When I was in middle school, my family moved to a new town over an hour away from my childhood home. I don’t remember wanting to move, but my parents were drawn to country living and wanted a house with property for our horses rather than continuing to board them.
For several years after we moved, I continued attending summer camp with our former church. The camp was in the desert and had an old west theme, which perfectly suited me as a voracious reader of Louie L’Amour westerns.
The Call to Neighborliness and Love
Aside from the beautiful desert location and the daily activities of archery, marksmanship, horsemanship, and swimming, I recall the songs. I was the kid who knew the jingle for every commercial and the theme song for every TV show. Whenever words were set to music, they became embedded in my brain.
The camp emphasized Bible memorization, and verses set to music made scripture memorization a snap.
One of my favorites was a round that went like this:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and love all mankind as you would love yourself,
Love the Lord your God, with all your heart and all your soul and mind and all mankind,
We’ve got Christian lives to live, we’ve got Jesus Christ to give, we’ve got nothing to hide, cause it’s in the way we love”…. [repeat]
The song derives from the following Bible passages:
Matthew 22:34-39
34 But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” 37 Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Mark 12:29-31
29 Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. 31 And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
And
Luke 10:25-28
25 And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” 27 So he answered and said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’ ” 28 And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”
The song I learned, its message, and the biblical passages from which it draws have been on my mind a lot lately. Catchy tune aside, one of the reasons I loved the song so much, and why it still resonates with me after all these years, is that it perfectly articulated the essence of what I understood it meant to be a Christian and to live Christianly. It highlights that the best manifestation of Christian practice is found in love for God and love for others.
Two of the four gospels shared Jesus’s verbal answer when a Pharisee asked Him the greatest commandment; a third illustrates it through example. Jesus shows us clearly who He considers to be our neighbors and what our posture should be toward them.
Christ says we should love our neighbors as ourselves, second only to loving the Lord with our whole being—mind, body, and spirit. The word used for ‘neighbor’ in these passages is plésion. On a basic level, it translates as referring to those close in proximity; however, Jesus, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, broadens the accepted cultural context beyond that basic definition. He illustrates moral and ethical components in properly living out neighborliness. He challenged the highly religious Pharisees to recognize those who didn’t share their ethnicity or religion and embrace them as neighbors. The plésion were to be treated respectfully and lovingly.
I find it interesting that Jesus chose to show those who were most religious and who were the foremost experts in the law as the bad and clueless neighbors in the parable. It is so familiar. Even in Jesus’ day, knowing the right way to act did not guarantee right actions.
The Power of Confession in Community
Last Sunday, as the congregation was reading aloud the Confession and Absolution, a portion of it stuck out to me:
Confession and Absolution
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen.
For most of my life, I was some form of Baptist. In my experience, prayer in those circles was almost entirely a private matter and pre-written prayers were highly suspect, well, except for the Lord’s Prayer, of course.
This deeply private approach to prayer fosters a deep spiritual individualism rather than a spirit of communal faith rooted in humility, as advocated in the confession.
There is power in communal acknowledgment and humble repentance of sin, in being reminded that we bring glory to God through correct attitudes and behavior. Regular spiritual introspection makes glorifying God possible as it leads to personal corrective action. These humble actions push us to recognize our need for God’s mercy. Only through His mercy can we find true delight in God and correctly love Him, which in turn enables us to love our neighbors in the way that God would have us love.
Contrasting Christ’s Teachings with Modern Politics
These thoughts bring me crashing into today’s troubling cultural environment.
The most glaring cultural problem is the fervent dedication of many Christians to Donald Trump, who claims to be Protestant. At 69 years old, when he was asked, “Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?” he replied:
“I’m not sure I have. I just try and go and do a better job from here. I don’t think so. I think if I do something wrong, I just try and make it right.
I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.
Now when I take… when we go to church and when I drink my little wine, which is about the only wine I drink, and have my little cracker, I guess that’s a form of asking for forgiveness. I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed, ok.
But you know to me, that’s important. I do that. But in terms of officially, see, I could say absolutely, and everybody… I think in terms of let’s go on and let’s make it right.”
Donald Trump shows no humility or repentant posture necessary to enable him to walk in God’s ways. How can he claim a basic level of faith yet fail to understand the vital connection between faith and forgiveness?
Examining Character and Neighborliness in Leadership
- Trump has cheated on all three of his wives.
- In 1973, his company was sued for civil rights violations for discriminating against Blacks and Puerto Ricans by refusing to rent housing to them. His company was forced into compliance.
- He took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1989 advocating for New York to adopt the death penalty after the arrest of five Black and Latino young men for a brutal rape. They were later found to be innocent and were exonerated. In his debate with Vice President Harris, Trump stated that the men had admitted to committing the crime and that a person was killed. Neither was true, yet he refuses to correct his statement and is being sued for defamation as a result.
