We Need a Righteous King

In the year 2012, there was an undeniable fraternal spirit gripping the majority of the world's "millenials" as we "woke up" politically, socially, and environmentally.  Actually, it had begun at least a year sooner for those of us who had participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but by 2012 it was a powerfully felt reality.  We connected across social media and flooded it together with our emerging perspectives on the need to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the need to shut down the fossil fuel industry and power up renewable sources of energy, and perhaps the need to completely replace global capitalism with something more equitable and sustainable.  We marched for racial and climate justice in the world's major cities.  We talked of a "global consciousness shift" and many of us found a spiritual component in the movement - centered around our conviction that the Earth is a living, sentient being and that we need to work to heal her by adopting lifestyles marked more by sustainable production than by mindless consumerism.  Outsiders, particularly among the baby boomers, dismissed the rise of the "social justice warrior" as the misguided optimism of youth at first, and later began to fume angrily about "entitled adolescents" (even though we were actually in our 20s and 30s) who were in love with socialism and just wanted "free stuff."  But whether dismissed or derided, our movement grew mightily from 2012-2016. 
We saw some key victories, as well, such as when we finally prevailed upon President Obama to reject the plans for the Keystone XL oil pipeline proposed by the multinational corporation TransCanada. 

But 2016 was an election year, and inevitably, our movement became bound up with a Presidential campaign.   Even non-Americans jumped on the bandwagon and engaged in a meme war supporting the "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders against the corporate oligarch Hillary Clinton among the Democrats and the Republican nationalist Donald Trump.  Bernie Sanders rallies turned out tens of thousands of us, and the positive momentum was electrifying.  It is my belief to this day, that if the Democratic National Committee had not engaged in underhanded tactics in key states such as Nevada and New York, and if the "superdelegate" system had not been in place in 2016, Bernie Sanders would not only have defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, but would have handily defeated Donald Trump, and our movement would have only gained in positive momentum. 

But 2016 happened, and it majorly disaffected quite a number of us.  I am one of those disaffected leftists, and I have struggled to find my political compass in the world of Donald Trump.  This struggle has been all the more painful for me because of how intensely I felt a part of the movement in 2012.  Not only was I part of the crowd, at that time I even felt like one of those at the helm, as I had worked for Greenpeace USA and pioneered a local chapter of Move to Amend, among other things.  I was one of those who volunteered countless hours making calls to swing states for the Bernie Sanders campaign and donated whatever money I had left over from bills each paycheck to his campaign.  When he conceded the primary election to Hillary Clinton so that the convention would not be "disrupted" I not only felt discouraged, I felt betrayed.  Hillary Clinton was not even close to the type of candidate I could support, even against Donald Trump.  She represented the political corruption and the blatantly bubblegum brand style of corporate candidate which I felt I had been standing against for more than four years.  I was disgusted by her, I was disgusted by Bernie Sanders' decision to unite the party behind her, and I was disgusted by the decision of every fellow leftist who announced that they were going to hold their nose and cast a vote for Clinton just so Trump wouldn't win.   I knew that everyone had just fallen into the two-party trap - controlled opposition.  I felt that the movement had sold out completely, and it didn't surprise me in the least that Donald Trump won.  The psychic impulse which informed his movement had emerged undaunted from the Republic primary, whereas ours had been fractured.  I believed, and still believe, that the authentic thing for Bernie Sanders to have done at that time was to run as a third party candidate and taken the movement outside the realm of just being about who won the election.  Maybe he would have even won -  but either way, the movement would still have been authentic, and I could have remained a part of it. 

This amazing letdown corresponded with a letdown in my personal life as well, as I underwent a divorce that split my young family.   These two things seemed magically linked to me, so as I began to lick my  wounds I reached out, spiritually, to my roots in the Christian faith. 

Throughout 2012-2016 I had embodied the progressive Christian response to current events.   I denounced racism, capitalism, corruption, climate pollution, and bigotry against the LGBTQ+ community while affirming Jesus as my Lord, the progressive church as a relevant bastion for change, and the Psalms of David as a living body of resistance prayers, poems and songs.  I knew that among millenial progressives, my Christian faith put me into a kind of niche minority: but I wasn't completely alone in that minority, and the non-Christians in the movement seemed to view me with a sort of sympathetic curiosity.  On occasion, I was even able to use that curiosity as a springboard for "evangelism" - sharing my faith.  I rather delighted in being the type of Christian who proved "not all Christians are like that" to friends in my age group, where "that" meant conservative and often close-minded or even downright bigoted. 

