“The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis features Screwtape, a senior devil, writing to his nephew Wormwood offering guidance about how to confront the pestilence of Christianity that had become a plague threatening Hell’s future. It’s an entertaining and instructive take on what is pestilence for whom. It’s a story that makes an obvious point in the contest between good and evil in what pestilence is depends on which side one is on.
This year’s presidential election has something of that character. Those of us who treasure American liberal democracy working to fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all, recognize that the MAGA movement is a pestilence that, if allowed, will destroy it. On the other hand, the MAGA movement sees liberal democracy and equality for all as a threatening pestilence that will kill the form of society and privileges they believe are exclusively theirs by right.
Who is in the right and who is in the wrong? Or to be more realistic, which side holds values that embrace the messiness and hope of liberal democracy, and which side embraces values that embrace strict order and severe limits on social freedom? Both sides claim they will do the best at keeping the U.S. strong, prosperous and invincible. Can they both be right?
History declares that liberal democracy has been the only path to sustained prosperity and freedom for the greatest number of people. Authoritarian regimes have provided extended periods of social political stability and prosperity, but only for a few, not the many. In the ages before democracy, the more autocratic a regime, the more repressive and corrupt it became. Each collapsed from internal rot. The less autocratic authorities were the more inventive and prosperous their lands became, with incremental freedoms enjoyed by more people. Authoritarian regimes by their very nature invite violent competition for succession to power and position, so to be more or less free depended entirely on who had the power until death or violence ushered in a new ruler.
England was the first of nascent democracies even if it was constrained by a rigid class structure. Nevertheless an elected parliament that balanced the monarch’s power is what, I believe, enabled it to become the world’s first sustainable super power. The U.S. followed with a new, improved form of republican democracy founded on principles of human freedom and a government for the people, by the people. It began with a limited scope that made room for continual movement toward greater access to full freedom for more people with governments capable of putting limits on systemic abuses, protecting the viability of creation, and funding for the common good. As messy as it is, it is anchored by its commitment to the rule of law, not of autocratic personalities. The pestilence of MAGA threatens everything liberal democracy holds dear and must be confronted boldly.
The MAGA movement sees things differently. For them liberal democracy has become too open ended with no moral center. A civil society is one in which people know their proper place in it, obey the rules set down for personal behavior, with greater rights reserved for the deserving for whom they are intended. In MAGA’s case the deserving are mostly white, conservative evangelical Christian nationalists. Others may have rights but they will be allowed access to them as needed by MAGA leaders. To redeem the messiness of liberal democracy, authority is better located in a central executive to whom the legislature and judiciary are subordinate. Businesses, oddly enough, will be free to be run with little governmental oversight on the grounds that they know best how to do what they do best and the market will be self correcting. If you are unfamiliar with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, please look it up. It’s a clear manifesto of MAGA intentions.
MAGA adherents believe liberal democracy has become a threat to order, civility, and personal morality, which for them centers on nationalism, patriarchy and an obsession with things sexual. The MAGA movement has convinced millions that the reason their lives are so hard is the fault of immoral liberal democracy and that it must be dismantled for order and the good life to be restored. The case has been strengthened by forty years of right wing claims that government is the enemy of the people and conservative evangelical claims that God condemns newly recognized rights for marginalized persons.
Advocates for liberal democracy have, I believe, been too complacent about the obvious moral value of the American way, the level of understanding people have of it, and the ease with which a nation can be misled. Classical Christian and Jewish denominations have been reluctant to publicly advocate for a greater, deeper public understanding of godly justice. Their multitude of anti-racism and anti-hate efforts have been an ineffective swatting at flies in their own houses, having little effect on public opinion.
As for me, I believe the MAGA movement is a moral evil, a life threatening pestilence that must be confronted. There is nothing Christian in its Christian nationalism and orthodox Christians must say so. As citizens, we must stand for liberal democracy. As Christians we must stand for God as we know God in Christ Jesus. If the forces of MAGA prevail, we must not surrender the centrality of the Triune God in our personal lives, the life of the church, and in our public behavior. We must remain steadfast in trust in God and proclamation of the Good News of God in Christ Jesus. Moreover, we must pursue godly justice for all in cooperation with people of other faiths who share similar values.
While you bring in the “anti-racism” and “anti-hate” efforts within the Episcopal Church (and other “mainline” American churches) as an ineffectual “swapping at flies,” Steve, I think you underestimate the damage that Kendi-oriented “anti-racism” has done in both the Church and the Academy. To see “justice” as rooted in the “equity” of comparative “output assessments” across identity-groups based quite literally on skin-color within a predetermined hierarchy of oppression based on “whiteness,” where, say, Asian-Americans as an identity-group are “classified” as “white-adjacent” and therefore must be discriminated against as a group (e.g. in Harvard admissions in the Supreme Court case) radically rejects what it means for an individual person to seek to live a life inspired by the example of Jesus of Nazareth. That the Episcopal Church apparently still refuses to see this is an indictment of the current version of “social justice” dominate within it.
The different distortions of a vision of social justice that could be rooted in the Christian tradition and the self-blinding that continues to fuel those distortions within both the Church and the Academy ever increasingly delegitimate both—and into the vacuum that relentlessly follows steps the supposed “moral clarity” on offer by such things as Project 2025.
I believe you are certainly right about the need to directly confront the cruel emptiness of Project 2025’s sense of “moral clarity.” But what happens when there is a mirroring but still different configuration of distorted emptiness at work within both Church and Academy? In the end, is the MAGA threat an all-too-convenient distraction from standing up to confront a much more intimate self-blinding emptiness?