- He is known for stiffing contractors who worked for him, and he still owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to cities where he held rallies over the last five years.
- In April 2018, Trump was forced to pay $25M to Trump University students who were not taught real estate investing as they were promised.
- Donald Trump has a long history of alleged wage theft, has been sued by his long-time personal driver for failing to pay overtime over 20 years, and even said as recently as November 2024: “I know a lot about overtime. I hated to give overtime; I hated it. I’d get other people—I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.”
- A grand jury of average citizens was sufficiently convinced that he should stand trial for a mid-1990s incident of sexual abuse against E. Jean Carroll. He was subsequently found guilty in May 2023 on 34 counts by a separate trial jury composed of another group of average citizens and ordered to pay $5M. Yet another group of jurors awarded Ms. Carroll an additional $83.3M when Trump continued to defame her.
I can’t explain why Donald Trump has gotten away with so much unkind and unneighborly behavior or why so many Christians seem content and, in some cases, beyond thrilled to overlook his glaring lack of good character. He claims he tries to make things right. Yet, the sheer number of lawsuits and claims against his character over decades would seem to dispute his possessing even a basic understanding or recognition of what is right or ethical. Throughout his life, he has shown a flagrant disregard for Christ’s values, the law, ethics, and even basic decency.
The Evangelical Shift: A Departure from Christ’s Gospel
Given the Evangelical church’s support for Trump, there appears to be a whole slew of Christians who never received or understood Christ’s messages on love or neighborliness. Not really.
How can that be?
For these evangelicals who claim Christ but also enthusiastically voted for Trump, I must ask, where is the desire to love God, to delight in His will? Where is the neighborliness toward those who don’t look, act, or think like you? The parable made such an impression that not one but three gospel writers recorded the story of the Good Samaritan, one of the most famous Biblical stories of all time.
I don’t see neighborliness in Trump’s MAGA movement.
I see fear and suspicion toward those who differ, not neighborliness.
I see accusations and hate lobbed against those who are not white or ‘straight’ and against those who are from other countries, those who MAGA thinks should not be U.S. citizens for whatever reason.
I see a lust for violence as we witnessed on the now infamous January 6th, which Trump now describes as a “love fest.”
What???! Has he lost his mind??
Hundreds of people broke the law on January 6th; many suffered injury, and several died from issues stemming from the ensuing violence against man and country. That’s a version of ‘love’ with which I want absolutely no connection. That “love” does not resemble the love by which Christians are called to live.
Trump’s true character, highlighted by his past behavior and current talking points, is full of promised retribution. He can say “making things right” is his value, but he is not making things right according to the way of Jesus. His past and present tell a very different story.
If Trump truly has any compulsion toward love and neighborliness, his public biography would read quite differently. Instead of learning about how he siphoned donations from children with cancer, we’d have numerous stories of his kindness and philanthropy. Instead, we have countless stories of his lawlessness and self-dealing wrapped in a long list of grievances that have only increased since his first presidential term.
I confess to a perpetual state of dismay as I see what some consider to be Christianity carried out in such a way that harms our neighbors.
How does a Christian convince themselves to cast aside the person and lessons of Christ so they can follow a man who fails to exhibit even a small portion of the fruit of the spirit?
How does one look past the Savior and up to a man who exhibits a savior complex, who says he alone can fix what he has told them are their problems?
How can they not recognize the idolatry in their own lives?
The Crisis of Christian Witness
I am deeply concerned for our country in light of Trump’s highly questionable character, the deep hate he has stoked, and the general discontent he has encouraged for years. In his own words, he is determined to act upon the worst of impulses once he is sworn in as president.
I am deeply grieved and concerned for the American church that has been so thoroughly swindled. It has turned away from foundational Christian values and traded them for membership in a movement saturated with political talking points centered on pride and hate for others, which run contrary to the gospel it so loudly proclaims yet thoroughly fails to recognize. A movement that, instead of drawing people to Christ, actively repels them, even pushing former Christ followers out the church doors in disgust. It is a movement that rubberstamps and idolizes malevolent behavior while failing to possess enough spiritual introspection to recognize the stark dissonance between Christ and a severely broken man and the call to live ‘Christianly.’
The American church has made a grave error. It has become unrecognizable as Christ’s through its refusal to practice the love of neighborliness toward others. Instead, it has chosen a form of godliness mired in misery, discontent, and disregard for the One it claims to follow and who gave His very life for it.
We have forgotten that sin is committed not only in the things we do but also in the things we have left undone. How can the church possibly claim to love and glorify God as it so publicly sins against Him and its neighbors?
A house divided against itself cannot stand, and we cannot serve two masters.
Donald Trump shows no concern regarding right and wrong. He displays a wholesale lack of concern for Christian values, especially love or empathy for neighbors. How so many Christians with access to Truth can support him in good conscience is a contradiction I will never understand.
God help us all. We are going to need it.
Image: Pamela Reynoso
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