Ted Grimsrud—April 28, 2025
In the fifty plus years that I have been paying attention, I have felt that most Americans have been shielded from much of the brokenness of our society. Domestically, the people who suffer the most have generally been separated from the general population and shunted to unnoticed pockets of poverty and imprisonment. And throughout my lifetime, few Americans have been much aware of the brokenness we have visited on foreign lands through our wars and other interventions.
Now it seems that our political system has been degraded enough that the nation has put into power an administration that does not actually care that much to keep the brokenness hidden. And the future looks troubling for as far ahead as one can imagine. One could say that in light of our long history of causing harm around the world, we have a kind of grim justice being visited upon an ever-wider swath of Americans. However, you can be sure that the people at the top of our social pyramid (the ones most responsible for the suffering of the vulnerable at home and abroad) will themselves manage okay until the entire system collapses.
American delusions of goodness
I read something the other day that underscored my perception of the trouble we are in. David Brooks is a well-known columnist for the New York Times and author of numerous bestselling books on politics and social trends. He wrote an article in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic called “I should have seen it coming” that various of my Facebook friends have linked to. Brooks is a kind of never-Trump Republican, so it is not surprising that his article focuses on how disastrous the second Trump presidency is for the US. He makes some good points, in criticizing Trump, but it was a different aspect of the article that troubled me more (not that I am not also troubled about Trump).
Brooks states that the reason he is so upset about Trump is that Trump is causing him to feel shame about being an American. “Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on [my] faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause.” In effect, Brooks seems to say: “My personal identity is founded on a belief about the goodness of America, and I hate Trump for threatening that identity.”
Contrary to Brooks’s beliefs about America, I believe that the only hope for some broad social healing in our country is a recognition that the belief in “the goodness of America” as a foundation for people’s identity is deeply problematic and has been from long before Trump’s admittedly malefic impact on our society. The closest to a positive thought I can come up with regarding Trump is that he is more clear than his predecessors and political opponents about the basic American way of being in the world. With Trump we may better know what we are up against—a dominating empire that has the effect of “killing hope” all over the world (Killing Hope is the title of a book by former State Department official William Blum that itemizes the destructive interventions of the U.S. military and CIA around the world in the years since the end of World War II).
Brooks lays out his basic assumptions about the U.S. early in his article. “All my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, American’s fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDs. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.”
The need for honest self-awareness
I believe that the only way our society can hope to reverse the damage that is being visited upon us by Trump is to come to terms with some deep-seated realities about America. The underlying and longstanding injustices, violence, and—yes—evil intentions of the leaders of our society for its entire history are profound. They go back to the founding genocides of the establishment of the North American colonies and economic dependence on the enslavement of millions of people forcibly imported from Africa. As long as most Americans think of our country in ways that resemble Brooks’s, I find it hard to imagine such a turning back happening.
What might it mean to begin to be more honest and realistic view of the American project down to its very core historically and ideologically? That is indeed a complicated question, and I don’t have much of an answer to offer here. I do have one thought to note, though. I was struck by Brooks’s use of the phrase “my very identity” in relation to his foolish and hardly justifiable “faith in my country’s goodness.”
I grew up with a similar sense of my identity, but it was decisively redirected by the Vietnam War (which, I would say, was initiated with profoundly “evil intentions” on the part of America). What followed for me with that redirection was a sense of identity founded on my Christian faith that reminded me that nation-states are rivals to God. They tend to demand loyalty and a sense of identity that belong to God. If our identity is tied to our belief in our country’s “goodness” and if having that goodness challenged results in deep shame, we are bound to be vulnerable to all kinds of misperceptions about our society and to be ineffective in resisting injustice—that is simply the way idolatry works. We tend to work very hard to avoid feeling shame. It appears that David Brooks wants to blame Donald Trump for his feelings of shame rather than ask searching questions about his sense of America’s “goodness.”
In the years since my rejection of America as central to my very identity, I have evolved in my understanding of Christian faith. Too many Americans have found it too easy to too closely link nationalism with Christianity for me to want to pose Christian faith itself as an alternative sense of identity to Americanism. I have refined what “Chistian faith” means to me in the past fifty years. What I would now say is that my identity is based on the conviction of the supreme importance of Jesus’s call to love my neighbor and of having an extraordinarily wide view of who my neighbor might be. I now know that many non-Christians also base their sense of identity on the call to love—and are able to recognize the American Empire as a rival to that call.