But following the letdown that was Bernie Sander's surrender, my political Christianity became something more to me.  It became all that the movement had betrayed: it became an unwavering, unassailable commitment to a vision of a world ruled justly and righteously.  Throughout Scripture God speaks about judging the oppressors of the poor and those who destroy the Earth.  As I sought solace in these promises, I increasingly realized that they did not hinge on the election cycle.  And as such, they were not bound up with party politics or with the campaign of one candidate.  They were timeless and non-partisan. 

Realizing this enabled me to put some space between myself and the ongoing slogans and campaigns of my fellow "social justice warriors" and even many of my "progressive Christian" friends - many of whom had sold out by voting for Hillary Clinton because they were stuck on the idea of a single election solving every problem.  That space only increased as I perceived that their anger at having lost - to Donald Trump of all people - was fueling hate, bitterness, and political alienation.  The positive momentum seemed to have evaporated and I saw friends engaged in counterproductive protests which nonsensically declared that Trump was "not my President."  Rather than promoting new ideas, making connections, and persuading folks to move left, those who I had once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with seemed to only being reacting against the President's mostly irrelevant tweets and going on sprees of unfriending anyone in their social media universe who disagreed with them.  Their angry tirades, as often as not, drove people further to the right rather than creating space for personable engagement.  Some of my friends even began to advocate political violence - posting memes about bringing back the guillotines, or threatening to bring AK-47s to the next political protest.  I had always stood for non-violence!  I was a parent of three small boys, some of whom had even attended climate marches with me.  I was not about to go along with this turn toward violent solutions. 

And a new obsession began to arise among them: an obsession with widening the definitions of what was "offensive" or "racist" to the extent that a whole new culture was created - the "call out culture" which not only refused to reach out to moderates or conservatives in intellectual debate, but even became a sort of tone policing amongst fellow leftists.  "Leftbook" strove to teach ideological purity, and a new kind of virtue signalling came to be: whereby how authentic one's contributions to the movement were was based on how abstruse their arguments were against "cisgendered heteronormative white supremacy."  In conversations with this type of new progressive, it became clear to me and many others that anything one would say which deviated even a little from the party line - increasingly the line of the Democratic Party which had sold us out - was completely unwelcome and was being spoken from "a place of privilege."  Such as, for example, our insistence on voting for third party candidates or building third party platforms when the Democratic candidate did not represent our interests.  The logic was that if we weren't willing to "do whatever it takes" to stand against Donald Trump - including casting our vote for Hillary Clinton - then clearly we were not on the same side as the minorities he threatened and could not possibly be seen to have anything of value to add to the conversation. 

For me, at least, it was all the better that I was written off in this way.  For as I felt increasingly alienated from fellow leftists, I felt increasingly drawn to exploring the ways in which my Christian faith informed my politics.  Why was I against environmental destruction?  Why was I against war?  Why was I against the death penalty and retributive justice?  Why was I against the unbridled exploitation of the poor, such as what happens under global capitalism?  Why did I insist on non-violent solutions to political problems? Was it not because I believed that life was created by God, was sacred, and was a gift to us?  Indeed it was.  Reigning supreme above every other political maxim or principle I espoused was the idea that life was sacred. 

This led, of course, to a re-evaluation of my position in the debate over abortion.  Previously I had gone along with the prevailing liberal view that abortion needed to be kept legal so that it could be kept safe.  But always, the tragic and obvious immorality of allowing babies to be killed had nagged at me.  Although I did not want to see abortion made illegal, I certainly wanted to see it become less and less common until eventually it went extinct.  I began - cautiously at first - to express this view to leftists, even explaining that I believed the solution to the problem of abortion was free childcare and more support for struggling young mothers - traditional leftist, even socialist, solutions.  But even as my distaste for abortion was growing, it seems that acceptance of abortion - not only its legality but even its morality - was growing amongst leftist friends.  My proposed "solutions" were unwelcome: why?  Because abortion was not a "problem."  It was a "fundamental right."  In fact, "abortion on demand and without apology" became the slogan.  Pro-lifers were denounced in the most colorful of terms.  One leftist friend even went so far as to tell me that he hoped life would treat me in such a way that my opinions on abortion would change.  He also said that if they didn't, the "revolution" would come for me and mine.  All of this without me arguing for an abortion ban - simply arguing that abortions should be discouraged by the provision of greater assistance to struggling moms!

