Happy New Year to all of you—or “all y’all” if I stay consistent with my header! My wife, the linguist, renewed my respect for “y’all” and “all y’all” when she revealed that German has similar colloquialisms, but French doesn’t. Also, English doesn’t have a standalone second-person plural pronoun - “you” is both a singular and plural second-person pronoun, which is a little awkward - so “y’all” serves that purpose! Anyway, I hope all y’all had a blessed and bountiful holiday season and are prepared for what is bound to be an interesting and consequential 2025.
I apologize for my lapse in writing. As I shared in my last article, my father’s unexpected passing in mid-October, before what would have been his 87th birthday in November, had me melancholy about the upcoming holiday season. The election results, which surprised me as much as they did millions of others, only added to my pensiveness. I recall that, back in 2016 when Donald Trump was first elected president, I hoped that the shock of victory would humble him and temper his narcissism, bombast, and vitriol as he pondered the gravity of the office he was about to hold. What followed was one of the more mercurial presidencies in American history, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic only made things worse for an administration that scrapped the plans previously put in place to deal with such a crisis and had no plan to replace them. I believe the disorder is what prompted people to drive him out of office, and his insistence that he had won and the election was rigged, culminating in the mob violence of January 6, 2021, cemented his place in the annals of the presidency as an agent of chaos and disruption.
This time, I know better than to expect humility or gravitas from him. He is the same man he was in the 1970s and 1980s when he became a known figure, the same man his father, Fred Trump, and his mentor, Roy Cohn, raised him to be. Moreover, I credit him for his transparency; he’s never tried to hide his egotism, prejudices, pettiness, paranoia, or sense of entitlement. The fact that he is who he is and 49.8% percent of Americans still voted for him is something I ponder a lot. I want to understand what they see in him that makes him presidential timber, but, to date, I have failed at that task.
So I headed into the holiday season, typically my favorite time of year, in a somber mood, mourning our family’s losses this year - my father, my father-in-law, and our pet corgi, Daisy, who was as much a part of our family as our human relatives.
Two years ago, my daughter bought her mother a Christmas ornament with an image of my mother-in-law, who passed away earlier that year. This year, she ordered ornaments to honor our dads and Daisy; they were sweet mementos of our loved ones.
Then, on Thanksgiving night, we were buoyed by the news that my son and his wife of a little more than two years were going to have a baby, and we would be grandparents for the first time. For me, that lifted the cloud that threatened to cast a shadow over the holidays, and I thanked God, even as he called our loved ones home, for bringing new life into our family and reminding us of his love and mercy.
I was headed out for a couple of appointments today, and I decided to count the American flags I witnessed on my drive and see whether they were at half-staff or full-staff. Before the inauguration, Trump had carped about the fact the flags would be flying at half-staff on the day he was sworn in, typically focused on himself rather than deferring to the memory of the former president and humanitarian for whom the flags had been lowered, Jimmy Carter. He incorrectly stated that “the Flag may, for the first time ever during an Inauguration of a future President, be at half-mast,” presumably ignorant of the fact that flags were at half-staff during the 1973 inauguration of President Richard Nixon to honor the passing of former President Harry Truman.
Nixon, arguably the most controversial Republican president before Trump, not only respected the U.S. Flag Code, which calls for the flag to fly at half-staff for 30 days to honor the passing of a president, but he was the one who issued the order, knowing full-well it would mean the flag would be at half-staff during his inauguration. He and Truman had locked horns politically when he was a U.S. Senator and Truman was in the White House, but he respected Truman over time and sought to honor him in death by following the law.
Not so Donald Trump. His complaints led Republican governors and the Republican Speaker of the House to declare that they would fly the flags in their respective jurisdictions at full-staff on Inauguration Day. A few Democratic governors followed suit in the name of “respect,” although none were mindful of the disrespect shown to the late President Carter. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, mimicked his GOP counterparts, so I conducted a brief social experiment to see how many would violate the U.S. Flag Code and follow his order.
I counted 13 American flags during my drives today, eight of which were at half-staff - the local post office, Wal-Mart, the public library, the nearby Sheetz convenience store, Jiffy Lube, a solar panel manufacturer, a local professional park, and a marketing agency. The 76 gas station, a pickup truck with a flag strapped to the back, Kroger, and McDonald’s had their flags at full-staff. The 13th? An upside-down American flag was planted next to a Trump/Vance campaign sign. I imagine your interpretation of that display depends on your political allegiance.
