Can God forgive America? I cannot.though I know I should

America sold itself for 30 pieces of silver

… most egregious sins in history, committed by those who call themselves “Christians”

http://hughbradyconrad.blogspot.com/2021/01/can-god-forgive-america-i-cannot.html

21 Then Peter approaching asked him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?”

22 Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.

Matthew: Chapter 18

Last year, I wrote about a distinguished Christian who begged to be forgiven because of his animus toward Donald Trump. He wrote that he needed to forgive Trump, whom he considers to be a despicable person. 

However, the greater question is whether God can forgive more than 70 million people who voted for Trump, and the attack on America that occurred just over a week ago by deranged people who were told to attack America to keep him in power. 

It is difficult to forgive demagogues, but Trump is more than a demagogic. 

Forgiveness for me, not for Trump

Here is some of what Michael Leach wrote about Trump and forgiveness in October,

Trump hasn't hurt me personally. I have a good life. My wife, Vickie, and I are perfectly safe as long as we continue to hide in our house and wear hazmat suits and ask our children and grandchildren not to come anywhere near us. I don't like it but I'm not upset about it.

Thing is, the president has hurt thousands of people. Especially the dead ones he may have saved by telling the truth. And their families. And all those children sleeping on cement in cages near the border. And their mothers who still don't know where they are. 

At best, Trump has devastated families, deepened division, ignited violence, made a mockery of decency, damaged our democracy, and now threatens our coming election. O, how that bothers me! …

Forgiveness is the only answer.

Jesus said, after his friends abandoned him, the government condemned him, and bad cops crucified him, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." 

Maybe Trump can't help doing what he does. After all, he was raised by a tyrannical father, had an emotionally absent mother, and learned survival of the fittest. Isn't he, like all of us, just doing what he thinks he has to do to protect his sense of self lest he completely disappear? Surely his mind contains a crypt of terror that fills him with such dread that he projects that terror into the world. 

I get it, but I don't buy it.

Michael Leach, “I need to forgive Donald Trump,” National Catholic Reporter, October 16, 2020

Founding Fathers committed America’s original sin

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, it was such a noble document that countries throughout the world emulated it as the greatest expression of freedom in history. 

Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal” and that each of us were entitled to unalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Such noble verbiage, but such hypocrisy because it allowed so many of those people to remain in slavery — called them 6/10th of a human being — and it deliberately did not say that “men and women” are created equal. 

Just men.

As one writer astutely put the problem in 2018, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were both severely tainted documents,

The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war. 

The Declaration of Independence had a specific purpose: to cut the ties between the American colonies and Great Britain and establish a new country that would take its place among the nations of the world. But thanks to the vaulting language of its famous preamble, the document instantly came to mean more than that. Its confident statement that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment. Yet it was written by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, and released into 13 colonies that all, to one degree or another, allowed slavery. 

The Constitution, which united the colonies turned states, was no less tainted. It came into existence only after a heated argument over—and fateful compromise on—the institution of slavery. Members of the revolutionary generation often cast that institution as a necessary evil that would eventually die of its own accord, and they made their peace with it to hold together the new nation. 

Annette Gordon-Reed, “America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the legacy of White Supremacy,” Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2018

But, as I have written before, Thomas Jefferson was a deeply tainted man himself despite being a great writer and leader. He not only allowed slavery, he owned slaves and had an affair with a mulatto slave of his, a union that produced six children. 

As a young college student in 1970, I was shocked when I was told about Sally Hemings and her relationship with Jefferson, whom as a young boy had idolized. 

Eight presidents owned slaves, and while most considered themselves Deists and not Christians, they did think of themselves as good people. 

They were wrong, just as those who think that Donald Trump is a good man are not good people.

People who are racists, demagogues, and amoral and immoral human beings are not good, yet many Americans who allege that they are “Christians” and “followers of Jesus Christ” ignore the fact that he is a brutal, flawed human being who will never enter God’s kingdom. 

The forgiveness of God

God’s forgiveness is much more stringent than that of the Catholic Church in which I was raised. 

“Bless me father for I have sinned, I am a racist and condemned a president by lying about where he was born in order to incite the racists in the country to my way of thinking.”

“Say an act of contrition and five Our Fathers and Hail Marys” and you will be forgiven. 

Somehow, I think that God will hold people like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and Hirohito and those who engaged in World War II to a higher standard than that. 

And, he will hold Donald Trump to a higher standard than that. 

And, he will hold America and the alleged Christian leaders who love Donald Trump and encourage their followers to vote for him to a higher standard than that. 

Forgiving America

Which is why I cannot forgive America and all of its amoral people for Donald Trump. 

Trump is America’s second grievous sin, a virulent racist and demagogue who brought out the worst in use, praised the anti-Semitic Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville and threw small children into cages at the border, separating them from their parents … and God will not be willing to forgive those who have enabled him with a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys. 

Nor can I.