Perhaps it should not have surprised me so, because in recent years, abortion has had a very vocal ally in public life: Satan.  The Satanic Temple, which despite erecting statues of Baphomet in American cities and taking the rebellion of Lucifer as a metaphor for personal transformation, tries to fool people into thinking it is a secular humanist organization or a "parody religion."  And it organizes pro-abortion demonstrations throughout the United States.  To anyone with half a brain, this support of the Devil himself for abortion should be very telling.  But, as the general public has persuaded themselves that the devil doesn't even exist, they have been able to swallow Satanism whole and have even said such things as "Hail Satan" in appreciation for what they see to be a non-controversial support for ho-hum pro-choice politics.  As a Christian, it has become abundantly clear that my place is not shoulder-to-shoulder with these types of leftists. 

But what then?  Do I find my home in the conservative movement?  Do I join the ranks of the Trump-worshipers whose xenophobia and paranoia is painfully obvious?  Who strain at the gnat of government spending on programs of social uplift or environmental conservation yet swallow the camel of bloated defense spending, regime change foreign policy and empire building?  Do I become the type of "pro-lifer" who believes that desperate women seeking to terminate their pregnancies deserve to hang?  Absolutely not.

I have, in practice, become a critic of both sides.  I am told by leftist friends that I "have changed" because I do not give them free passes for their hate and closed-mindedness, and all the while I am still being derided by conservatives for spreading "liberal propaganda."  But I am not a moderate.  I am still very much an extremist. I am extremely against anything that harms people, animals, or the Earth.  Ironically, it is not my positions which have changed, but the political world has changed around me.  Unfortunately, a political movement no longer exists which is robustly committed to non-violence and the uplift of the poor and oppressed.   A leftist movement exists which frequently loses its composure and advocates for political violence in fits of political rage and hopes to expand the size of the government, presumably investing it with the power to police the populace along the lines of the same principles with which they police and deride their families and friends - while oppressing the unborn in the name of women's rights.  A right wing movement exists which pays lip service to the ideals of reducing the size of government but all along stops at nothing to drive out minorities and engage in deadly wars for the benefit of unaccountable polluters and weapons makers.  There are, unbelievably, Christians on both sides.  But on neither side do I see Christ.

I believe that the American government is living through a crisis which it may not survive.  The right wing solution promises unbridled capitalism, in which corporations will run roughshod over national sovereignty and destroy all of our natural resources while keeping the people at gunpoint.  The left wing solution promises authoritarian socialism, in which minorities, particularly religious people, are likely to be persecuted as the hate and violence gets out of hand and the ideological purity gets harder and harder to achieve.  Neither solution is authentically democratic.  Neither solution is humane. 

But in both the Bible, and in history, there is one solution which seems to present itself.  It is such an unlikely and surprising solution that I have hesitated for a while to announce my belief in it.  That solution is monarchy. 

As Americans, we are so indoctrinated to accepted the republican form of government that suggesting monarchy seems to be a colossal step backward.   However, I am convinced that it is not.  That is because monarchy and democracy are not at odds.  A republican form of government is not the only democratic form of  government.  In fact, of the 20 most democratic nations in the world, 10 of them are monarchies.  This includes Norway, Sweden, and Denmark - which are not only democratic but are social democracies - with the same level of socialism (or higher) that supporters of Bernie Sanders dream of.  The United Kingdom is a monarchy, of course, and it has medicare for all through the National Health Service.  Australia and Canada are also under the British Crown. These are the very nations which leftists are so fond of holding up as examples.  But they have something that our republican United States threw off centuries ago - a royal family. 

As I have read the Bible and observed current events, I have become convinced that monarchy, though it certainly can be abused by evil kings or queens, is quite often the guarantor of a stable democracy or, in a word, justice.  In fact, as the colonial era ended around the world, particularly in Latin America, we have seen that the republican democracies which were established when the monarchy was thrown off have mostly been unstable.   Like our own government currently seems in danger of doing, they have imploded from within and chaos has reigned in the streets.   A monarchy, however, adds an element of stability to the government by providing a politically neutral head-of-state whose role it is to represent all of his or her subjects, not just the liberals or the conservatives. 

A republican democracy has the disadvantage of not being able to solve problems very quickly or very efficiently.  Every policy decision must be debated for months or years amid ever-growing levels of rancor before potential political solutions can be tested.   By contrast, a monarch has the ability of charting the course toward a just and humane future with amazing rapidity.  The monarch can declare the vision of where to move the country and the politicians can weigh in on how - but not if - that vision is achieved.  For pressing issues like climate change, perhaps this is what is most needed.

