Creative Commons
© 2018 Robert Osburn
I grew up in a lower middle-class blue-collar home in Southeastern Michigan where it seemed every 10th word out of my hardworking father’s mouth was a profanity. Since my grandparents were not profane people, I often wondered what led to the linguistic degradation of this often-compassionate man I called “dad.” I concluded that it was the combined influence of 18 months as a post-World War II US Army draftee and 45 years working as a laborer “on the line” at what was once the world’s largest refrigeration compressor company.
Though ours was a household largely devoid of Christian faith (apart from nominal churchgoing in the early and late 1960s), I instinctively knew that crude language about defecation and sexual intercourse was distasteful, if not just plain wrong. Was I wired with some kind of moral code that resisted this linguistic trash? My Catholic friends (and most older Reformed thinkers, by the way) would say that natural law, the law imprinted on our hearts by God (Romans 2: 14-15), is the explanation.
Why couldn’t my 8th grade-educated father find better ways to express his anger and frustration? I sympathized with his poverty of education, but, then, why were most of my high school classmates using the same four-letter bedroom and bathroom vocabulary?
When I heard that the US President several days ago chose this kind of language to describe whole regions of the world, I felt the same revulsion. Not just because this language offends the natural law God has inscribed in me, but for two other reasons as well. First, I work with international students from around the world, and I do not want to unnecessarily offend them. Secondly, I am deeply concerned that our president is degrading the American people, and especially members of his political party as well as a core base of support (white evangelicals) in ways previously unimaginable and tragic.
As for my international student friends, except for a very few, I have known little but grace and respect, even among many who have nothing to do with the Christian faith that I so passionately embrace. My Chinese friends would never, in their wildest dreams, imagine causing Africans and Haitians to “lose face” in the way that our leader has. Yes, it is true the president spoke about their nations, and not of individuals from those nations. But, what one of us native-born Americans thinks of ourselves as pure individuals, unrooted in our shared and great American story? When you attack the nation, you are in some way attacking each member of that nation.
As for Republicans, with whom I have found a political home for many decades, they are in serious trouble because of this president. I predict the mid-term election in November 2018 will be a cataclysmic disaster for them, as a result. Though the majority of evangelicals (of whom I have been one since a fateful day in the late 60s at the University of Michigan) did not vote for him (and some, like John Piper, vigorously rejected his candidacy) , white evangelicals are still reported to amongst his most loyal supporters. Though it’s wrong to conflate Republicans and evangelicals, the central problem is that both groups must regularly (almost daily) invent excuses for the president’s behavior.
Americans, especially Republicans and white evangelicals, are latched, whether we like it or not, to a national leader who degrades others and is himself degrading. (On the same day that his profane comments surfaced, a very credible claim was made that his lawyer paid $150,000 to silence a porn star who had a sexual relationship with him in 2006.)
We are being linguistically and morally corrupted, fellow Americans! Let us no longer hide ourselves from the truth. Yes, one could say that many of Trump’s policies have merit. That is surely true. But, American presidential leadership is not just about the content of policies; it is just as much about the character of the presidency. America’s future, humanly speaking, depends upon both.
Lest God intervenes, we have three more years of this degradation. I fear for Americans, because our leader is not someone who will stop degrading us. It will continue, and many of us will respond by clinging tightly and firmly to our best and only hope: a holy God who cannot be degraded and dragged through the mud, muck, and mire of early 21st century America.
For my domestic friends on the left and my international friends, whether in or out of the Christian faith, I ask you to resist schadenfreude (taking pleasure in someone else’s failure) over this degrading disaster. Instead, join with those Christians and conservatives who resist this degradation and let us create some shared civic platform where we jointly declare, “No more of this. This is not the America we love. We will resist this ugliness in order to pursue, rather than betray, our founding ideals.”
