Praying for a Change of Heart

Two of the most enduring holiday entertainments involve a change in the main character’s heart. In the upteen versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (as seen in this image), malignant miser Ebenezer Scrooge repents after late-night visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a kind of American Christmas Carol, pulls salt-of-the-earth George Bailey from a fatal jump off a bridge, to which he’s been driven by Bedford Falls’ equivalent of Scrooge, banker Henry Potter.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, American Roman Catholics were accustomed to praying for “the conversion of Russia,” the Soviet state spearheading an atheistic assault on  religion.

This alarming Christmas season might at last induce Americans—including Catholics who constituted the key swing group in the past three Presidential elections—to pray for another dramatic change of heart: Donald Trump’s shift away from the authoritarian path he has followed more assiduously than ever before.

It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley has embraced Trump in his second term, as no American politician has so embraced one of the tech industry’s biggest mantras: “move fast and break things,” as when he quickly demolished the East Wing of the White House.

In the last two weeks, however, several incidents have increasingly called into question what PBS Newshour commentator David Brooks termed the President’s lack of “moral acuity,” including:

* telling a Bloomberg News reporter who was asking a follow-up question, “Quiet, piggy”;

* referring to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as “seriously retarded” in a Truth Social post, leading to a tripling in use of the slur on social media in the hours afterward;

* adding his name to the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, only hours after its board (whose directors were stacked in his favor) voted him the honor;

* affixing negative plaques to White House West Colonnade signs of prior presidents he loathes (e.g., Joe Biden was “the worst President in American history”);

* alleging that the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son Nick was “reportedly due to the anger he caused by others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction … known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME."

Let’s spell out the unprecedented nature of these remarks and actions:

*No other President has had public buildings or monuments (re)named in their honor while in office, and in most cases this occurred after their deaths.

*No other President has publicly derided the physical attributes of female reporters.

*No other President has bandied the word “retarded” about in public to deride another person’s intelligence, like the kind of 1950s middle-schooler who used to be called “fresh.”

*No other President has falsely ascribed a family’s private tragedy—arising from one member’s addiction or depression—to public opposition to White House policy.

None of these incidents touch on policy matters. They relate only to Trump’s character, or lack of it. For that reason, in no way can his diehard defenders default to the “what-about” option they have invariably employed about his opponents.

A relative asked me recently how I thought history would judge Trump. Though I told him this would depend to a large extent on Trump himself, I think now that the larger question is how history will judge us—especially my fellow Roman Catholics—for not just putting him in power in the first place, but returning him to the Oval Office, when his instinct for unchecked power had become obvious with the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

For years, I groaned at the prospect of sermons touching in any way on government policy or officeholders. These all seemed too divisive, too oblivious to the compromises needed to advance legislation.

But Trump has fundamentally changed the situation. There is no longer any realm of life—including sports or entertainment—that is beyond his commentary and befoulment. 

To borrow what John F. Kennedy said about the racism undergirding segregation in the 1960s: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

Trump’s remarks and actions beg for a forthright condemnation by the American archbishops, not the muted, passive voice-laden admonitions of their recent statement on violations of immigrants’ rights.

Over the past decade, few matters have dismayed me as much as the affection held by many Catholics for Trump. 

Just a few weeks ago, for instance, a fellow member of a Catholic group to which I belong complained that the President had been “investigated to death,” ignoring the fact that his political rise was made possible because local officials hadn’t investigated him enough early in his career.

That immunity from prosecution (including most GOP senators refusing to go along with impeachment) only ensured his current impunity in defying even legal efforts to stop him.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States cannot escape its own responsibility for the disaster now unfolding.

By emphasizing the overwhelming importance of outlawing same-sex marriage, transgender designation, abortion, or even contraception, it didn’t merely narrow the focus of what Joseph Cardinal Bernardin had rightly termed the “seamless garment of life” but effectively tore it to pieces. Other issues, such as civil rights, immigration, climate change, and economic justice, were inevitably downplayed.

