Loyalty to authority vs obedience to the truth
All it would take to end the corruption and madness that has plunged our nation into chaos is for half a dozen Republicans in Congress to speak out against Donald Trump and thus give enough courage to the rest of the party to abandon him before he pulls us all into the lake of fire entirely. But they cannot. Even when he robs taxpayers of $1.776 billion to pay terrorists who tried to overthrow our democratic process on his behalf. Trump has done far worse than King George III ever did, and still the Republicans are handcuffed to his mast.
They are trapped not just by their addiction to power, but because they have been discipled their entire lives to comply with authority and repress their cognitive dissonance. They were doomed by their evangelical Sunday school classrooms where they learned to play along with the official story even when it doesn’t make sense.
Donald Trump is performing his appointed role in this hour of final judgment: to sift through humanity like wheat to see who is loyal to authority and who is obedient to truth. Many evangelical Christians are damned by their inability to distinguish between these two things, since for them truth is whatever the man in the pulpit says about the book that is the fruit of knowledge of good and evil which gives its holder the authority to speak for God.
Every serpent who thumps the Bible while he preaches wields absolute authority that cannot be questioned. And that is how millions of people are discipled from childhood not to question authority, which has led us to this moment in which the fig tree of our democracy withers just before its 250th anniversary.
Indeed Donald Trump depicted the nature of evangelical authority perfectly when he teargassed the black people out of Lafayette Square during the protests of George Floyd’s crucifixion in order to stage a photo of him holding the Bible as a prop in front of a church he never attended. I wrote a poem about it called “The Serpent’s Fruit.” That was the moment when the ancient story was unveiled for me.
The curse of the serpent’s fruit is the religious authority that interposes itself between humanity and God. That’s what converts the earth from an abundant garden into an extractive plantation, establishes patriarchal hierarchy between the genders, and sets humanity at war with nature. Adam and Eve’s fall wasn’t a historical event involving a talking snake; it was an allegorical prophecy about what is always happening. We are seeing the illumination of this fruit’s curse in the inability of “biblical” culture warriors to abandon corrupt authority in obedience to truth.
Obedience to truth cannot be instilled in people who have spent their lives performing on eggshells for a God who metes out eternal destiny based on correct beliefs. Those whose orthodoxy boxes must be checked in every utterance will never leave their straight and narrow path to find burning bushes or angels to wrestle on the beach at night. The orthodox cannot be prophets until they stop coloring between the lines.
If truth is understood fundamentally as authoritarian proclamation and not the infinitely idiosyncratic mystery of reality that transcends all verbal expression, then by its nature truth is the party line of whichever orthodoxy is unquestioned. It is not reality as it presents itself; it is the conclusive explanation of the reality I do not otherwise examine by the authority I do not question. Authoritarian epistemology makes truth an assertion of black and white clarity that demands loyalty and the repression of all objections.
No brain indoctrinated into this authoritarian epistemology compartmentalizes it between the spiritual and political. Just as the pastor is always correct because the Bible is always correct, so too the party the pastor supports is always correct, which means its leader is always correct. That is the deadly trap authoritarian epistemology creates. And its fruit is in full bloom.
Obedience to truth requires something very different than the loyalty to authority which evangelicals are taught to equate with it. To actually obey truth requires my ability to question the official story when I see things that don’t add up. It requires curiosity above all else. Closely examining conflicting perspectives with critical thinking. Wanting to understand what motivates people I’m told to condemn and hate. Refusing to settle for generalizations and caricatures.
Jesus doesn’t model loyalty to religious authority. He models obedience to truth. It was his obedience to truth that caused him to heal on the sabbath, defend loose women against the puritans who judged them, destroy the property of merchants who exploited the temple, and publicly lambast the religious authorities. All of these acts involved being disloyal to authority for the sake of truth.
That was why he was crucified. To take up your cross and follow Jesus means to risk everything in obedience to the truth, which is incompatible with loyalty to the party line of any orthodoxy. As Donald Trump continues to drag our nation into the chaos of his dementia, he will continue to reveal the difference between those who play along with the official story out of loyalty to authority and those who refuse to obey anything but the truth itself.