I’ve actually been mulling how to follow up on the last two posts for a while. And then the US Presidential Election happened.
I’m not going to get into all of cultural and political aspects of that at this stage. I’ve been mulling them A LOT since, of course, but still don’t know what to make of it all. Without wanting to blow my own trump-et too much (or rather, to do so just a little bit), however, it seems to illustrate perfectly just what I was on about in A Wilderness of Mirrors. But that’s for another time.
Whatever the reasons or justifications, though, one thing is clear. The electorate, including, most shockingly, the white evangelical vote, decided to overlook Donald Trump’s attitude to women. As a powerful article in the New Atlantic put it back in August:
Trump-loving Christians owe Bill Clinton an apology. Conservative evangelicals were unwilling to offer forgiveness to a Democrat who asked for it. But they have freely offered it to a Republican who doesn’t want it.
“Character counts.” That was evangelicals’ rallying cry in their all-out assault against Bill Clinton beginning in 1993.
It seems that this time, the only thing that counts for them is power.
I’m not wanting to glory in the details, by any means. But it’s extraordinary how little people seem to have cared for Trump’s moral track record. When questioned about his relations with ‘other women’ during his divorce proceedings from his first wife Ivana, he apparently invoked the Fifth Amendment 97 times! And so on.
This is a man who has boasted about the married women he has slept with, bragged about his power to grope models, condemned any women he regards as overweight or ugly.
And still he gets lauded and elected.
I wouldn’t want my daughter anywhere near him. Would you?
Of course not.
No wonder, as one tweet I saw this week put it, that women won’t report sexual assaults. “A man can have double digit accusers and still be elected.”
It is incumbent on us all, men included, to change this culture, first of all within the church. We have to get our house in order before we can even begin to consider speaking about what goes on outside it.
That’s the subject of the next post in this series.
