As a minister, a religious leader, I have been struggling to understand the response of people of faith to our national politics. Celebration of the National Day of Prayer at the White House this morning featured the predictable conflation of American national pride and God’s purpose. “Faith and Opportunity” was the President’s pairing of the day.

As we watch the moral train wreck of this presidency, I find myself yearning for a return. A return not to some fictional lost Eden of racial and religious purity, but a return to national discourse and decision-making in which moral imperatives are valued at least as much as self-interest.

I have to begin by acknowledging that politicians from Thomas Jefferson (remember Sally Hemmings) to FDR, Kennedy and Clinton are not poster children for traditional moral values. Donald Trump is simply more crass.

And it is important to remember that the economic interests of the few have always faired quite well in this country regardless of the person or party in power. The Trump regime is simply more transparent in transferring wealth to the already rich at the expense of those on the bottom rungs of the ladder.

But while both of those things are true, there has always been a countervailing aspiration to accountability and honesty and care that has not won out at every turn, but has always been an espoused value. “We the people,” who honor our shared values and want our common success…that has been who we have said we were, even when our actions betrayed that hope. We are in danger, it seems to me, of losing that moral compass. We are in danger of accepting the “Art of the Deal” as our national gospel.

Michael Gorson, writing in this month’s Atlantic (“How Evangelicals Lost Their Way”):

“Every strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the President of the United States.” Ditto: sexual infidelity and even sexual assault. Ditto: unalloyed greed. Ditto: the end of truth as a value. Ditto it may even be: betrayal of country.

None of these are disqualifying. Apparently.

Reaction to our nation’s increasing pluralism and diversity, the “End of White Christian America,” has been proclaimed as the reason for the seemingly unshakable support for Trump among his “base.”

That base has demonstrated the willingness to jettison their “family values” and moral frameworks to try to turn back the demographic reality in which we all now live. The return to that lost Eden where white Christians were in charge of politics and business and culture is, for them, apparently worth sacrificing deeply held moral views and closing their ears to most of the Gospel they claim as authority.

The Christian chaplain of the House of Representatives was fired for quoting the Gospel in his prayer.

Gorson concludes: “Christianity is love of neighbor, or it has lost its way.”

I believe that we are losing our way. I believe that there is so much being done now that will need to be undone to get this nation back on track. I also believe that our acts of resistance are critical acts of witness to a more hopeful future.

We need, I believe, a moral revival. Not a revival of traditional morals, but a revival of morality as a basis for our national life together.

Beloved Community. The Common Good. We the People…all of the people.

The news this morning, filled with reports of more and more lies, leaves me yearning not for a national day of prayer, but of practice.

“Practice,” as dancer Martha Graham tells us, “means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, or desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”

Practice is in the service of our vision. It is our moral vision that requires repair.

Blessings,

Bill