In my last Blog Post, #63, I cited an email letter I had received from Tyler Huckabee, the managing editor of Sojourners magazine. In it, he posed the following important and pleading question:
What kind of country are we becoming?
The primary proposal of that blog was that we are living in a new age of impunity, a time when those who exercise power do so insulated from being held accountable for the brutality and inhumanity of their policies and actions. I have read an apt description of this administration as “morally grotesque.” Indeed, it is. The level of corruption, cruelty and lawlessness is unprecedented. In a recent issue of Global Public Health, 2026, authored by Jane Galvao, Peter Aggleston and Richard Parker, the authors wrote: “the politics of the Trump administration is seen as a “politics of cruelty.” Moreover, the second Trump administration with its “fast, furious and lethal times” is understood as flooding the zone with its cruelty. They write:
To understand how the zone is being flooded and its impact on global health, we highlight the impact and use of the groundwork laid by Project 2025, the use of EO- rather than politically negotiated legislative initiatives- to implement the changes outlined in that document, alongside the creation of a Department of Government efficiency (DOGE) Our reading of the documents related to these three instances has lead us to coin the phrase “the banality of cruelty” as a counterpart to Hannah Arendt’s earlier “the banality of evil” (Arendt, 2022) –to describe their willful and horrendously damaging effect.
The banality of cruelty, the zone is flooded with the horrendously damaging evidence. Along with the contemptible practice of separating children from their parents, masked ICE agents have again shot someone in his car on a busy city street, this time outside a school in Manhattan, with a five-year-old girl in the backseat of the minivan.. There are no indications that these masked and ill trained thugs/agents in our age of impunity will be held accountable.
Moreover, Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have announced the public execution of former Major Nidal Hasan for murdering thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009. In a shameful interview aboard the USS Lincoln, Hegseth said that the public and livestreamed execution by a military firing squad was a “no brainer.” (Today, President Trump has reversed that decision due to a massive pushback from the public.)
Peter Baker wrote in his White House Memo for the New York Times, titled:
For Trump, a Firing Squad on Livestream Becomes the Latest Spectacle
The last legally sanctioned public execution in the United States was conducted in Owensboro, Ky., in 1936 when Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, was convicted of raping a 70-year-old white woman and hanged in front of a crowd of as many as 20,000 spectators. Another hanging a year later in Missouri was moved into a specially built stockade with only a few hundred select witnesses, though many others climbed trees to watch.
Sonya Lea, the author of “American Bloodlines,” a book about the Bethea case that was published last year, said that it was widely denounced as “a brutal carnival of sadism” and led states to stop allowing large crowds to witness executions.
“There’s a kind of parallel in what we’re looking at now,” she said, “in terms of America’s barbarism and depravity that’s happening — not just a killing by firing squad but cultivating that kind of cruelty as a modern entertainment.”
What kind of country are we becoming? Barbaric? Depraved? One that is cultivating the kind of cruelty that serves as modern entertainment?
In an insightful blog post called “In cOHERENT Thoughts” by Dr. Harry Franqui, the writer addresses this disgusting execution of a death sentence. The title of the post is:
The Gospel of Cruelty: Hegseth, MAGA, and the Corruption of Christian Morality
Franqui writes:
Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in the November 2009 Fort Hood massacre, will be livestreamed is more than a disturbing policy decision. It is a sign of the moral bankruptcy of this administration, the MAGA movement, and a mainstream conservative movement that has increasingly embraced cruelty as a virtue, vengeance as justice, and the exercise of power as a substitute for morality….
A political movement that claims to defend Christianity should be able to explain how the public celebration of death reflects the moral teachings it professes to uphold.
And a nation that prides itself on the rule of law should recognize the difference between administering justice and cultivating a public appetite for cruelty.
Cruelty is not strength. Vengeance is not justice. Religious nationalism is not Christian morality. And blind loyalty to a political leader is not patriotism
A couple of years ago, David French, a columnist for the New York Times wrote a memorable ‘Opinion’ titled “ Don’t let our Broken Politics Mangle Our Faith.”(NYT, April 4, 2024) Obviously, in this new age of impunity, where the politics of cruelty has mangled the Chrisitan faith, we have been unsuccessful at protecting ourselves. French reports on an interview of Tim Keller, who was the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and by the way, was also a graduate of my beloved Bucknell University. In the interview French reports:
Keller was describing a change in his church’s young adults. “I’ve long seen friendships flourish across political differences,” he told me. “Now I see that disagreement often ends friendships.” As he put it, what he was seeing was a change from a culture in which younger Americans were intolerant of cruelty and tolerant of good-faith political differences to a culture in which people were intolerant of political differences and tolerant of cruelty — so long as that cruelty was aimed at the right targets.
Keller wasn’t just describing young Christians. He was seeing the change everywhere.
Indeed, everywhere! Sadly, it seems that it is the nation we have become, at least until we reshape it.
On November 5, 2024, Trump declared that Election Day was Christian Visibility Day. Sadly, he was accurate in his prediction that Christians would turn out in huge numbers to support his bid for the White House. Now the nation mourns his victory and Christians are being called to be visible on election day, November 3, 2026 in a very different way. French wrote of Christian Visibility Day in the following terms:
When I think of “Christian Visibility Day,” I have very different images in mind — of Christians on the Edmund Pettus Bridge marching for justice and responding to violence with peace, of Christians in Birmingham, Ala., enduring fire hoses and attack dogs in the name of justice and reconciliation. Or I can think of the ultimate Christian Visibility Day, on a cross on a hill outside Jerusalem, when the son of God faced the ultimate act of persecution, looked at the men who were murdering him and declared, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
If it is a spectacle we want, I can think of a much more compelling spectacle November 3, 2026, one in which Christians livestream and broadcast the demands of faith, that we be compassionate and merciful, tolerant, and rainbow inclusive, that we end this war of choice and bring back civility and respect to political debate and neighborhood conversations. We would all do well to remember the words of Saint Paul, admonishing the Christian converts in Corinth:
13 If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast[a] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13: 1-13, NRSVUE)