At the Table With Jesus: Kids, Faith, + Trump

part 2/3, plus the GBBW

I think now, looking back, I could say my deconstruction began in a staff meeting.

In the run-up to the 2016 election I worked for a 25,000 person mega church with monthly all-staff meetings. And in this one we were warned against being divisive, and given, for the first time, social media engagement policies.

So…what if I posted a Bible verse? Just a little inspirational scripture for the day? Like Deuteronomy 10:17-19.

For Yahweh your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords. They are the great God, the mighty and awesome God, who shows no partiality and cannot be bribed. They ensure that orphans and widows receive justice. They show love to the foreigners living among you and give them food and clothing. So you, too, must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.

Is that divisive or just biblical?

From that time forward, I watched our church do basically nothing to equip people to think critically about the election. No space for people with historically Republican policy preferences to grapple with Trump’s character. (But privately so many were trying to sort that out.) No space for people with Democratic preferences to practice understanding why the ‘obvious’ rejection of Trump was…not so obvious to some.¹ The church said ‘we have folks from all sides’, shrugged, and did nothing to ask those people from all sides to seriously, carefully, consider how they would trust Jesus and let that trust shape them.

The effect for me personally was this: whatever it was we staff thought we were doing here, we had failed. The white-cultured, suburban mega church had failed and was no longer credible in conversations about anything important to faith. This was their time to do their job – help people think critically about trusting and following Jesus – and they intentionally chose not to.

And I was done with them.

I no longer had any desire to help make churches that would be this useless.

I know how rigid that sounds. How unempathetic to the complexity of politics and the personal choice of voting. But that’s where I was. Trump had won; 80 some-odd percent of white ‘evangelicals’ (whatever the hell that meant) voted for him. And I was done with the churches that had failed to form those people to care more about Jesus than power.

Now I wasn’t quite as scorched earth as that in personal relationships. I knew why people I loved felt like they had to vote Trump instead of Clinton, or just couldn’t vote Democrat, or whatnot. That’s what comes with real relationship, no? Hearing the working out, the wrestling through…

No, it wasn’t that I couldn't see how anyone would vote for him, so much as I couldn’t understand how Christians could celebrate him and church leaders could just say, “Yup, we’re good with our role in all this.”

So that was how my deconstruction began. It wasn’t about Jesus. It wasn’t about theology or the Bible. It was about how the church wasn’t even going to try to engage together with the political implications of Jesus’ message out of a fear that even talking about it would alienate donors. We might share rhetoric about God or the Bible, but despite overlapping vocabulary, we weren’t really following the same god or reading the same authoritative story.

I was done with the churches that were silent, and I was disgusted by the ones that were celebrating.

And it was heartbreaking. Because I had wanted to be a pastor since I was 12, a dream that grew to specifically be: I wanted to help the mega churches I grew up in, knew, and loved navigate the transition from their boomer generation founders to the millennials and beyond.

I wanted to stay forever.

Remember when Glinda tells Elphaba she can “still be with the wizard, what you worked and waited for. You can have all you ever wanted…”

And Elphaba says, “But I don’t want it. I can’t want it, anymore.”

I couldn’t want to work for mega churches anymore. Not if they weren’t really about helping people get to know who God is and how to reflect God’s character in their lives.

And that realization brought about a deep sadness for me, because I’d met Jesus in those churches for most of my life. I know that’s not the case for everyone (both in terms of ‘mega’ and of ‘church’.) But it was true for me.

I didn’t really know what my faith looked like if I wasn't a staff member at a mega church. It wasn’t the only expression of my faith, but I worked in a church as a sincere expression of my love for Jesus and if you took that away there would be a pretty big question remaining: how would it look for me to continue to follow Jesus moving forward?

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In the ten years since, church has changed significantly for me and my family. It took a few years to be able to wrap up at the mega church, catalyzed in part by a leadership failure and subsequent organizational crisis. We moved home to California, and started a tiny church with some friends in the fall of 2019 that’s still our community now.

What does this have to do with how I’m talking with my kids about Trump?

That experience, and processing it in the years that followed, settled two key things for me. The two are inseparable commitments that shape our conversation now.

First, I’m making zero effort with my kids to defend the nationalists as Christian.

It’s hard to overstate how much of the biblical narrative is about whether people choose to trust in God alone, and the type of life that flows from that, or trust someone or something else, and the type of life that flows from that choice instead.

You could almost make a game of it – pick a book of the Bible, any book! – what’s its version of those who trust God will reflect that trust by living in God-like ways?