So, if we are to achieve genuine healing for the hurts of our country, we need to find clarity about our sense of identity. Holding on to the mirage of a “good America” will not empower us to find healing. To self-conscious base our identity on the call to neighbor love may be the key. Such self-consciousness may empower us to recognize, critique, and start to overcome the various harm-causing elements of the American way in the world. And it may help us affirm and cultivate the elements of social life in our society that actual do empower neighbor love. I think the growth of such a sense of identity is our best hope for genuine healing.
Thinking Pacifism 
It’s certainly interesting to consider the idea that Trump, in all his manifest awfulness, could serve as a kind of mythbuster that prompts people to wake up from the illusory American dream and repent of their nationalist idolatry. I’m not sure whether it will happen, or at least not in any significant numbers.
No way to reply directly to the post and the platform erased my first attempt at a reply.
I did not grow up with the kind of identity that Brooks did. My parents did not have that identity and I grew up with their countercultural identity. The well-documented facts show the USA as a nation-state started as a colonialist regime based on genocide and slavery. The “Doctrine of Discovery” which supports the European settler supremacy has been recognized numerous times by the Supreme Court as part of the nation’s common law. Indeed, it could not be otherwise because there has to be some basis for forming a country ignoring that the claimed area had existing nations with their own cultures and governance system long before the European settlers came. This heritage has long been repeated with such phrases as “manifest destiny” and “American exceptionalism” – the last still today claimed by most representatives of the oligarchy’s duopoly parties that mightily fight against democracy breaking out. It is reflected in our imperialist military adventurism all over the world.
Unless we grapple with the evil inherent in our history, we can’t fully become a good nations albeit we have made some improvements over the centuries.
Thanks, Bill (and thanks, Ted, for the thought-provoking post),
First, as to a comment disappearing, I’ve had it happen at least twice, and think I understand the problem and how to counter it. It seems that there is an unstated length limit, beyond which it just rejects/deletes. I’ve gotten around it a couple times by breaking a long comment into two parts and saying [con’t] to indicate… seems the limit may be around 250 to 300 words… never noted exactly.
You point out important context and historical factors in our delusional, dysfunctional, even “evil” cultural heritage (though “evil” I tend to use sparingly and carefully, as being actually vague and also often provocative, counterproductively).
At some point, we must continue (as I see “wokeness” or some difficult-to-label dynamic having begun fairly broadly) to acknowledge, ponder and repent for our past aggression, oppression, etc. That means both distant past and recent/current matters, as there is great continuity, even if we “improve” around the edges.
My message of hope is this: A majority of Americans have fairly similar perceptions of our extreme polarization, tied largely to a highly dysfunctional and money-led two-party plutocracy. And they believe it is imperative to lessen that polarization and increase civility, both in politics and in other, broader ways.
Couple with that the situation (and tiny ray of hope) that people are increasingly aware that exploitation of animosities has fed into not only the rise of Trumpism, but also allowing a powerful enabling cadre of authoritarian-minded folks, seeking virtually unlimited power. And enough of the “eyes open” folks, some from Gov’t positions (fired, still in, etc.) and even more outside… NGOs, mostly of non-profit type, but some corporate people, too, are getting VERY activist. They are coalescing, organizing, strategizing, advocating for the “least of these”, etc.
[con’t]
[con’t, and hopefully from just above or just below, though I’m not sure of placement]…
So, I’m in the middle of some of this ongoing organizing and action-taking. Some is just to adapt to recent authoritarian moves, some to resist, and a great many to advance real “answers” in the form of systems change…. creating new structures and alliances, cooperation, etc. As this progresses and, as I believe it will, succeeds in holding us as the US from devolving yet further into full fascism, we can then make more, faster progress in addressing our sordid past and its carryovers into our ongoing racism, oppression, inequity, etc.
We are seeing a reaction against such self-reflection, facing of shameful, immoral, cruel behavior, etc…. in the rise of MAGA, including among a great many “Christians”. But the reaction TO that reaction is stronger than many might realize, partly because it doesn’t get much publicity.
Resistance that’s tied directly to politicians and our electoral processes does get some attention, but I’d argue that the deeper and perhaps more significant action is happening behind the scenes. One place you can follow and/or get involved in a slice of this, and at a fairly sophisticated, “high” level, is the Generate Democracy! group on Linked in and its “Inter-movement Impact Project” and many sister ventures cooperating as “sub-movements” in many service and academic arenas.
