How to Herd
When evil times call us to deep moral discernment and courage
Last Sunday I stayed after church to watch Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy with my people. It was a really good documentary. Which is to say: it made us feel terrible.
The film explored how right-wing policy wonks strategically co-opted evangelical Christians and made them bedfellows with wealthy oligarchs for the long-term project of destroying democracy.
They were saying the quiet part out loud even then (“the more people that vote, the less we win”) and have been working this project for 45 years now. They are extremely organized and (especially now) have limitless funds. They’ve been using the language of faith mingled with violence against those they’ve unilaterally decided are evildoers (including other Christians like me) since the beginning, and it’s seeped from the margins into the very center of the party that now controls all three branches of government.
So, you know, feeling terrible. And helpless. And hopeless.
That’s all to be expected. But it’s not acceptable as a long-term position.
One of my consuming thoughts at the moment is not what people committed to the Trump Death Cult are up to. It’s what (mostly white) people on the left and the center-left are up to. I’m hearing from a lot of folks that they are entirely exhausted from the last 9 years and checking out.
Apart from coming out of political hibernation to momentarily bask in the warm glow of schadenfreude when a Trump voter suddenly regrets their vote, they are making noises that they’re done with the political circus and ready to spend more time tending their gardens.
That would be bad. But know what would be worse? If a whole lot of white liberals started actively accommodating the incoming regime. I almost did it myself back in 2016. For a few seconds between Election Day and the inauguration I said out loud “Maybe Trump isn’t really that bad? Maybe we should give him a chance?” I realized with horror that I probably had the beginnings of Stockholm syndrome–calling evil good, or at least “not so bad,” so I didn’t have to live with the anger and/or terror and/or responsibility for resisting years of his hard rule. It’s so much easier just to surrender to the water, getting warmer every minute…
There’s only so much we can do to resist this time around (unless we are a mid-level bureaucrat in the federal government–then there might be quite a lot we can do). But two things we can do for sure is:
1) protect vulnerable individuals and groups as much as we can, even if it comes with a great sacrifice of our money, our time, our reputations and respectability, and even our personal safety.
and
2) keep a steady moral plumbline running down the center of our souls, so we can let those souls shout at us when things are happening that are wrong. Maybe our plumbline is the teachings of Jesus. Or the law of Moses. Maybe it’s an areligious but inviolate commitment to kindness, generosity, humility and courage.
We need to hold a moral center because a whole lot of people and institutions (including our churches) are going to start shifting their positions. It’s entirely unsurprising that CEOs and mainstream media companies are bending the knee. Of course they are. Their core values have always been attention and/or profit.
But the rest of us? What are our core values? How can we anchor in a place of objective moral good when there’s so much social pressure to go along with evil, and little reward (or even punishment) for doing the right thing?
I think a lot about human nature and how we can act right, individually and collectively. How can we do good without the usual religious tactics of fearmongering or shame or scapegoating? How do we win the heart, hack the brain, in-spire into the soul the longing to do better and better by one another?
Looking at the confederacy of rapists and rape enablers, shameless liars, and treasonous grifters Trump is assembling for his cabinet and other key positions, maybe it’s not that complex to understand both how we do better, and how we come to do more and more bad over time. We’re herd animals, after all, and there is safety in numbers. We take our cues from each other.
I read this fascinating piece a few weeks ago, about Elon Musk’s ketamine parties as one example of how “shared indulgence in moderately illegal behaviors can provide the social cement for trusting relations among people who want to do other, worse things. Rituals can corrupt the previous uncorrupted.”
Doing bad things together normalizes badness. If a bunch of people in Trump’s cabinet, including Trump, have a documented sexual assault history–then nobody does, in a sense. It normalizes sexual assault as “wild child” playfulness.
Not only does that kind of normalization have a trickle-down effect to the hoi polloi, (which is terrifying in itself as the mother of a young adult daughter who is in her highest-risk era for being assaulted); the normalization also makes it possible for confederates to do worse and worse things. Either you relinquish your conscience and commitment to your moral values, or you risk the consequences of breaking with the power bloc and becoming a target for takedown.
This photo of self-styled health guru RFK Jr. on a private jet eating McDonald’s with Elon Musk, Don Jr., Mike Johnson and Trump says it all. One wag captioned the photo “when you do drugs together to prove you’re not a narc.” In a regime like this one, you *have to* do bad things to prove you won’t turn on anyone else.
When I was in 8th grade, my whole class went on a trip to Gettysburg. We had to organize ourselves into groups of four for the overnight hotel stay. After years of being bullied and having no safe social space at school, I was thrilled to suddenly find myself in a new friend group. They weren’t popular girls–but they were themselves. Even better. That meant they were people I thought I could be myself with. We decided to room together.
My stepdad was an active alcoholic at the time. A few months earlier, I had spent the most terrifying Christmas of my life forced to witness hours of his drunken self-harm. Fast forward to Gettysburg with my new friends. As soon as we all got to our hotel room, the girls revealed that they had brought a whole bottle of vodka. Party time!