Let's face it - our republican democracy is in fact an oligarchy.  We do not have lords or nobles but we do have corporocrats, and our representatives are not accountable to us.  In fact, our current system all but guarantees that it is the most cutthroat power seekers who will obtain power.  At the top, we are being governed by psychopaths and narcissists.  And there are no checks or balances to keep this from continuing to be the case.   By contrast, when the head of state is selected from the ranks of a royal family, this means that the person who rules the country will be someone who was not particularly seeking power, but was nevertheless raised to have the values of a good ruler.

Monarchies do tend to draw their power from a common religious heritage and as such, are distasteful to those who are bent on having a secular democracy.  Given the checkered past of Christianity, not to mention of Christian kings, it is undoubtedly asking too much for the non-Christian to assent to the idea of having a church anoint a monarch to be the head of state.  Nonetheless, as a Christian myself, and one who understands that Christianity has been steadily maturing for two thousand years into a more and more enlightened and benevolent, tolerant religion, the notion is rather attractive to me.  Christianity has a lot of haters, and it is usually forgotten that Christianity is responsible for the invention of the modern hospital (in fact a Christian king, Justinian, was instrumental).  It is also usually forgotten that Christianity is responsible for the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 19th Century (again, by a Christian king - Dom Pedro II).  And although the Christian faith has had its share of bigots, change in cultural attitudes about marginalized cultural groups - including the LGBTQ+ community, has usually come from within Christian community, not from without it.  Today, many of the foremost fighters for LGBTQ+ rights are Christians.  Often, pastors.  Christians continue to be the most instrumental group in fighting slavery today: in fact, if one googles ways to help refugee children or victims of human trafficking, the first several hits take you to church-organized non-profits.  In cities throughout the world, if you look to see who it is that is helping the homeless and the hungry by manning shelters and soup kitchens, you will find Christians.  If you ever find yourself a few hundred dollars short of paying your electric bill or a medical bill, you probably have a local church within a few miles of your home who would be willing to make up the difference if you simply made the phone call to ask, as most churches do have discretionary funds which are explicitly earmarked for helping people in their community who need it.  If you happen to be one of the millions of Americans who struggle with addiction, I guarantee you there is a nearby church hosting  a recovery meeting.  You can say whatever you want about the Christian religion - and quite a few of us have had overbearing, strict Christian relatives who have reacted badly to some things as we have grown up -, but the fact remains that Christians are among the most giving and loving humans on the planet.  And we have proven in recent decades that we are capable of learning from our mistakes and improving upon past performance.

With all of that said, it is still true that in the United States there is unlikely to arise a new monarchy firmly rooted enough in our pan-Christian heritage as Catholics, Anglicans and Protestants to firmly represent us culturally (to say nothing of the many non-Christians which such a monarch would be expected to represent).  Personally, I believe that Christian unity is a necessity.  In my own Christian journey I have found that denominational differences are of significantly less importance than people give them.  But I do not believe it is the will of Christ that the body of Christ should stay fractured forever.   Jesus prayed in John 17 that we would all be one.  Looking at the doctrines of Christianity with an eye to which doctrines are most widely held and have been held the longest, the fact emerges that Protestantism is a relatively new development and that Protestantism is both the newcomer and the minority version of Christianity.  I have found exquisite beauty in the traditional teachings of the historical churches - Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox - and these three not only agree with each other far more than with the various Protestant sects agree with each other - but these three are also the churches which have successfully ordained monarchs.  The Anglican Communion ordains the monarchs of the United Kingdom, and the Catholic and Orthodox churches have ordained the various monarchs of Europe.  As the various monarchs have grown up inculcated in the rich teaching of the historic churches, they have inevitably taken up the mantle of public service as though it were a duty to God.  The multitude of Scripture verses which are written by kings and for kings give them a strong template of how to rule with justice and mercy toward the poor and downtrodden. 

The idea will not easily catch on, but nevertheless as a citizen who can think and feel and, most importantly, pray, I begin to long more and more that perhaps the breach can be repaired between the United States and its mother Great Britain.  As I look at the life and example of Queen Elizabeth II who yet reigns, and as I investigate the causes which are currently championed by Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne (causes such as organic farming and alternative healthcare), I find myself wishing that their wise leadership might quell the great unrest that exists within republican democracy.  I find myself increasingly led to declare myself an American monarchist.

 

Wayless Wander

idle minds, restless race
hurry hinders; hurry's haste.
wayless wander, windless waste.

broken banter, stolen space
worry whimpers; worry's waste.
How do Love and Mercy taste?