Kierkegaard, Trump, and Our Post-Christian America

If there’s one thing this election season is proving, it is how few Christians there are left in America.

There is nothing more nauseating than the idea of millions of Americans — after having shrugged off Trumps comments, character, and everything else they claim to despise in the Clintons but will tolerate in their own candidate — placing communion on their own tongue.

We keep hearing the refrain “judge not” and “let he without sin cast the first stone” — not from those who are actually professing their faith, but from those who use such lines as an excuse to wallow in their own mediocrity and excuse the mediocrity of others.

Let’s be honest.  How utterly boring has this election cycle become?  How decidedly mundane and catty?  How devoid of policy in a serious world?

Yet here we are, and it should come as a thunderbolt to those who actually do profess their faith and live Christian lives.  We are indeed a minority again, in a country founded by profoundly Christian men who gave us a republic and not a theocracy, a government suited only for a moral people and none other, individuals who sought to better the world by reforming themselves.

Instead, we have an idiocracy in the truest sense of the world — perhaps the most stark contrast against the beautiful and true, we instead settle for the ordinary and mediocre…

• Trump brags about sexual assault?  Brawndo has electrolytes.
• Clinton and Benghazi?  It’s what they use to make Brawndo.
• Johnson can’t find Aleppo on a map?  But Brawndo’s got what plants crave…

Americans are literally living in a golden age, yet through boredom and decadence, we have decided to settle in to this idea that America is on the brink of collapse, that our institutions are weak, that we are more divided than ever before.  None of this is even remotely true — but through a combination of social media and self-promoting doomsayers who have traded sandwich boards for talk radio, somehow we have convinced ourselves that the soft bigotry of lowered expectations is the new standard.

One forgets the author (Carlyle or Burke), but it was remarked that the demise of the French Revolution was that brilliant ideas would be raised in the Estates General, and this legislation would be destroyed by some witticism from the gallery or fellow members themselves.  Thus republican government in France collapsed into the Directory, the Terror, and eventually the Triumvirate followed by Napoleon himself.

Republics survive not through good government, but through self-government.  Christianity and the Civitas Dei is intrinsically wrapped up in the idea of self-governance through modesty, repentance, and personal responsibility.  The moment we surrender these things to the secular state — whether through taxation or laziness or ineptitude — then the game is over.  That’s how the slow descent towards Hayek’s road to serfdom begins.

The bottom line is simple.  Trump is unfit to be the leader of a free people.  Conservatives instinctively know this… but in the effort to beat Hillary Clinton, an alarming number of self-professed “conservatives” (read: populists at root) and “Christians” seem willing to shed everything they believe in order to achieve victory — every standard, every value, every shred of conscience to destroy a person they politically despise.

Soren Kierkegaard warned about the promotion of principle above all things in The Present Age — a small book that accurately predicted the post-modern era of social media.  To wit, for those of you tired of hearing about “principle” being used to justify everything under the sun:

It is acting ‘on principle’ which does away with the vital distinction which constitutes decency.  For decency is immediate (whether the immediates is original or acquired).  It has its seat in feeling and in the impulse and consistency of an inner enthusiasm.  ‘On principle’ one can do anything and what one does is, fundamentally, a matter of indifference, just as a man’s life remains insignificant even though ‘on principle’ he gives his support to all the ‘needs of the times’, even when, by virtue of being a mute and in that capacity as ‘the organ of public opinion’ he is as well known as the figures on a barrel-organ that can move forward and bow, plate in hand.  ‘On principle’ a man can do anything, take part in anything and himself remain inhuman and indeterminate.  ‘On principle’ a man may interest himself in the founding of a brothel (there are plenty of social studies on the subject written by health authorities), and the same man can ‘on principle’ assist in the publication of a new Hymn Book because it is supposed to be the great need of the times.  But it would be as unjustifiable to conclude from the first fact that he was debauched as it would, perhaps, be to conclude from the second that he read or sang hymns.  In this way everything becomes permissible if done ‘on principle’.  The police can go to certain places on ‘official duty’ to which no one else can go, but as a result one cannot deduce anything from their presence.  In the same way one can do anything ‘on principle’ and avoid all personal responsibility.  People pull to pieces ‘on principle’ what they admire personally, which is nonsensical, for while it is true that everything creative is latently polemical, since it has to make room for the new which it is bringing into the world, a purely destructive process is nothing and its principle is emptiness — so what does it need space for?  But modesty, repentance and responsibility cannot easily strike root in ground where everything is done ‘on principle’.  (emphasis added)

Consider for a moment how Trump supporters (and Hillary supporters) justify every inch of the litany of horribles produced by either candidate as being done “on principle” and you can easily see how this paragraph applies to our own post-modern age — and more specifically, how Trump boosters justify Trump’s actions vis a vis the “principle” of the idea.

Meanwhile, the virtues of modesty, repentance, and responsibility — all the Christian virtues — get stomped out in the exchange of virtues for mere principles.

It is worth noting that the Latin root of the word virtue is vir — quite literally, manliness.  For all the pretensions of defending Trump’s comments as locker room talk, such comments hardly represent the voice of men, much less virtue.