The most problematic aspect of the entire Trump phenomenon is how loyal so many Christians are to him. It never ceases to trouble me. But it shouldn’t have surprised me. The values he embodies, the causes he champions, the general perspective he has on life, are unfortunately very common. I think back (close to thirty years ago now) to some of the awful letters to the editor that The Plough magazine used to publish at the end of each issue. Time after time “good Christian people” demonstrated through those letters how much they hated just about everything the Bruderhof stood for, including things that were essential components of my reading of the gospels. I knew then that things in the evangelical world were deeply troubled, and it’s only gotten much worse and more vocal as the years have passed. But it’s not just evangelicals, its most church members in this country. After all, I think most mainline Protestants, though recently echoing Brooks’ remarkably recent disenchantment with “American Values,” would never have questioned the goodness of America if the Trump phenomenon had never happened – and I think most still think he’s a rare exception rather than a more honest version of business as usual in the USA. Even a significant proportion of Catholics seem to have completely succumb to Americanism. One need only look up Pope Francis on Youtube to find that the same old sort of Christian nationalist/fundamentalist mentality has infiltrated the Catholic church as well as Protestantism at large.
You’ve made some excellent points… disturbing ones!
Indeed, if not for a largely disproportionate white Evangelical vote going to Trump, it’s unlikely he would have won in either 2016 or 2024. Black Christians probably average at least as theologically conservative as do white Evangelicals. Even with more swinging to Trump in 2024 than in 2016, the percentage difference is massive. That alone should tell us that something more than just “Trump’s supportive of Christians and religious freedom” going on…
There’s a major factor of racism (often of the unconscious sort) and anti-intellectualism going on… related to the very factors Ted’s pointing out: a lack of true self-reflection and readiness to repent and compensate for (not necessarily even with “reparations”) past and ongoing repression. Instead, we see the denial and purposeful hiding of white supremacy that indeed traces back to the Doctrine of Discovery, if not earlier. Theologically, it has various flaws, and some of them grow out of the inherent hubris of the idea that “The Church” (whether RC/Orthodox or Protestant) brings with it “the only way to God” and that that gives it the right to dominate. This then quickly becomes “by whatever means necessary… for THEIR own good”.
This is a response to the following comment by Howard Pepper (this blog format does not allow direct responses to comments): “Resistance that’s tied directly to politicians and our electoral processes does get some attention, but I’d argue that the deeper and perhaps more significant action is happening behind the scenes.”
I don’t know about what Howard suggests in the following sentence nor how to access it. I do believe that the concept in Debra Reinstra’s Refugia Faith is critical. This is based on the phenomenon noted after the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption that most scientists thought would result in desolation for eons. But within a few years after the eruption, signs of life were spreading. What the scientists discovered was that the devastation passed over small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. These places are called refugia. Life spreads out from them after a disaster.
Reinstra expands the concept beyond the direct manifestations in nature. Our faith can be the same way, establishing small centers of life and hope that the larger domination system does not notice but have the power to restore life in the wake of the crumbling system.
I live on land bought more than 7 decades ago as a place of retreat, a place to listen in silence to God’s call. People hear God’s call in the silence and go on to follow that call. Silent retreat is not directly political, but it taps into a power that is far stronger than the domination system that sometimes seems all-powerful. I believe there are many small outposts of life and growth across our country which are the hope for our land in the way that none of the political movements are.
Bill, thanks for those thoughts and the concept of refuges for life (or its critical functions such as a broad love of neighbors as expressed well by Ted in the post). I think we all here, writer, readers/commenters, are close “neighbors” and important allies in the challenge of living out love of both neighbors and also “enemies”.
While we’ll inevitably differ on some points of analysis or places to focus to produce change (in ourselves as well as others and large-scale systems), we perceive the large picture basically the same and have the same ends, plus commitment to non-violent means of moving that direction.
As to your comment about not knowing where/how to access some of the positive endeavors of our time and predicaments, for you or other LinkedIn members (a much higher quality and professional/generally-civil social media platform than most), I’d recommend going to a search for groups one can join and inserting “Generate Democracy!” It is by acceptance, as I recall, but I think they accept virtually everyone, and welcome new members.
Not only does the group promote important nonpartisan improvements in our electoral and governing systems, it is transpartisan, with broad recognition among members that the structure and mechanisms of both major parties and of the financing and other systems supporting them is seriously flawed. Only a major (yet feasible) reworking provides at least a chance that we CAN face our past, change course, and begin to operate more compassionately as well as with respect toward others and the earth.