The Golden Ass

The prevailing story of America is one of freedom, equality, and “democracy.” Some, however, say that we cannot tell the story of America without telling a story of racism. White people tend to respond to this with utter offense. There is a divide here that appears irreconcilable. Election2020 seems to be confirming our division. How could so many white people still be voting for Trump after what we’ve seen for the last four years, right?

I saw someone say this today: “I don’t think it’s as simple as calling them all racists and religious zealots. There’s a fear or longing they have that we’ve got to be able to tap into somehow…” Black and minority voices legitimately remind us that it’s not rightly their burden to do that work. I think it is part of my work, though. After all, I needed a conversion of sorts myself to even begin to “see” the story of my own racism. So, I feel at least somewhat qualified to somehow try to “tap into” what’s going on. And, where will we be with no sense of mutual understanding? So...

I have a dear Catholic friend from rural Charlottesville. If there was ever someone who revealed the truth of “I don’t think it’s as simple as calling them all racists and religious zealots,” it would be him. He and I have been dear friends for 22 years, precisely because he’s “good people.” He’s not a hateful person. But he also legitimately thinks Trump isn’t racist. How is that possible? What world is he living in? If he were in your living room with an elephant, what could he be looking at, and in what direction, to not only not see the elephant but to look me directly in the face and tell me there’s no elephant?

Let me offer two anecdotal answers that will at first seem totally nonsensical and out of thin air: eggs, and the Eucharist. He’s passionate about both. He doesn’t eat eggs from the grocery store. He refuses. He only eats eggs laid by the chickens on his farm. And, he doesn’t flavor them with processed foods from the grocery store, either, such as cheese or salt. He savors the “natural” flavor of the eggs themselves. Connected to his love for the eggs laid by the chickens on the land on which he dwells, I believe or at least suspect, is his passion for the Eucharist. He got emotional last night telling me repeatedly essentially that the “ACTUAL body and blood” of Jesus in the Eucharist is the only way to salvation. He put great stress on the word “actual.”

He sees the “World Economic Forum” and “The Great Reset”, progressivism and globalism as evil threats to healthy society that are and can only be explained and driven by Satan. At this point, it may be EVEN EASIER for victims of racial and patriarchal trauma everywhere to dismiss him as a racist misogynist, but please bear with me here, if you are able.

Let me suggest that this love for eggs and this aspiration to the “actual body and blood” of Jesus can stand as representatives of the positive, “good” hope or vision that could possibly drive people to “miss the elephant in the room” and vote for a man who, to the rest of us, is obviously dangerous. In eggs and Eucharist, I think we can see glimpses not of what they’re blind to but of what they see and want. And, perhaps it’s actually difficult – for anyone - to name (Neo-Thomists, don’t @ me). For all Trump voters, it won’t be represented in eggs and Eucharist. The specifics of the story will be different for many. For many, it might go by something like “connection to nature.” For others, it might be “the natural way” to bear children and family (minus contraceptives and abortion)? For all I know, it might be hiking for some people.

Out of this vision and hope for connection to and identification with the land and the earth comes a dread, a fear, an utter and total rejection of what is SENSED as its loss. To gain the globe is to lose the land. So, the further “globalism’s” territory spreads, the greater the rural Trump voter VISCERALLY senses dislocation from the land. And, this is difficult to name and articulate. I would even suggest that the Conservative’s rhetoric of “freedom” may “actually” ring most true for rural voters as a sense of binding to the beckoning of the land.

The kicker for me, then, is that the white rural Trump voters and those traumatized by their votes essentially share the same trauma. Those who dissociatively and aspirationally insist on narratives of freedom and equality are actually telling the same story as those who give witness to their own racial (and patriarchal) trauma. What do I mean by that?

“Historically, this is so obvious as to seem trite, but…while almost imperceptible, [this displacement] was earth shattering…It will not be easy to articulate the material reality of displacement because it is the articulation of a loss from within the loss itself. To fully tell it requires the very thing that is lacking, indigenous voices telling their own stories of transformation through current concepts of space, identity, and land. Equally difficult is the attempt to peer into a theological mistake so wide, so comprehensive that it has disappeared, having expanded to cover the horizon of modernity itself...Vilgnano [a 16th century Portuguese Jesuit priest on a mission to spread Christianity to Japan] entered this moment of dislocation by choice, the slave by force.…That new space…meant utter disruption for the African. Gone was the earth, the ground, spaces and places that facilitated his identity…” – Willie Jennings, pp. 37-39, The Christian Imagination: Theology And The Origins of Race

One entered by choice, the other by force, but both DID enter “this moment of dislocation.” And, it was and remains traumatic for both. All trauma leaves us aspiring to health and healing. “Gone was the earth, the ground…” This is, perhaps, the rural voter’s visceral fear of the “progression” of globalism. This shared trauma may also thus even partly explain why the contours of "socialism" or "communism" become so nebulous in the linguistic world and practices of conservatives?