America was once a better nation (though stained by horrors like racism). But, at its core, Christian faith fueled America’s virtue. Evangelicals and conservatives are, however, being degraded because we have latched ourselves, reluctantly or willfully, to someone who is openly degenerate. And, for that, like the prophet of old, I can do no less than weep (Jeremiah 9:1).
I appreciate your concern, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I’d like to discuss this blog with you, not so much as it’s observations, but it’s conclusions.
Did Daniel pray for Nebuchadnezzar? Did God answer that prayer with a dream that unsettled Nebuchadnezzar? Was Daniel shy in explaining, You will be given "enough time to learn that the High God rules human kingdoms and puts whomever he wishes in charge."? And, who was in charge during the seven years Nebuchadnezzar ate grass and then came back humbled? Daniel 4:37 in The Message:
"I, Nebuchadnezzar— singing and praising the King of Heaven: ‘Everything he does is right, and he does it the right way. He knows how to turn a proud person into a humble man or woman.’" Was Daniel degraded because of his forced work for Nebuchadnezzar?
Out of the heart, the mouth speaks-
In graduate school at Northwestern University in the spring of 1969 the instructor of a counseling class showed us a filmed lecture by the popular psychologist, Albert Ellis, who explained his theory of rational-emotive therapy. Basically he told all the young men in the class that in order to have fulfilled sex lives they should consider every woman walking around to be a possible source of gratification. We now live in the world that Albert Ellis and the other social psychology gurus of the 60’s gave us.
In 1972 when I began teaching in a junior college in Minnesota the facilitator at the fall faculty retreat presented a sordid story involving a lot of conflict in a difficult situation. We were asked to rank the characters in the story from who we liked the best to who we liked the least. I like virtually none of them. In one part of the story a pair of lovers were separated and found themselves on two different islands in a large lake. The owner of the only boat available for the woman to get back to her love was to ask the boat owner to take her. The boat owner agreed to do so, but only on condition that she have sex with him first. Shockingly this boat owner was not the person least liked by many of the women on the faculty. In fact one young woman said he was the one she liked the best, because he was the most honest and direct about acknowledging his own needs. In a world today where sexual harassment by men with power is being unmasked everywhere, I wonder just how this story would be viewed at a faculty retreat now.
In my view, the degradation of the office of President of the United States has been underway for several administrations due either to moral failings of the men who have held it or to embracing ideas that are very anti-God. There have been bright spots (or at best non-dark spots), but overall, there has been nothing but decline.
Kennedy: adultery
Johnson: enemies list, blackmailing enemies to accomplish his objectives
Nixon: lies, perjury
Ford: nothing comes to mind
Carter: former segregationist
Reagan: nothing comes to mind – actually honored the office
Bush 1: lies ("Read my lips: no new taxes!")
Clinton: lies, perjury, and adultery
Bush 2: nothing comes to mind
Obama: institutionalized very radical ideas and was very sympathetic to Islam
I can’t help but to liken this decline with the decline of Judah before the Babylonian captivity. The kings of Judah became weaker as defenders of the faith and as leaders. Of course it isn’t an exact parallel, but it is similar.
The American people have lurched leftward politically, and far away from God spiritually. I haven’t decided yet if leadership is following or leading the people but the outcome is the same: we are leaving the United States of our Founders and heading in a very new, radical, faithless, and dangerous direction. I tremble for our future.
Let’s be careful how we judge another’s words, especially when we were not present at the time to know what words were actually uttered, nor the context in which they were uttered, nor their intended meaning.
I was in El Salvador when the POTUS allegedly made the comments referred to. I observed trash and old tires floating down a filthy river in the Homicide Capital, close to where a police officer had been murdered. Most of the water is unnecessarily polluted and people frequently die due to drinking the contaminated water. Washington DC has a different sort of swamp pollution. When you hire an exterminator, you expect a profane comment, or two. The President was hired to exterminate the rats. If he is unprofessional at times, the least we can do is give him some latitude to lash out, as he wades through the trash searching for the rats.