Joseph Gerth of the Louisville Courier Journal had a scathing response to Trump’s flag kerfuffle:
In what may be the worst show of disrespect, Trump raised the flag at his Mar-a-Lago club, where he lives in Palm Beach, Florida, to full staff less than a week after Carter’s funeral.
Mind you, all of this disrespect is being done by the same people who so vociferously complained when former NFL player Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem that he was “disrespecting the flag.”
On the bright side, those on the right are removing any doubt that their complaints about Kaepernick had nothing to do with the flag or the national anthem but had everything to do with a Black guy speaking up about racism and police brutality.
Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here trying to figure out how our nation got to the point where we look back on Nixon and think, “Ahhh, the good old days.”
1 Peter 2:17 says, “Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.” As I endeavor over the next four years to think and act “Christianly,” I will do my best to show President Trump the respect that the office he holds demands. This doesn’t mean I won’t be critical of him, but I will do so in a manner that pleases God. To that end, I offer the following thoughts from the leadership of Avondale Baptist Church in Arizona:
We don’t have an emperor. In our system, the responsibilities of an emperor are divided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. If that verse applies to believers today—and it does—then we are to respect the leaders of all three branches of government. It’s not just presidents. It includes senators, representatives and judges as well.
So let me be clear.
If you only apply the command to those in your party, you are disobeying the Bible. If you show respect to this President but not to the last one, you are disobeying the Bible. If you show respect to the President but you feel free to disrespect the Speaker of the House, you are disobeying the Bible. If you show respect to the President but you feel free to disrespect the Supreme Court Justices, you are disobeying the Bible. If you show respect to the senators and representatives of your own party but feel free to put down the senators and representatives of the other party, you are disobeying the Bible.
Believers need to obey the Bible when it is easy and when it is not.
So respect this President and the last one. Respect senators, representatives, and judges. And do so whether you agree with them or not.
Honor the Emperor.
And if I can make a literary allusion, honor him even when he’s wearing no clothes.
I just read that Senator Marco Rubio was confirmed as President Trump’s Secretary of State, 99-0 (with J.D. Vance resigning his seat to become Vice President, the Senate is down by one person). He is probably the least controversial and most qualified of Trump’s picks, which makes me nervous about how long he’ll last. Conversely, I followed the testimonies of his nominees for Secretary of Defense and Attorney General during their confirmation hearings, and they will probably not be unanimously confirmed. I was struck by the scripted responses they repeatedly gave to questions that warranted straightforward answers. Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General nominee, refused to provide a “yes” or “no” answer to whether she believed the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. Her repeated response was an acknowledgment of President Biden as “duly sworn in,” which was an evasive answer. Despite her expressed intention to be the chief law enforcement officer for the people, her inability to reject her boss’s lies about the 2020 election makes me question her independence.
Similarly, Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense who has been dogged by reports of infidelity, sexual assault, and excessive use of alcohol, repeatedly used the phrase “anonymous smears” to describe those reports, which isn’t entirely accurate. I can recall a time when someone with Hegseth’s baggage would be considered unqualified to lead the largest department in the federal government, the one that commands the might of the U.S. armed forces. In fact, I was a captain in the U.S. Air Force in 1989 when former Senator John Tower of Texas, a man with unimpeachable national security credentials and more than two decades of public service at the federal level, was rejected as a nominee for Secretary of Defense because of - wait for it - excessive use of alcohol and womanizing. Hegseth not only carries similar baggage, but his only military credentials are his service in the Army National Guard as a major. There are also several controversial statements he has made on the record about women on active duty, although he now conveniently disavows them.
Jesus advises us, “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Anything beyond this comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37). Simply put, tell the truth. If these two nominees equivocate and muddy their responses with scripted phrases multiple times in response to direct questions, I have a right to question their fidelity to the truth. Hegseth, in particular, professes to have given his life to Christ in 2018, and he invoked the name of Jesus during his testimony to deflect criticisms of his past behavior, a tactic that always bothers me. The grace of Jesus Christ is not a pass to avoid the consequences of bad behavior. If you are genuinely in Christ, He has forgiven your sins once and for all, but if you sin, you must still contend with the earthly consequences of your actions. Nancy S. Fitzgerald, founder and executive director of Anchorsaway, an organization dedicated to teaching the Christian worldview to young people, puts it well:
Even though we are free of the penalty of sin, there are natural consequences for sin. If you kill an innocent person, God will forgive you, and you are going to jail. If you steal and get caught, God forgives, but again the consequences for your sin will be on you and perhaps others. God determines consequences. Born-again Christians who sin by committing adultery may lose their families, careers, and friends, even after they confess and turn away from their sin. Coming to Christ does not erase the temporary effects of sin; but our salvation does guarantee that we will not face the eternal consequences of sin.
