Some 2023 articles in Current
Current (currentpub.com) is well worth a daily look. Here are four short pieces I wrote for it during the second half of 2023.
September 6
Making Amends
Marvin Olasky
The argument against Trump’s eligibility for the presidency is strong. Evangelicals should get behind it.
Many Christians have hurt the cause of Christ in America by considering temporary political advantage more important than the Bible[EM1] [MO2] ’s requirements (and the Constitution’s as well). A growing movement gives us the opportunity to make amends.
The cover of the first issue of World magazine after the January 2021 storming of the Capitol got the story right: It pictured the attackers waving flags glorifying Jesus and Trump, and headlined the debacle as “the Insurrectionist Heresy.” It was an insurrection and it was heretical, advocating allegiance both to Christ and to a man who considers himself sinless.
As editor-in-chief I went with that headline not as Constitutional analysis but because it seemed biblically objective: An insurrection is an insurrection, even if conducted feebly. But thirty-one months later, the issue of what exactly Donald Trump’s goal was in urging on the Capitol invaders is becoming important because of Constitutional analysis by able legal analysts—and not just those on the left.
Conservative legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen have studied the question deeply and detailed their findings. In Baude’s summary, “Donald Trump cannot be president—cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office—unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”
Here’s what the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution plainly says: “No person shall . . . hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Clear enough: An insurrection is an insurrection, not matter how small. Evangelicals have a special responsibility to speak up about this because the evangelical vote made Trump president, and many evangelicals made evangelism harder by melding creed and crackpotism. As Emma Green, an accurate reporter, began her story in The Atlantic, “The name of God was everywhere during Wednesday’s insurrection against the American government.” She saw signs declaring “Jesus saves!” and “God, guns & guts made America, let’s keep all three.”
Many evangelicals legitimately disclaim responsibility for the insurrection. But so many were involved, and continue to defend Trump, that it’s hard to argue with Green’s conclusion: “Donald Trump has bent elements of American Christianity to his will . . . many Christians have obligingly remade their faith in his image. Defiant masses literally broke down the walls of government, some believing they were marching under Jesus’s banner to implement God’s will to keep Trump in the White House.”
World founder Joel Belz started his magazine in 1986 as the Charlotte Observer was on its way to a Pulitzer Prize for investigating the Jim Bakker/PTL scandal that began an era of televangelistic disgrace. Joel always regretted not getting there first and exposing the bad apple that others were still polishing. With great political power comes great responsibility: Donald Trump is still bending many evangelicals to his will, but those with even a bit of bravery now have the opportunity to counter some of the damage we’ve done. For the good of the nation and the honor of Christ, evangelicals should support this Constitutional procedure.
Will it work? I hope so: Supreme Court justices who believe in abiding by the words of the Constitution have shown courage before and may display it again. Even if they don’t, evangelicals will have scraped off some of the mud that clings to our boots.
If this process does work, will some Trumpists push back, maybe even with domestic terrorism? Perhaps. But we’ve lingered so long in the fever swamps that a return to health will not be instant. Long-term repercussions are inevitable, and our best alternative is one that doesn’t allow an egomaniacal insurrectionist to become commander
Sept. 13
Tricky Dick and Don
Marvin Olasky
The tale of two very different January 6ths
Who was the nastiest, most self-seeking president in the second half of the twentieth century? My guess is that most Americans would say Richard Nixon, driven out of office in 1974 after Watergate scheming and lying.
A new biography, though, suggests that even for “Tricky Dick” some things were sacrosanct. Paul Carter’s Richard Nixon: California’s Native Son quotes Nixon’s response to reporter Earl Mazo’s investigation of voter fraud in the 1960 election: “Earl, those are interesting articles you are writing—but no one steals the Presidency of the United States.”
Mazo’s investigation revealed that in Texas, which John F. Kennedy won by about 46,000 votes, at least 100,000 officially tallied votes appeared to be “nonexistent.” In Illinois, which Kennedy carried by only 8,858 votes out of nearly five million, “mountains of sworn affidavits by poll watchers and disgruntled voters” testified to cheating.
When several weeks after the election Mazo spent an hour giving Nixon the facts, Nixon said he would take no action. Mazo was flabbergasted. According to the Washington Post’s Mazo obituary in 2007, the reporter considered Nixon “a goddamn fool”—but Nixon did not want to damn the United States by creating the “partisan bitterness and chaos that would result from an official challenge of the election result.”
Carter reports that Dwight Eisenhower was willing to raise money to support a legal challenge. But Nixon said the U.S. “couldn’t afford to have a vacuum in leadership,” and even if Republicans won in the end, “the cost in world opinion and the effect on democracy in the broadest sense would be detrimental.”
Carter quotes Nixon saying that African, Asian, and South American countries saw the United States as a nation in which democracy works. So “if in the United States an election was found to be fraudulent, it would mean that every pipsqueak in every one of those countries would be tempted, if he lost an election, to bring a fraud charge and have a coup.”
Compare Donald Trump’s incendiary words on January 6, 2021 with what Nixon said to a joint session of Congress when he was doing his election-certifying job as vice president on January 6, 1961: “In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win.”
Nixon then did just that, extending to President-elect Kennedy “my heartfelt best wishes” for success “in a cause that is bigger than any man’s ambition, greater than any Party. It is the cause of freedom, of justice, and peace for all mankind.”
