In What I Saw in America (1922), G.K. Chesterton offered one of his many paradoxical insights, contrasting the political power of the British King and United States President:
“The American Republic is the last medieval monarchy. It is intended that the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling… All the popular Presidents, Jackson Lincoln, and Roosevelt have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiously interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought to be called a King.”
It is with Chesterton’s quote in mind that I have witnessed the bewildering events of the past month: Biden’s calamitous debate performance, the rebellion of democrat-friendly commentators, the pins and needles NATO summit press conference, a judge’s dismissal of the strongest legal case against Trump, the former and likely future president coming within a centimeter of an assassin’s bullet, the iconic raised fist photo, and now the selection of the first millennial vice presidential candidate in J.D. Vance. Even as a professional politics watcher, I can hardly keep up.
Chesterton’s insight that the president operates as a king obviously speaks to how the chief executive wields political power. But his observation also captures how the president is asked—like a medieval monarch—to literally embody the nation, being symbolically invested with the nation’s mythic self-understanding. In the context of foreign policy, as Allison Prasch notes in Presidential Studies Quarterly,
“The movement of the presidential body establishes a network of relationships between the United States and other nations… If U.S. presidents speak to, for, and about the body politic, their movements to and through various places also communicate national priorities and commitments.”
The holder of the US Presidency possesses rhetorical and symbolic force; his dress, movements, style, and person are elevated into representations of the nation to itself.
This is an impossible task, of course. No one person can embody the profoundly different creeds, classes, and cultures of an entire nation, much less a nation stretched across a continent like the United States. I’m reminded of when I taught English in Jordan, a country then of about 8 million, and would see posters of King Abdullah II in various guises strategically placed throughout the country (King as businessman, King as Bedouin, King as military commander, King as family man, etc.) to appeal to the local residents. Yet precisely because the president’s task is impossible, it is all the more telling what a president—or a presidential aspirant—chooses to reflect or symbolize.
For many Americans, Trump reflects who they believe themselves to be: defiant, coarse, powerful, proud, and unyieldingly patriotic. In contrast, Biden’s followers see in him a compassionate and capable public servant who has doggedly fought for the little guy and overcome the odds time and time again. For them, he is the candidate of caring, intelligent voters who are busy creating a world where all people can flourish; a vote for him is a vote for decency and against national depredation.
Each of these various relationships between voter and presidential candidate have been scandalized in the past month. Trump, the candidate of strength and national vitality, escaped a brutal death by the thinnest of margins. While his bloodied visage with raised fist flooded the airwaves, other images of the attempt on his life underscore his physical vulnerability—and he is 78, after all. The hush that fell over the Trump Rally in Butler, PA, swiftly followed by onlookers’ relieved cheers that the former president was okay, aptly captures the sense in which the psychic bond between candidate and crowd was nearly severed.
Biden, on the other hand, was revealed to be in a far more advanced state of decline than many of his supporters expected during the June 27 debate. His nonsensical responses to basic questions exposed the degree to which his condition had been hidden from not only the American electorate but also members of his own White House. As Andrew Walker put it, the consequence was multiple rings of scandal that call into question Biden’s character, the integrity of a Democratic Party that tried to hide the president’s condition, and mainstream journalists’ brazen violation of public trust for complying with requests to conceal Biden’s condition. The resulting avalanche of calls for Biden to step down reveals more than a divide between party and press; it exposes the rupture between a candidate who represents establishment competence and a voter base appalled at the president’s basic incapacity and his utter intransigence to put country—or even party—over self.
Now that Biden has exited the race, a similar rush toward relief among Democratic figures has taken place as occurred among Trump’s supporters in Pennsylvania. In both cases the president’s followers have exuded an exhilaration at escaping the full writ and stench of scandal, and in both cases the followers are leveraging all their rhetorical resources to try to spin a near disaster into a campaign triumph.
These twin shocks of Trump’s near assassination and the revelation of Biden’s deterioration have disrupted politics as normal in the United States. This interruption marks a moment of kairos, a natural, opportune, and organic view of time set in contrast to chronos, or a dull, segmented, and mechanized understanding of time. As Josh Pauling writes, kairotic moments offer the chance for reappraisal, to “reorient us toward permanent things and higher goods.” Kairos represents an aperture into the divine, a time outside time, offers a moment of respite through which we can take stock and see anew, redeeming the time. How should American Christians respond to this unique moment before it is gone? I have three suggestions.
First, remember that there is only one king whom we truly serve. The Davidic monarchy, on which medieval European thrones were modeled, rested on a key truth: the king represents, serves, and is ultimately accountable to God. While presidents and kings in this sinful world attempt to embody nations partially, Christians know that we are citizens of a heavenly kingdom and coheirs with a perfect, resurrected king. In James K.A. Smith’s words, we should discern the religious nature of the political and cultural spaces we inhabit and recognize how our relationships with them “are not neutral or benign, but rather intentionally loaded to form us into certain kinds of people—to unwittingly make us disciples of rival kings and patriotic citizens of rival kingdoms.”
While we cannot give our ultimate allegiance to Biden, Trump, or any earthly authority, we must also trust in God’s providence that he has appointed us to live in this time and in this place for a purpose. We are not called to immanentize the eschaton through a political party, yet we must have faith that, as Rusty Reno states, “Every nation is in some sense a ‘chosen’ people” through and in whom God is working. Our heavenly citizenship does not divest American Christians of the call to serve our country and seek, as best we can, the common good here in our earthly home.
Second, we need to realistically assess where social causes rooted in a biblical account of justice stand. Among many other things, the 2024 Republican National Convention marked the triumph of Log Cabin Republican attempts to purge the GOP platform of any references to traditional understandings of marriage, sexuality, and the human person. The Republican Party is visibly distancing itself from Christianity and social conservatives. And all pro-life language and policy stances on abortion have been removed from the party platform as well. In isolation, each of these moves may not represent a wholesale abandonment of Christian voters, and not all Christians agree on issues of abortion or marriage, but they collectively convey a party doing its best to rebrand itself in accord with prevailing secular norms. We must remember that the people will not save us and so we must be proactive to avoid the fate of Christians in places like Jordan, India, or even the United Kingdom, who are consigned to political irrelevancy—even as we try to protect our persecuted brothers and sisters in the faith overseas.
Third, we ought to recognize our relative exile as freeing and use it to cultivate a hopeful retrenchment and prophetic posture toward American politics and especially the GOP. As Susanna Black Roberts argues, Christians ought to use this current kairotic moment of political realignment to intentionally position ourselves as organs of conscience for U.S. political parties through institutions like the American Solidarity Party, a political party founded on principles of Christian Social Democracy. In doing so, we can hope to reflect the goodness of God’s design and the presence of the imago dei across all human ethnicities and cultures. Such a posture would be prophetic, as opposed to critical, entailing (1) a call to repentance among other Christians, (2) motivation towards action, not reflection, and (3) dependence on God, not ourselves, for the source of ourmessage.
Even though the prophetic label is overused, it can still be instructive. Republican Christians post-Moral Majority have typically wanted to be Moses (laying down the law) or Samuel (anointing the king). Our marginalization in the post-Trump GOP marks the end of that dream, although we are not yet Elijah consigned to the wilderness. Perhaps our model should be Nathan—the conscience of the kingdom, capable of rebuking the king when he falls astray but not estranged to the extent he is barred from the royal court. Doing this will require a renewed vigilance to ensure the spiritual health, theological seriousness, and moral formation of our own churches. May we be faithfully prepared for such a time, for it is coming soon.