However, the only sin with consequences in Trump’s orbit is to be insufficiently loyal or even mildly critical of his opinions. Therefore, only true believers or sycophants need apply. His cabinet and political appointees will never be mistaken for a “team of rivals.”
One of the profoundly disappointing things to witness at the dawn of the second Trump administration is the capitulation of grown men and women to Trump’s will. Yes, I know it’s been a primary feature of the Trump era, which began in 2015 with his initial candidacy regarded mainly as a vanity project with no chance of success but evolved into his complete takeover of a 170-year-old major political party, which he has shaped in his image. Dozens of former adversaries, including his vice president, became fawning admirers who conveniently forgot or developed convoluted excuses for their previous criticisms of Trump.
But it broke my heart to see Sen. Joni Ernst, a victim of rape and sexual harassment, express legitimate concerns about Pete Hegseth’s past regarding sexual assault and inappropriate treatment of women, only to reverse course when Trump’s mob threatened her political livelihood. I have counseled and walked alongside victims of clergy abuse and other forms of assault and harassment, and those horrific episodes sear the conscience and alter one’s worldview. What internal price did Senator Ernst pay to set aside the mental and emotional scars of her experiences to avoid the wrath of Trump’s followers? “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Matthew 15:26).
Is the allure of a seat in the U.S. Senate worth it? I am thunderstruck.
On the other hand, I’ve never mistaken Mark Zuckerberg for a profile in courage. Even as early as last summer, when he complained about the Biden administration “bullying” him and his staff into “censoring” COVID-19 misinformation and praised Trump’s defiant response to the attempt on his life, it was clear that he was positioning himself to kiss the ring should the moment arise. Watching the tech oligarchs elbow one another in their rush to get close to Trump has been bemusing, but Zuckerberg’s response takes the prize. Firing Meta’s contracted fact-checkers and announcing it on Fox News, calling them “biased,” hiring a Trump-friendly policy chief, moving their content moderation team to Texas from California, presumably because they’re less left-leaning there, eliminating restrictions on hate speech, ending diversity hiring and promotion programs, buying a coveted seat at the inauguration, and hosting an inaugural gala is an impressive bootlicker checklist.
However, two things led me to the conclusion that he is not only a sycophant but emotionally immature. On the Joe Rogan podcast, he made the following statement:
But I think these things can all always go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we wanna be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the spectrum where, you know, it's all like, masculinity is toxic. We have to, like, get rid of it completely. It's like, no. Both of these things are good. Right? It's like you want feminine energy. You want masculine energy. I think that's like, you're gonna have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that's all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a much more masculine culture. And, so — and not that it doesn't try to be inclusive in its own way, but I think that there's just a lot more of that energy there.
An article in the New York Times said that, in a meeting with Stephen Miller, one of the genuinely malevolent people in Trump’s inner circle, he acquiesced to Miller’s demands that Meta do nothing to obstruct Trump’s agenda. Before going public, he also previewed the changes he intended to make at Meta with Miller. The article then attributed this statement to him:
Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.
Sheryl Sandberg was Zuckerberg’s handpicked COO at Facebook/Meta and served with him for 14 years. For him to deflect blame for promoting inclusion at the company when he could have overruled her had he disagreed at the time seemed cowardly to me. When coupled with his comments about “masculine energy,” it gave the appearance of him trying to appeal to the faux “manliness” that has gained a foothold in Trump’s universe.
Zuckerberg has since declared his comments about Sandberg were “misconstrued,” and he publicly praised her and her tenure with Meta, saying, “Sheryl did amazing work at Meta and will forever be a legend in the industry. She built one of the greatest businesses of all time and taught me much of what I know.” She responded favorably to his statement, thanking him and saying, “I will always be grateful for the many years we spent building a great business together - and for your friendship that got me through some of the hardest times of my life and continues to this day.”
Taken as a whole, it seems that Zuckerberg hasn’t evolved much beyond the college student who created the social media platform that evolved into Facebook to rate the “hotness” of female Harvard students. I’m reminded of how James, Jesus’ brother, described those who lacked wisdom as “like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6). Zuckerberg’s changing priorities and values suggest someone who lacks a central organizing principle to guide his words and actions.