Fools rush in where even Richard Nixon feared to tread.
October 31
A Golden Anniversary
Marvin Olasky
A season of doubt can be worthy of celebration
Tomorrow, November 1, is the fiftieth anniversary of the strangest episode in my life.
On the morning of that Thursday in 1973 I was in the first autumn of a Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. Reacting to the Vietnam War and my own internal conflicts, I had become a Marxist as a Yale undergraduate. Earlier in 1973 I had worked as a Boston Globe correspondent while keeping secret one small detail: I was a member of the Communist Party USA.
My room in a boarding house just west of the Michigan campus sported a single bed, a night table bearing an alarm clock and a lamp, a red upholstered chair, and two folding chairs. My bookcase, made from flattened cardboard boxes and bricks, displayed not only Marx, Engels, and Lenin but Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts and three volumes by Bulgarian Communist boss Georgi Dimitrov.
On November 1 Watergate was exploding the Nixon administration. Capitalism was destroying itself, I believed—and I was on the winning side! Michigan professors loved my Marxist analyses. I had traveled across the Pacific on a Russian freighter and 6000 miles across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The U of M library subscribed to Pravda, the Moscow newspaper, and my knowledge of Russian was sufficient for me to read its demand for “unyielding war against religious patterns of thought.”
The evening before students in Nixon masks had celebrated Halloween. November 1 began as normal for me. I read Pravda in the library. Then I offered Marxist views in a literature class, ate hamburgers in the dining hall, and was back in my room just before 3 p.m. to sit in my red chair by the window and read Lenin’s famous essay, “Socialism and Religion.”
I was feeling on top of the world, addicted as I was to Lenin’s gospel: “We must combat religion—this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism.” Channeling Marx, Lenin called religion “opium for the people. . . . spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image.” God was clearly a “figment of man’s imagination.”
Suddenly, without warning, on this very ordinary day, figment became fact. New thoughts bombarded my brain: What if Lenin is wrong? Why am I sure that God does not exist? Why have I turned my back on him?
For eight hours I sat in that red chair, unwilling to move. I glanced at the alarm clock every hour, surprised that I was still stationary. It’s hard for me to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of this experience. No drugs, no dreams, no hallucinations, just sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly thinking Marxism is wrong. At 3 p.m. I was an atheist and a Communist. At 11 p.m. I was a believer in a God of some kind. Hardly born again, but no longer dying.
At eleven, finally, I stood up, went outside, and wandered around the cold and dark campus for the next two hours, trying to make sense of those eight hours. I couldn’t figure it out immediately. Four years later I saw in the Westminster Confession of Faith that God “is pleased, in His appointed and accepted time, effectually to call [some] by his Word and Spirit out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ.”
Sometimes that happens all at once. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes, as in my case, part happened all at once and part was, over the next three years, a slow train coming, because that’s how long it took me to make a public profession of faith in Christ. But fifty years ago my faith in Communism was suddenly gone. On the third day after that weird experience I visited the U of M law student who headed the Communist Party chapter in Ann Arbor. I told him I was out. He denounced me as “a bourgeois individualist” and used other ideological expletives.
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow. I’ve tried to praise him in thirty books and through editing World magazine from 1992 until November 1, 2021.
December 12
Taylor Swift and Kelce too
By Marvin Olasky
The front page of this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal highlighted three important news items.
First, Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” is the only singing tour ever to gross $1 billion. Second, on a hypothetical ballot listing only Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Trump leads Biden 47% to 43%. Third, Swift’s boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, has become famous enough to rate a cover story in the Journal’s magazine, WSJ.
The “Eras Tour” began in March 2023 and is scheduled to end on December 8, 2024.
Five days later, Swift turns 35 and is thus eligible officially to become president of the United States on January 20, 2025. Only 37 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance, but many websites say Swift is “universally acclaimed.”
Swift’s music appeals to young Democrats but comes out on the Republic label. She begins her Tour performances with "Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince," a grumpy-lyric song that could pull votes from Trump: “My team is losing, battered and bruising/ I see the high fives between the bad guys…/ American stories burning before me/ I'm feeling helpless… now the storm is coming.”
The groundswell has begun. The Time cover story that anointed her 2023 Person of the Year includes a quotation from Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group: “She could serve two terms as President of the United States and then go to Las Vegas. Who else can do that?”
Donald Trump, of course, could do that if elected in 2025 and not imprisoned in 2029. But Swift is clearly in better shape: Time noted that “to prepare for the tour physically, Swift sang the entire set list daily while running on a treadmill. [She] trained in dance for three months leading up to the first show.” I’d like to see Trump do that.
Plus, those who say Swift is not tough enough to be president will be able to point to her VP running mate, Travis Kelce, who turns 35 on October 4, 2024, and is thus also eligible. The tight end “Plays for Keeps,” according to WSJ., and “has phenomenal pain tolerance.” Kelce also has a Rolls-Royce with a ceiling that displays a shooting star: He pointed to it during a WSJ. interview and said, “Make a wish. Dreams come true.”
Americans dream of an alternative to Biden or Trump. Oprah Winfrey said no. “Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson said no. The Swift/Kelce era beckons. ###
Why should I respect a democracy that refuses to investigate election fraud on principle? Also, John Hinderaker disagrees with your 14th amendment interpretation, and he's someone that Trump cultists accuse of being anti-Trump.