of creation and humanity's artistic response. The result of evangelicalism's historical amnesia is not merely ugly churches and vapid music but a cultural blindness that destroys the Church's witness more effectively than any persecution.

More Thoughts on Culture

Two weeks ago Ken Myers was one of the speakers at the Reagan Symposium sponsored by the Roberson School of Government.  I’m a long-time subscriber to the Mars Hill Audio Journal that Myers produces and I suspect that he sometimes gets more out of the folks he interviews than they knew they had.  In any event, Myers’s remarks connect neatly the Renew 2010 Conference. 

Myers suggests the American flavor of Christianity is intensely personal and private; it is not a moral community that loves truth and sustains a way of life.  In other words, despite the hysterical rantings of some, there is little evidence of Christian culture in America today (understanding culture as a pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities that form and motivate us).  American Christians either condemn the disorders of modern America from some lofty moralistic perch or buy into America’s consumer culture.  (After all, the customer is always right, right?)

We don’t have any record of the Christians of the first centuries of this era asking how they could have an impact on Roman culture.  Instead, they created their own culture, one which eventually reformed and ultimately replaced that of Rome.  Will American Christians break out of their cultural captivity?  Time will tell but the odds don’t look good.