This evening, President Trump followed through on his promise to pardon or commute the sentences of those convicted or charged with crimes related to the January 6, 2021 riot that he incited against the Congress gathered in session at the U.S. Capitol to certify the electors for the 2020 presidential election. This includes six people convicted of seditious conspiracy, a historically rare charge whose last convictions were decades prior, and the total number of people successfully convicted for sedition or treason before the January 6th charges were fewer than twelve. Also included are people who violently assaulted Capitol Police officers.
I remember sitting in stunned silence for hours as I watched the rioters storm the U.S. Capitol. Everyone saw what they did in real time, and they watched President Trump’s belated and half-hearted statement on television asking them to disperse while telling them he loved them, understood their hurt and pain, and called them “special.” The persistent and shameless attempts by Trump and his supporters to rewrite the history of that event are an insult to the intelligence of every thinking American. It is astonishing and disheartening to see how effective they’ve been at persuading millions of Americans that this act of violence against our government was, in Trump’s words, “a day of love.”
This action adds to my disappointment with the American justice system, which allowed Trump to avoid accountability for his criminal acts. In hindsight, I fault U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell for underestimating Trump's appeal to the populace and refusing to convict him after his second impeachment. He said at the time that the legal system would handle him, but Attorney General Merrick Garland took too long to bring charges against him, giving his lawyers time to stall and delay and essentially run out the clock. Even the case where he was convicted means nothing because his sentence was little more than an acknowledgment that he is a convicted felon and there are no consequences for his actions.
These injustices go against everything we were ever raised to believe about America. We are increasingly becoming a society where power, money, and influence allow you to do what you wish, while those who lack those advantages are held strictly to the rule of law. I know the Scriptures say, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). That doesn’t make watching wrongdoers not only get away with their deeds but prosper any easier.
After the events of January 6th and Trump’s evasion of accountability for inciting the violence, not to mention his illegal possession of classified documents and his attempts to hide them from federal officials, I never want to hear the phrase “law and order” associated with the Republican Party ever again. I recognize now that they only care about “law and order” when their political adversaries, immigrants, or people of color are involved. I have been naive, and I should have known better. After all, when Bill Clinton was president, the evangelical community was immovable on the principle that character in our public officials mattered to God, but when Trump came to power and tickled the ears of evangelicals with offers of “protection” and influence, the slogan, “We’re electing a president, not a pastor-in-chief,” came into vogue. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, and I don’t know how some evangelical leaders are indifferent to it. No wonder more people have left the church in recent years than came to Christ in all the Great Awakenings combined.
Donald Trump spoke of unity in his inaugural address, but he then proceeded to trash America and Americans who don’t subscribe to his view of the world. The truth is that we are more divided than we are unified; we disagree on fundamental principles that could bring us together regardless of policy differences, and perhaps more damning, we see our political opposites not as human beings like us with differing views on how we can flourish together as a society, but as enemies that must be defeated and cast aside for our country to be whole.
Even Christians are divided despite the fact we profess belief in the same Lord and Savior. Franklin Graham, before delivering the opening prayer, dared to suggest that America was in darkness but that Trump’s victory was evidence of God’s hand on our nation, and President Biden and Vice President Harris had to sit there and accept the indignity heaped on them by this purported “man of God.” Trump only amplified the apostasy by declaring his surviving the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was God sparing his life so he could “make America great again.” When people make this claim, I want to remind them of the numerous assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler’s life and ask them if God spared him to do His will. This is terrible theology on so many levels. Shane Claiborne of Red Letter Christians said it best when he declared, “Any theology that puts God, rather than sinful human beings, behind a gun or a bomb, is bad theology.”
Yet, I still have hope.
I look across the church congregation I serve as an elder and see people of different political persuasions coming together, leaving their earthly positions outside the sanctuary's doors and showing genuine love and kindness toward one another. I confess I struggle with the idea of some of these people, who I love dearly, voting for a man like Donald Trump, but I don’t doubt their faith or the compassion they show toward others. It reminds me that to “love your neighbor,” our church’s theme for 2025, includes loving those with whom I disagree politically. It’s easy for me to do in our small church because I know these people and care deeply about them, and they know and care about me and my family.
With the help of the Holy Spirit within me, I pray that I can extend that love beyond my precious congregation and that other believers can find it in their hearts to reach out to their brothers and sisters of a different political persuasion. If Christians can’t find a way to come together as Jesus desired for us to do, then the next four years and beyond are going to be extraordinarily hard.