Normalizing Corruption

we built this city

It’s one of those quotes.

The words live in my head rent free. They roll around in there waiting for the next encounter or experience that validates their truthfulness. I first heard the quote long before I experienced it or understood the context or implications of the statement. I’ve repeated it so many times that people familiar with my writing will immediate check out on hearing me quote this again.

Nevertheless.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton dropped this little nugget in a letter to a Bishop Creighton in or around 1887. The important context is that Acton is making this observation about Church leaders and Political leaders. One might say, the more power one has the greater the corruption tends to be. It’s a proverb, a saying of the wise, and history keeps proving it true.

Humans don’t do well with power.

Originally, Acton was applying it to Bishop Creighton’s plea that religious and political leaders, by virtue of their office and the virtues their offices suppose, should be given the benefit of the doubt, or even their poor choices and immoral behavior be excused. Acton wrote Creighton, “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

Recently I was talking with a couple of my children about the well-known religious leaders in the small pond of religious leaders in which we’ve been swimming for the last 40 years. If the same number of leaders had the same number of scandals followed by the same number of cover-ups and “restorations to power” in, say, a local private school, you would warn everyone you know not to go to that school. Rather than “a few bad apples” we would reasonably suspect that the orchard was full of poison.

In the same conversation we were talking about the number of Charismatic and Christian leaders that applaud and support the current political administration of the United States despite the incredible graft and abuses of power. One of the common refrains of this second Trump administration has been, “Don’t listen to what he says, look at what he does.” The refrain came in reaction to the very un-Jesusy, obviously corrupt, immature and hateful things he tweeted or said – BUT – his supporters said, ignore all that and look at his groovy policies. The problem becomes apparent in the last half of the first year of his second term – Trump is doing some very corrupt and evil stuff (evil in the sense that Christianity has classically defined the term). The office has not sanctified him, as people like Representative Susan Collins once hoped. He has, in fact, managed to denigrate the once respected vocation.

Reflecting on Trump’s first term (and this is where I bring us back to Church), author Kristen Kobes DuMez, writing about the overwhelming evangelical support for candidate Trump, wrote, “Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.” (Kristin Kobes DuMez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation) In short, the Church is hot for power.

Professor of Religion, Randall Balmer, in his 2021 book, Bad Faith, makes the following observations – (and I know you must feel like I’m talking about politics but I promise you, I’m writing about the Church) writes, “There is a kind of tragic continuity in the Religious Right’s embrace of Donald Trump. A movement that began with the defense of racial segregation in the late 1970s climbed into bed with a vulgar demagogue who recognizes “some good people” among white supremacists, who equivocates about denouncing a representative of the Ku Klux Klan, and who admonished a white supremacist terrorist group to “stand by” in advance of the 2020 election. If racism is America’s original sin, politically conservative evangelicals, with their continuing support for their champion, have been loath to seek redemption.” (Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right) Balmer goes on to say, “Single-issue voting on abortion makes white evangelicals complicit on a whole range of policies that would be anathema to nineteenth-century evangelical reformers, not to mention the Bible itself. How is a ruthless exclusionary policy toward immigrants and refugees in any way consistent with scriptural mandates to welcome the stranger and treat the foreigner as one of your own? How does environmental destruction and indifference to climate change honor God’s creation? One of evangelicals’ signature issues in the nineteenth century was support for “common schools” because they provided a boost for the children of those less fortunate; Trump’s secretary of education (who professes to be an evangelical) spent her adult life seeking systematically to undermine, if not destroy, public education.” The biblical analogy – the Church is all too happy to trade its birthright for a bowl of really good stew. (Genesis 25:29-34) Or to put it another way, the Church is hot for power.

And power corrupts. Not a little or even a lot. It corrupts absolutely. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but in the end we will become, in C.S. Lewis’ words, “immortal horrors.”

There’s a moment in the story of Israel when they have become so corrupt as a nation that it has become impossible for the people of the world to see the beauty and goodness of the God they claim to worship. King after king of Israel sought after illegitimate power until the whole nation had become like an unfaithful wife – or as the prophet Jeremiah describes them, “You are like a wild donkey, sniffing the wind at mating time. Who can restrain her lust? Those who desire her don’t need to search, for she goes running to them!” Jeremiah was immediately canceled for being anti-semitic. Nevertheless, the story insists that God turned Israel over to their lust for power and they became the b*tch of Babylon.

I share that little history lesson to give some context to some words of Jesus. Speaking to his own disciples, Jesus tells them that if people reject them as they come in peace and humility to announce the kingdom of God and heal the sick, that “…the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah will be better off than such a town on the judgment day.” I want to extrapolate from that this thought – if the Church’s lust for power and disregard for the victims of religious leaders and religious systems isn’t met with some justice, God is going to have a lot of explaining to do to Israel and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Our problems aren’t the result of some bad apples. The whole orchard is full of poison. We’ve built a system that lusts after power. A system that centers people with wealth and power and marginalizes the people traditionally marginalized by every other Power that’s come before us. The people Jesus means to save when he says his purpose was described by Isaiah, “…to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come” are the people the Church seems comfortable with deporting. The present-day evangelical and charismatic systems works to protect those who do harm and to villainize those who bring forward legitimate and provable claims of abuse and corruption.

At the end of her book, Jesus and John Wayne, DuMez reluctantly added this sentence, “What was once done might also be undone.” I’m not sure she’s right. I think of the line from the movie Buckaroo Banzai that Buckaroo, in the middle of doing brain surgery with a colleague tells him, “No, no, no. Don’t tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.” I suspect that the pursuit of power and proximity to power and bullying leadership and protecting our kings has become so central to the system, so intertwined, that it can’t simply be undone. It would be interesting and, I think beautiful, to gather a bunch of artists and poets and writers and feed them and fund them for a week of imagining and dreaming together and seeing what they might come up with from the roots up that might offer us a better way, a more Jesusy way, non-corruptive way.

Of course the central problem remains, artists never know how to make money…