Dear friends,
“Will you seek and serve Christ in all people?…Will you respect the dignity of every human being?”
These questions from our baptismal covenant are to me the core of what it means to live a Christian life. From the very first verses of Scripture we learn that humans, all humans, are created in the image of God; that all people are worthy of dignity and respect. It’s a core tenet of our faith.
That core doctrine was violated by the president again this weekend with his obscene post placing the faces of President Barak Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama onto the bodies of apes. It’s an old racist trope which is offensive to any decent person. There is nothing funny about it.
Trump’s post was shockingly grotesque, but it should not have been surprising. It’s merely the latest in a lifetime of racist words and actions. In 1973, Trump Management Company (of which he was president) was sued by the Department of Justice for discriminating against prospective Black tenants. In 1989, he paid $85,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, young men of color accused of raping a female jogger in the park. The men spent much of their lives behind bars until they were exonerated. Trump stood by his ad.
Trump’s political career really began when he spread the lie that President Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was a not an American citizen. When members of the Klan and other white supremacists groups marched in Charlottesville, VA, killing one young woman, he declared that there were “very fine people” on both sides. Let’s be clear — white supremacists are not very fine people.
More recently he spread the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating neighborhood pets. He has repeatedly referred to Somali Americans as “garbage.”
During the last presidential campaign he referred to immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” “I don’t know if you can call them people,” he said. “In some cases they are not people, in my opinion. They’re not human; they’re animals.”
Standing up to the president’s racism, and the racism of his supporters, is not a question of Democrat versus Republican, or of liberal versus conservative. It’s a question of right versus wrong, of good versus evil. It’s a question of morality and decency. It’s a question of faith.
Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, all our souls, and all our minds. We do that, he says, by loving our neighbor as ourselves.
You can’t separate those two commands. If you think it’s funny or acceptable to depict Black people as apes, you do not love your neighbors, and therefore, do not love God. If you see people with Black or Brown skin as vermin and parasites; if you say they are less than human, or support a president who proclaims that, you are not loving God.
And yet, the toxic, fascist, racist rhetoric we hear is embraced by many who call themselves Christian.
Jesus wept.
With love,
Tricia