One obvious response to this question is my own — sinful — favorite: not to deal with it. Rather, withdraw into what has sometimes been called the bourgeois interior. You know, the vision of Frank Sinatra: “The weather outside is frightful, But the fire is so delightful. Since we’ve no place to go, Let it snow, let is snow, let it snow.” Along with this, we all could rededicate ourselves to business as usual, however nervously, hoping that all this chaos will somehow blow over.
Another more charged option, would be public resistance. For example, a variety of NGO’s, such as labor unions and religious groups and library boards and other like-minded voluntary associations could amass on the Mall in Washington, D.C. by the tens of thousands to demand that all our representatives in the House and the Senate take urgent action in behalf of a “regular” legislative process dedicated to getting the work of the people done, rather than sitting back and watching Trump do regime-change in Latin America in order to insure the U.S.’s oil supply. Could such demands include the option of trying to impeach Trump yet another time?
Good luck on that one, you may be thinking. But once upon a time an amazing March on Washington could happen. Once upon a time a magnificent No Kings Day could happen. Why not again? To that end, why couldn’t American church bodies take the lead, at least at first? It could happen! Imagine the leaders of America’s churches gathering together and then issuing a call for the establishment of a Churches for Political Sanity Movement that would call upon all U.S. Christians to join in a National Day of Resistance: to shut down business-as-usual everywhere in the country. Across the land, millions of citizens would then gather in public spaces to express revulsion against Trumpian machinations and to demand justice for all, especially the poor and the oppressed, above all the refugees in our midst.
Short of such a massive public revolt, we can well imagine this. Trump’s current public malfeasance or, better expressed, his eagerness to throw sand into the gears of all major public processes, will pick up even more tempo. He’ll start deporting immigrants not just in dribbles, but en masse, maybe even herding them into “camps” along the way. To that end, he might well call upon the U.S. military to “restore order.” Which he has done more than once, of course, although many of those troops have now been quietly withdrawn.
As an undergraduate, I studied the German resistance to Hitler, focusing on the life and death of the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like many students of that resistance, more than a few of whom were much more qualified than I was at the time, I concluded that the resistance movement to Hitler was, as they say, too little, too late. Are we approaching that kind of a tipping point at this very moment in the U.S. today? Minimally, I believe that the leaders of America’s churches could at least hold a meeting to discuss the matter. Or is it too late to resist the Emperor?
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