Saturday, January 9, 2021

The Week that Was

Well, it was a week.

I don't need to go over what happened in the past week, except to say it was one of those memorable but terrible times in our history that will always be remembered, like the JFK assassination, the Challenger explosion, 9/11. It was on that sort of scale of horror. But it wasn't a lone crank with a gun, nor was it a technological malfunction, nor a foreign invader, it was a crowd of homegrown insurrectionists violently sacking the capital and stopping the very functioning of government on a momentous day.

My dominant feeling as I watched was disgust, with anger coming a close second. Over the last few days I have tried to make sense of it all by reading a lot of responses from news sources and pundits, listening to discussions about political ramifications, etc. Like many others, I have filled my head with this stuff. I have shared a bunch of what seemed the more insightful material on Facebook and the tone of my own words there has often reflected that disgust and anger I felt. 

The president, after inciting the rage that would later result in the evacuation of the Capital building while barbarians forced their way in at the other end, then failed to respond or, later, flubbed his response as only he could do. Muttering that the violence must stop in a strangely detached monotone, he soon moved on to his life-work of nursing his self-story, his imagined grievance-narrative, and vaguely promising that "the fight" was far from over.

Still, he had far fewer defenders than usual this time around. In the wee hours of the morning the Congress finished its work of accepting the Electoral College slates from the states and declaring Joseph Biden our next president. Now they have moved on to considering impeachment proceedings yet again. In the meantime, a host of White House staffers have tendered their resignations, and seemingly everyone who used to work at the White House has condemned their former boss. It almost seems a page has turned. I don't think the man will ever completely recover from this episode.

One of the more interesting responses (to me) was that of Al Mohler, the president of Southern Seminary. In 2016 he declined to support Trump on the grounds that character matters, famously saying that if he were to support Trump he would have to apologize to Bill Clinton. Then in 2020 he opted for the It's-a-binary-choice argument and publicly urged the re-election of the man whose character had been so damning 4 years before. 

Now, in the wake of recent events, he is withdrawing his support. For me he represents one of those people who has simply ceded his self-sought position as a prominent voice of reason or wise councilor to Christendom. All of the dark warning of his character matters phase have come to pass. There is no way he can actually claim he was right both in 2016 and 2020 and now again 2021, but that's exactly what he's doing. When you're burnishing your brand as the wise man of Evangelicalism, you can't ever admit to having once been unwise. In 2016 he said in essence that bad character inevitably leads to bad actions. But in 2021 he justifies his refusal to take anything back or to suggest he might have been wrong at any point by saying that he simply does not accept that this week's bad actions were inevitable. What he once called inevitable he says now (conveniently for him) could never have been imagined to have been inevitable.

For Mohler, as for many others, the proverbial hair-dye is dripping down the side of his face. One of the arguments he likes to make is that it was a binary choice after all (an idea I would quibble with, in any case), but of course we are not talking about whom one votes for in the privacy of the voting booth, but about whom one publicly supports (and urges others to support) as a prominent "thought leader" and so-called influencer in the world of Evangelicalism. In that he certainly didn't have a binary choice. He always did have the option to simply withhold support from either and keep quiet. 

And who will listen to his "deep thoughts" now?

* * *

Read also:

What are the court evangelicals saying?

No comments: