It’s now the general practice in Washington to wear gold lapel and necklace crosses while flouting the golden rule, which teaches that one should act toward others as one wants to be treated. Trump’s regime has drifted so far from this core principle that the United States has become a menace to democracy and world peace. It is time for people of faith to set aside their doctrinal and political differences and help pull our country back from the precipice.
The golden rule has lived in the human heart since at least the time of Confucius 2500 years ago, probably long before. Christ’s offering of himself on the cross for the whole world is its ultimate embodiment. It is neither liberal nor conservative. It requires power to act humanely on behalf of everyone as much as practically possible. A golden rule foreign policy is to do good where we can while not doing harm if it can be helped, neither to our interests nor to innocents abroad.
What makes this historical moment so dispiriting is that the golden rule is actually a low bar. The secret of life is that we almost always know right from wrong. God stitched the text onto our hearts. A five-year-old knows they shouldn’t cheat at Candyland, even if they do anyway. At their best, families and spiritual teachers encourage us to do what we already know we should. They show us how to get out of God’s way and not be stumbling blocks to our own and our neighbors’ thriving.
But God has once again hardened pharaoh’s heart. Our ostensibly Christian government is dancing wantonly around the golden calf. As in Palestine in the time of Jesus Christ, power’s means are cruelty, its ends one man’s comfort and profit. The president is like the corrupt tax collector chided by John the Baptist, his government like John’s example of a corrupt centurion. He kills men of color on the high seas just to watch them die, treats immigrant workers with sadism, deprives Africans of life-saving medicine without saving money, denies the humanity of our trans and non-binary siblings, and mounts racist attacks against our Haitian neighbors – all while raking in billions in grift, erecting vanity monuments of Herodian dimensions, and feasting on his critics’ rage.
Those who love Trump the most don’t want him to obey the golden rule or love his enemies. They want him to stick it to his enemies. Racial resentment and racism fueled his rise beginning in 2011, when he capitalized on lies about President’s Obama’s birth. His base has always savored his cruelty and expects a fresh helping periodically. One example was his racist video featuring the Obamas and his refusal to apologize for it. Then he complained that no one could understand what Bad Bunny said during his Super Bowl halftime show. This was objectively untrue, since about 57 million Americans speak Spanish. By no one, Trump meant certain voters he will need in close House and Senate raises in November. If he had apologized to the Obamas, these voters would have been enraged.
So please don’t think Trump had a bad week, at least from his perspective. Cruelty always makes him stronger. Only a mass movement of people of faith can make cruelty a political liability by insisting that no matter what policies our leaders enact, acts of intentional cruelty are unacceptable, because they violate the universal divine law of love, the golden rule. Christians, Jews, Muslims, non-Abrahamic practitioners, secular humanists – I’d estimate that 100 million of us, left, right, and center, would, if properly led, take a stand for the golden rule as the sine qua non for United States office holders.
Those who say this would violate the separation of church and state overlook that the constitutional ban against adopting one religion was designed to protect an ecclesiastically diverse people from their government, not the government from the people. Other countries have Christian democratic parties, twinning liberalism with gospel values. Ours would be a multifaith democratic coalition, a hundred million golden rulers saying no to cruelty for cruelty’s sake. A hundred million Americans who know you can only build decent families through acts of self-sacrificial love and mutuality and want to associate themselves with a movement to run our country and the world that way, too. Thanks to Trump, I hope we finally understand that we have to, or else.