Kamala Harris has been accused by Trump of being the “anti-Christ.” Subsequently, some of his followers have argued that Harris, if elected President of the United States, will be responsible for the slaughter of millions of children as she tries to get Roe vs Wade reinstated. She has also allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood across the US border, and they are all rapists and murderers.
On the other hand, the Harris camp points out that, in the Christian scriptures, the devil is called the “Father of Lies,” and Trump is seen as an unrepentant liar. He has deceived half the population of the United States with his lies, spews racism and hatred, is obsessed with power, wants to be the most powerful person in the world, and tried to destroy democracy by inciting the January 6 attempt to overthrow the US government.
In either case, although both claim to be Christian, they are promoting the exact opposite of Christ’s teaching to “love your enemies.” They both are preaching the anti-gospel by demonizing their opponents.
Rene Girard (1923-2015), a French philosopher, claimed that whenever things go wrong in a society, the political leaders will try to gain or hold onto power by scapegoating some group, that is, proclaiming the group is the cause of all the society’s problems. Therefore, the solution is to banish or kill off that group, and then all will be well again. This was Hitler’s basic strategy in the Second World War: the Jewish race was the cause of all of Germany’s problems and, therefore, must be eliminated.
“Scapegoat” is an interesting word. Its roots come from the ancient Jewish practice of, once a year, having the High Priest pray and lay his hands on the head of a goat, thus symbolically transferring all the sins of the Israelites from the previous year onto the goat, which was then banished to die in the desert. Then, everyone celebrates being cleansed of their sins – until their sins start to cause problems again.
Scapegoating works in a perverse way in any culture because it allows all the pent-up fear, anger and hatred of that culture to be focused on a persecuted and usually defenceless and innocent minority group. It also conveniently allows the persecuting group to escape looking at their own sins as the cause of the culture’s problems and take responsibility for the culture’s flaws.
The first step in scapegoating is to dehumanize your chosen enemy by calling them denigrating names such as ”anti-Christ.” So, they are both scapegoating the other party. Neither Trump nor Harris is the anti-Christ. They are limited human beings like the rest of us who are convinced their own point of view is right and simultaneously choosing not to see anything positive in their opponent.
The Trump camp has been emphasizing as their main argument that when Trump was president, there were no wars and no inflation, as if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were personally responsible for the wars in Ukraine and Israel, and as if inflation was not a consequence of the government giving out billions of free dollars to keep the economy afloat during the Covid shutdown.
The Harris camp has been pressing as their main argument that Trump is a fascist, and if he is elected with total legal immunity, it will be the end of women’s rights and of democracy.
It is far too late, but it might have helped if both of them had meditated on and tried to follow Jesus, the ultimate scapegoat, who Christians claim took away the sins of the whole world by sacrificing himself on the cross. In this case, he is both the High Priest and victim of our scapegoating, both the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) and the goat.
However, this approach only works if Christians do not use Christ’s redeeming work on the cross as an excuse to let themselves off the hook of owning their own sins and scapegoating as the cause of all their problems. God takes away our sins, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to change our lives.
Christians, and all of us, need to own how often we do not love our enemies.
Bruce Tallman is an educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com
Intelligent Christian Spirituality 