There are Christians and then there are Christians

Well, that was quite an election night nnIn a couple of months, the 2027 Congress will face a heaping plate of issues and a recalcitrant president bent on retribution. A mere three days after the election, he fired Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and appointed Stephen Miller, who is fueled by cruelty and hatred.

Congress’s work record is abysmal. Until the election, the House of Representatives has been in session for a total of 72 days this year, while still drawing a paycheck. Nice work if you can get it.

Mike Johnson, outgoing Speaker of the House, is responsible for calling all the recesses. He was a young Congressman when he took the job, and his inexperience and obeisance to 45/47 made him cowardly.

For someone who claimed that his elevation to speakership was a God thing, God must want him back in Louisiana on the regular. Johnson told “Focus on the Family” that “God chooses the lowly things to confound the wise. It’s God [that] gets the glory when the unlikely person is elevated.”

I was raised in a religious tradition that became ever more evangelical, and I recognize this verse. But being elevated does not mean jetting home whenever things get tough on the House floor.

I also know the verse: “Faith without works is dead,” and you ain’t been workin’ much, Mike. And when you have, you haven’t been giving much thought to the needs of the lowly in our country. I guess you think it’s up to God to elevate them, too. Is that why you decided there wasn’t much that needed doing in your job?

But enough about Mike.

There is genuine, good news (and for those in the know, Good News) to share.

Despite gerrymandering and massive amounts of Musk money, Democrats prevailed like a rolling, mighty river. Among the many new Democratic faces going to Congress, five of them are pastors and one is a seminarian.

How this sits with MAGA, who tried to brand itself as the Christian be-all and end-all to save the country, is interesting to watch. What’s also interesting is that in Project 2025 the name of Jesus appears nowhere. Not once.

The word “Christian” appears seven times, but as a cultural/historical reference or to show examples of how “wokeism” is coming for Christian schools or how Covid policies kept people from going to church “on the holiest day of the Christian calendar.”

The impetus of Project 2025 is, of course, Christian nationalism, which is to say not Christian at all. Their screed is about power and control placed in the hands of a few, rich, white men. It will never cease to astound me how such people have no understanding of Jesus, upon whom Christianity was, after all, founded.

Here’s a delicious irony: For anyone wishing to leave Jesus out of politics, that’s exactly what the Project 2025 geniuses were doing. They want the appearance of being Christian without actually encountering its source. Instead, their foundational assumptions are  grounded in punishment, vengeance, and coercion.

For a while, though, it looked like their plan was working.

Then, along comes James Talarico, who will be the first Texas Democrat to win a US Senate seat since 1988. A seminary student, he drove MAGA crazy saying that God is non-binary, but he also talked about the Great Commandment, which is to love God completely with a “second which is like unto it” to love your neighbor. He also harked back to the Old Testament prophet, Micah, who instructed people to “act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

For MAGA, them was fightin’ words because that’s not warrior-talk. To them, it’s “soft.” Moreover, Talarico’s voice is soft, prompting the president and vice-president to insinuate that Talarico was gay.

What was that nothing-burger supposed to accomplish when 45/47’s Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, and Peter Thiel, political donor and mentor to JD Vance, are gay. As a young man, the president himself was coached by Roy Cohn, a gay man. The hypocrisy was hard to miss.

As they say in the South, that dog won’t hunt. And it didn’t.

In addition to Talarico, there is Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor who will be the first US Democratic Senator from Kansas since 1932. He recognizes people’s struggles, but he doesn’t charge his language with domination-speak or enemy-mongering. “I listen carefully, I care deeply, and I fight for people,” Hamilton said on the PBS NewsHour recently. That doesn’t sound like the kind of preacher Pete Hegseth would recognize.

And in Iowa, there is Lutheran pastor Sarah Trone Garriott whose faith drives her to “do hard things and show up for my community.” As a state senator, she invited leaders of non-Christian faiths to offer prayers on the Senate floor. This is markedly different from Christian nationalism which draws circles around who is “in” and who is not. And now she’s headed to Washington.

Iowa’s new Democratic governor, Rob Sand, is not a seminarian or a pastor, but a guy who said on the campaign trail that “Jesus is for the little guy,” which, if you have any passing acquaintance with the New Testament, is incontrovertibly true. I can only hope Mike Johnson heard that.

All of these public servants have spoken about seeing the humanity in other people, which is what Jesus did, a concept that the president seems unable to grasp, and that Stephen Miller seems intent on squashing.

I confess that I struggle mightily to see a spark of the divine in Miller. If you can find it, please show me.

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.