The Lie of America's National Emergency

America is nearly a week into the National Emergency declared by the President on 15 February. 

It is an odd National Emergency; I never thought a National Emergency by President Trump would be so mundane. But even by his standards, it’s a bit of a let-down.

Given his endless, overheated rhetoric about the scale of the danger posed by the southern border’s supposedly weak security, coupled with his love for the ostentatious, I had wondered if we’d see tanks on the White House lawn, sandbag emplacements on the Capitol steps, special instructions given to the citizens…

… but in the end, all the President gave us was a very long and rambling speech (needless to say, no fourscore and seven years, no dates living in infamy, no asking not what your country can do for you) before leaving to play golf.

I don’t think anyone who reads me regularly will be surprised I think the President’s national emergency- like the President himself- is a fraud. No facts surrounding the issues of immigration, national security, drug enforcement, or refugee asylum point to more physically-reinforced infrastructure as a positive or even necessary solution.

It’s for that reason that I’ve posited that Trump’s wall is an idol- a manifestation of fear, lack of trust, misplaced identity and cruelty, the antithesis of the God  of love, life, and liberation.

Now, please don’t think for a minute that I don’t believe there is an actual national emergency unfolding in America; there is. And once again, I think a theological lens helps us bring it into focus.

You can theologically critique Trump from any number of directions- his disdain for the poor; his disdain for the refugee and the stranger; his almost pristine narcissism; his arrogance, and all of those critiques would be entirely credible. But there is one issue that I believe underpins them all.

Ask yourself: what is the most condemned action in the biblical text?

What sin is proscribed more often than any other?

Is it the rather awkward issue of all these homosexuals that God just keeps manufacturing much to the disgust of so many in the Church? Oddly, no.

Murder? Nope.

Sex before marriage? Not even close.

Profanity? Hell, no.

By a huge margin, the most proscribed sin in the Biblical text is lying.

Various nonpartisan, credible fact checking services report that the President lies anywhere from 70% to 90% of the time. We’re not talking about finessed facts, spin, or half-truths; we’re talking about patent falsehoods;

Events that didn’t happen;

Conversations that didn’t take place;

Statistics that are completely false;

Invasions, attacks, wars, peace agreements that no one has ever heard of;

Successful results to problems that didn’t occur, and egregious problems concocted to cover up inconvenient successes;

Lie after lie after lie after lie, day after day, night after night, tweet after tweet…

I am not, nor have I ever been, naïve about the nature of politics. The US- and many other nations- have had leaders in the past who have withheld information- for security reasons, for political reasons, for strategic reasons, and even for criminal reasons. Whatever your country or nationality, we’ve all had leaders who have lied before.

It’s not right, it’s not pleasant, it should be condemned, and the guilty parties held to account…

But that said, I think it’s safe to say that America has never had, in its history, a President who seems un-moored from any commitment to reality itself, who simply announces what he wishes to be true without any care for whether or not it is.

With this man, and presumably for those who work with, support and enable him, verifiable truth simply has no value.

That, I believe (and I think a welter of biblical texts backs me up), is the national emergency.

When a person in power resorts to a private reality, they effectively lose the ability to govern. When objective facts regarding any number of national issues are placed before them, and they say, in effect’ ‘I don’t accept that this is true; in fact, the opposite is true’, any understanding of leadership falls away.

In a politically specific way, any semblance of healthy democracy becomes unworkable; more generally, profitable human interaction ceases to function. 

Of course Christian faith understands lying to be a sin, but it’s always important to understand that sin is more than an ethical shortcoming. The reason that lying carries the theological weight that it does is because of the way it relates to the character of God. In I John we read:

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.  If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.  If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

Lying is the antithesis of God, who is whole, perfect… ‘light’. God cannot cease to be God, nor can he deny reality for reality emanates from God. A liar does both; a liar attempts to be other than he or she is and distorts reality for their own ends.

Truth requires humility, introspection, and self-understanding as a human trying to live in the truth- the reality of God- understands that they fall short. But, as the text expresses, Forgiveness follows repentance- repentance being the outward, active expression of humility and self-understanding.

In Jesus’s encounter with Pilate in John 18 he says:

‘In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’

 ‘What is truth?’ retorted Pilate. 

Jesus declared himself ‘the truth’, insomuch as the purpose of the incarnation was not for him to disseminate teachings or devise an ethical structure, but to be the the image of the invisible and indivisible God. Pilate accepts neither Jesus nor God, not by denying Jesus’s goodness- in fact he acknowledges Jesus’s innocence and the injustice of his trial- but by sarcastically calling truth itself into question.

The liar does exactly the same thing, and by doing so becomes an atheist, anti-christ. Just as there is no lying in God, there is, as it were, no ‘God’ in the lie.

America’s ‘national emergency’ is not along the southern border; it’s at the heart of government, in the way that lying- as well as open contempt for objective truth itself- has become the default communication for the wealthy and the powerful.

It is the duty of the people of God to declare the truth and take action in the light of truth embodied in the person of Jesus- food for the poor, sight to the blind, release to the prisoners, freedom for the captives, life for the lifeless, a voice for the voiceless…

We do this, not because the wealthy and powerful are unaware of the truth, but to bear witness that truth exists and is an intrinsic good.

Anything less is, well, just a lie…