• Exodus – Those who remember that Yahweh God saved them from Egypt live in new ways in freedom now, including pursuing justice for the vulnerable.

• Deuteronomy – Moses’ closing speech is ‘choose which way you’ll go: Yahweh and life or idols and death.’

• Judges – Round and round the people go: chase idols who promise life, actually experience death, realize this and return to God, enjoy life. Repeat.

• Jeremiah (and most prophets really) – Choosing who or what you trust is like choosing a path to walk, and the paths lead where they lead. The leaders use God’s name to lead the people away from God, and the result is currently oppression and suffering, and will lead to exile.

• Matthew – The people of God are like a tree that was meant to bear fruit but the farmer found none, so they cut the tree down and threw it away.

• Revelation – Hold tight to Jesus even though Rome seems all powerful and it seems so much easier to trust in Rome’s power.

(Seriously, I could do this for a long, long time, but that would derail this essay.)

When my kids ask about why people who claim Christianity would choose Trump, we center the conversation around what God is like, and what it looks like for people who trust God to reflect that by living in God-like ways in their own lives. Then we talk about why people might trust someone or something else – what they’re afraid of, for instance.

We often get at that one of two ways:

• Asking the question “Who or what is someone trusting to protect and provide for them?” or

• Completing the sentence, “Whatever happens it’ll all be OK because…”

If the answer is money or power, or a person who promises money or power, we talk about that. If someone is using God or the Bible but actually trusting something else, we talk about that. If it’s God….aaaand ‘this backup plan’ (which is a big theme in the Bible as well), we talk about that.

We say, out loud, that Jesus is Lord and the president is not (and we said that before Trump too), that Jesus is Lord and the U.S. is not, that Jesus is Lord and the constitution is not.

I’m simply not going to do conversational gymnastics with my kids pretending bad fruit came from a good tree. I cannot tell them “This is who God is. This is what God’s like. But that other stuff that doesn’t look like God at all is fine too because people are using God’s name and quoting verses while they do it.”

So that’s the first thing: who or what are people actually putting their trust in, based on their words and actions?

I can’t decide for you where to draw a line between charitable interpretation and hijacking Christian rhetoric to gain power.

I won’t presume to tell you how to sort “lots of people who love Jesus think differently about this” from “lots of people who don’t give a rip about Jesus know they can use Christian lingo to get their way.”

I do think, though, that if you ask God for wisdom about it, you’ll find help. (I actually have a practice for you to try included here.)

The second, inseparable element is a posture I’m committed to, one that shapes the tone and tenor of the above conversations as they come up, and it’s this:

I’ve decided where I’ll be for the next four years.

Find me at the table with Jesus.

From what I know of him, Jesus will inevitably ask others to have a seat, folks who I’d never expect to be invited.

After all, Jesus’ table is the place for the tax collectors – the ones who were willing to align themselves with the powerful empire and turn against their neighbors in the process. Like Levi, who became one of the 12. And Simon the Zealot probably had a huge problem with that, but they ate together even so.

Given that there’s truly a seat for anyone, I reason it’s quite likely that I am an unexpected guest there for someone else as much as they are for me. I’m going to accept my own seat with humility and gratitude, staying open to whoever else sits down. I’m inviting my kids to do the same.

I’m not vaguely trying to understand why some disembodied ‘they’ voted for him. But I am committed to talking well with my friends who did. I don’t worry about defending the overtly nationalist Calvary Chapel down the road. But I do try to share with my kids how the people we know personally weighed their vote.

I’m committed to staying at the table with Jesus and anyone else who sits down. Because the biggest thing I’ve learned since leaving the mega church, the thing that has given me hope for church at all, is just how powerful the table is. How bread that’s broken and shared as stories from our lives are shared can be transformational and life-giving. It’s done more for my faith than anything a fog machine and fancy lighting design for the main stage ever could.

I’m telling my kids we can trust Jesus, who invites us to his table, and gives us himself.

Pray

God, I’d like your help and your wisdom.

When it comes to the people in my life, and what I need to unpack with the kids in my life. would you help me sort “lots of people who love Jesus think differently about this” from “lots of people who don’t give a rip about Jesus know they can use Christian lingo to get their way”?

May I share your heart of compassion and tenderness while also sharing your love for what is right, good, and just. Amen.

Listen

Whenever you feel afraid
The next time you find yourself scared
Just remember that fear
Has no power here, it has no control
'Cause no chain can hold what's already free
So hold on to Jesus and breathe

Breathe

Take time to actually, literally, be still and breathe. You might find that setting a timer helps you (I’d suggest just 2-5 minutes).