Where you at, Little Dawg? - run-up-to- election edition

A call for my friends who do Christian faith much better than I do to show me how not to view the Jesus-centered life as escapism

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At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

These are the introductory paragraphs from a post from September 2023. They were the table-setter for what I hope was an honest look at the strength - or wobbliness, as the case may be - of my Christian faith.

So where do things stand in the week before we choose one form or the other of national ruin?

I’m serious about that question. I mean not one sub-atomic particle of hyperbole in my framing. Stop it with the “our institutions are strong enough to withstand blows” pablum. That may have been true in 1968, when an absorbent America still went to church, got married shortly into the third decade of life, could pass a basic American history test, had some understanding of what actual music was, dressed up to get on planes and unquestioningly stood for - and sang - the national anthem before sporting events. Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman and the anti-western movie genre had a huge impact, to be sure, but a recognizable America held up, at least to a considerable degree.

We have no such resilience today. Our brittle institutions - courts, the news media, the university, institutional Christianity, vehicles of civic engagement - have been utterly insufficient to prevent the rise of Trumpism, “gender-affirming care,” airline flight disruptions when one passenger takes offense to the political endorsement on another’s hat, the lionization of race-hustling charlatans, Trumpist refusal to see the stakes in Ukraine, Democrat refusal to see the stakes in Israel, government imposition of play-like energy forms, people willing to pay thousands of dollars to see a recording artist who has nothing to offer but validating the feelings of 13-to-23-year-old females, and public figures’ nervousness about having their ties to Jeffrey Epstein or Sean Combs discovered. Oh, and a $36 trillion dollar national debt.

So stop it with the whistling past the graveyard. It’s very late in the day.

I realize I can no longer call myself a fledgling Christian. It would be an indulgence in faux humility to say I was. I have a track record of volunteer work at a food pantry and in jail ministry. I serve as an usher frequently at church. I’ve even given the communion meditation. I’m constantly wanting to deepen my prayer life.

This is why I am really seeking guidance as to how to approach the rest of this year, and even the beginning of next year. As Precipice readers know, I’m staying home next Tuesday, for what I consider to be spiritual reasons. Not only both presidential tickets, but the entire parties they each represent provide nothing but recipes for, as I say, national ruin.

This morning, I came across a piece by Daniel Darling at The Baptist Review that intends to provide such guidance. Darling offers “5 Postures For the Post-Election Season.” The five are gratitude, prayer, engagement, hope and faithfulness. He fleshes each one out with theological soundness and a humble heart.

So why does his five-postures formulation strike me as trite and ineffective?

Do I doubt the theme running through all of his five postures, namely, that we are not of this world, God’s kingdom is unshakeable, and these truths ought to surmount any trepidation about the present post-American juncture?

Darling’s a good guy. You won’t find a skewing either to the progressive tainting of institutional Christianity on the left or to the imputation of salvific ability to the Very Stable Genius on the right. He’s straight down the line regarding the centrality of Christ to everything.

But in his Baptist Review article, he stops short of making clear how practice of the five postures is going to change anything.

But maybe I still have a touch of a world-centric streak in even wanting him to “change anything.”

When I look at Trumpist opinion columns, what the writers thereof are up to becomes increasingly transparent. They will not address in any depth the specifics of the insults, fear-mongering, policy incoherence and strange digressions during speeches of the object of their adulation. They so far are playing ignorant about the impact Tony Hinchcliffe’s garbage-island “joke” has had among the Puerto Rican voting populace.

So convinced are they that a win by the party in thrall to the squirrel-haired man-child will restore post-America’s spiritual and economic health that they shamelessly cheerlead for him - and paint the other side as unworthy of the tiniest modicum of basic respect as human beings.

Democrats / Harris Walz are relying on a focus on Trump’s unfitness to deflect inquiry into their collectivist package of policy proposals. Their message that “we’re better than that as Americans’ ought to be true, but it isn’t.

What I want someone to tell me in plain language is how to keep contempt, disgust and hopelessness out of my heart.

It can be done. Dietrich Bonhoeffer worked tirelessly to keep real Christian faith alive when the Nazis set up a German organization that claimed to be the repository of the real deal, but was just another way to monopolize societal power. He eventually got shot for his efforts, three weeks before the Nazis fell to the Allies. Christian history abounds with similar accounts of martyrdom.

A trait that’s common to them that I’d like to hear more about is courage. There’s something gentle-hearted about Darling’s five postures, and that’s good and to be expected. But a steel spine is quite obviously part of the mix as well.

What I want is for one of these leading lights of contemporary straight-down-the-middle faith to say is, “Look, man, expect to be hated. Be ready to deal with it.”

You know, like our Savior told us:

¹⁸ “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. ¹⁹ If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. ²⁰ Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’^[a] If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.²¹ They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. ²² If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. ²³ Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. ²⁴ If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. ²⁵ But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: ‘They hated me without reason.’^[b]

One might respond along the lines of “well, it seems to me you know what to do.”

But I need my courage bolstered, I guess.

Besides an unshakeable kingdom in eternity, I see nothing to be optimistic about. I’m about to watch the American experiment collapse.

I’m serious about this.