Except that they had unwittingly invited a party pooper to room with them. Shaken, I told them about my stepfather, how scared I was of booze and the idea of us starting to drink so young. I made them pour it down the sink. They iced me out for the rest of the trip, and that was the end of our friendship.
Eighth grade Molly. How I want to hug that naive, sweetly awkward, bossy nerd!
I’m not saying I was particularly brave, or even correct in what I did. They were, after all, just kids. No 13-year-old was getting behind the wheel that night. But something deep in my soul rose up and needed to speak.
In every one of us there’s a voice that will tell us when what is happening is wrong.
We can take a beat and do some discernment, interrogate that voice as to why we believe that and who is being harmed. Because of course, lots of people who are convinced they know right from wrong are in fact *themselves* wrong. Utterly polarized, good-guys-and-bad-guys moral thinking is immature thinking—and deeply destructive.
But here’s where our plumbline comes in. If the call to speak out is not coming from our prejudices or loyalties, but from deep within, that call is a bell. It rings out danger. It rings out warning. It rings out love for our brothers and sisters and siblings.
My new friends’ desire to party was not a sin, but it might have hurt or killed one of them, inexperienced drinkers without adequate chaperoning. Who knows? Maybe in making myself a parish I averted a worse outcome. I just knew I had to answer my soul’s–and ultimately I had to answer to my soul.
In the months and years to come, we will have to decide how much we will risk (relationships, reputation, resources, our very lives) to resist the dominant paradigm. By our courage we may even win others back from following the herd.
No one wants to think of themselves as bad, ignorant or complicit. But when the deportations start, when trans kids’ suicide rates climb even higher, when the violence against protestors escalates, who in your social circles will minimize or deny or ignore the violence as long as it’s not against people they know and can personally vouch for?
I undertook a mushroom journey just before the election. One of my intentions was to find unshakeable grounding, to be able to be a strength and support for others for the long haul if Trump won. In my journey, I spent what felt like hours standing on a cliff, observing a wild, darkly colorful Boschian landscape of suffering sorrow. A gentle voice said, “everyone is going to go through something because of what happens next. Including those who have been sheltered until now.”
If that sounds chilling to you, pause for a moment. Think back to a time of suffering that changed everything. Perhaps it was an illness, a loss or a confrontation with a powerful truth about yourself. You took a stand that would change or save your life, or someone else’s. The means by which that change came about was painful. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And yet, what followed the pain was miraculous. You were born again.
I believe we are about to go through such a time, collectively, as a nation.
We will have to confront our shadow and our demons. What we do, the choices we make individually and together, matter.
My friend Mary talked about the sin at the heart of all that is happening politically and culturally right now. All people sin, left right and center; and Jesus said we have an obligation to take the log out of our own eye before pointing out the mote in our enemy’s. But turning a blind eye completely to the sins of others or joining them in sinning is not what Jesus had in mind.
Corrupt countries are unhappy countries, because there’s no bottom to the bad behavior that happens at the top, and no one to trust. Lawlessness trickles all the way through society as others say “those who lead us have no scruples. Why should I?” We are at risk of the same perils that have befallen many other countries with widespread corruption. We are not exceptional. And this is our moment to decide what we will be.
What makes “good” people go bad? Permission. And what makes bad people turn better? Social pressure. We have a tremendous amount of influence over each other, especially at the level of friend, neighbor, co-religionist. We are going to have a lot of opportunities over the next 4 (or more) years to resist the urge to follow the herd, to sin-wash and call evil good: evils like mass theft through insider training, fraud and corporate greed; mass murder through health care denial, mass deportation, mass incarceration, mass impoverishment and, of course, straight-up genocide.
Just this week, we are having important “who was harmed, and to what degree?” conversations after the killing of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson by 26-year-old Luigi Mangione. Even I am surprised by how many ‘ordinary’ people of all political stripes see Mangione as a folk hero, taking out a villainous perpetrator in a murderous system.
I hope these moral conversations continue–and continue to surprise and depolarize. But the fact is, many of our conversations over the next years will continue to be hard. It’s uncomfortable to confront our own people when we disagree with them. Nobody wants to be a pariah.
And: the plumbline of your soul is a ringing bell, calling you to do as much good as you can, and inspire others to do the same.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats
Christlove <3
Molly
~
Staying engaged through these times means staying in touch with independent journalism and journalists. Here is a short list of what I am reading or listening to these days:
Yes I’m on BlueSky and follow a bunch of independent and especially Black journalists and activists
I read Heather Cox Richardson daily (natch)
Pod Save America does the impossible: it makes me laugh when even the very worst things are happening or might be about to happen. It also makes me feel very smart. And lets me cuss with very smart people who used to work for Obama (everything by Crooked Media is good, but this is my fave)
Democracy Docket fights for democracy in the courts
Popular Info which brands itself “accountability journalism”
Bess Kalb for her tender, fierce and LOL takes on everything from Luigi Mangione to Gaza
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg for her wisdom, playfulness and incredible moral compass
Kristin Dumez to stay on top of what the white Christian nationalists are up to
we should talk