The point man for this approach, and the one best exemplifying its dangers, is the now-retiring Timothy Cardinal Dolan. As President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) from 2010 to 2013, he led national church policy and advocacy, including opposition to Obamacare regulations calling for religious-affiliated institutions like hospitals and schools to provide contraception for employees.

More recently, as a recent New York Times article noted, he not only served on Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission” but joked in a private phone call that he spoke with the President more than with his own mother.

That friendliness and solicitude were the bonds that ensured the prelate’s silence when Trump engaged in humorless insults of Democratic rivals for the Presidency at the 2016 and 2024 Al Smith Dinners, occasions normally given easygoing bipartisan joshing.

“Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God,” Times columnist Maureen Dowd correctly observed. “The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith.”

Last week, when Brooks decried Trump’s lack of “moral acuity,” he elaborated on why the President's recent unhinged behavior is so disturbing: “Authoritarian leaders know that a certain part of the population likes it when they see the great leader idolized and venerated…. It is a form of psychological amassing of power to turn yourself into a demigod.”

Brooks likened such acts to those perpetrated by Mao Tse-Tung and Joseph Stalin. But there is another historical comparison that Dolan and like-minded colleagues on the USCCB might better understand: In abrasiveness, vindictiveness, financial and sexual corruption, and megalomania, the President is the modern equivalent of the pagan Roman emperors in the days of the Apostles.

Those emperors engaged in self-aggrandizement even as they persecuted the early Christians. These days, Trump has pursued self-preservation and self-aggrandizement even as he disregarded the civil liberties of undocumented aliens, many of whom are members of the very church led by Dolan and company.

In ignoring Trumpism’s increasingly open appeals to nativism, bigotry, and authoritarianism, the more conservative archbishops overlook a glaring 20^th-century dark spot in American Catholicism: the inflammatory radio broadcasts of Fr. Charles Coughlin that fueled the rise of the Christian Front in the 1930s.

They can rest assured, however, that American Jews still remember that the church hierarchy did nothing to stop Coughlin until the U.S. was at war with the Axis powers in 1942. Complicity, now as then, will breed consequences.

Quote of the Day (Alan Brinkley, on Historians’ Treatment of Conservatism)

“While historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas.” —Columbia University professor of history Alan Brinkley (1949-2019), “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, April 1994

The history department at Columbia University was one of the principal factors attracting me to the school in the late 1970s. Looking back on my four years being taught by its excellent faculty, I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, okay, maybe one. Because he didn’t arrive at Morningside Heights until nearly a decade after my graduation, I never had a chance to take a course with or even attend a lecture by Alan Brinkley.

Brinkley—who died on Monday at age 70—quickly became one of the university’s most acclaimed teachers, and even, despite his professed distaste for academic administration, even provost of the school for a couple of years.

His influence on a generation at the university, then, was considerable. But so was his impact on how historians came to view liberalism, conservatism, and the catastrophe that redefined these movements for nearly the next century: the Great Depression.

Brinkley’s article for American Historical Review might not have significantly kick-started the intensive study of conservatism that has occurred in the last two decades (surely, the electoral success of Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with that). 

But it instilled a sense in academe that conservatism should be examined in all its varieties, with at least something approaching the same rigor and seriousness accorded liberalism.

But Brinkley had already exerted influence early in his career through his first book, Voices of Protest (1982), an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis that ended up winning him the National Book Award for history. 

Though conceived as an analysis of two populist movements of the past—Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society and Fr. Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice—it should be read now as a warning of the discontents with the latent potential to disrupt the American political landscape that was finally realized in the last Presidential race:

“This casual mingling of themes commonly associated with opposite political poles did not originate with the Long and Coughlin movements; nor did it end with them. The populists, from whom both men derived so much ideological strength, had exhibited similar contradictions; so did later political phenomena: the George Wallace movement of the 1960s and the New Right of the 1980s, which combined populist rhetoric with cultural conservatism. Underlying all such movements in varying degrees has been a common impulse: the fear of concentrated power, the traditional American resistance to being governed—whether by private interests or by public institutions.”

And this sentence seems especially ominous: 

“Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics."