I Expected Many Things After Trump Won - But Not This
In 1981, the Cold War was near its peak.
Brezhnev is in the Kremlin. Reagan has just moved into the White House. And I’m a kid in a refugee camp.
My family had just left communist Hungary and travelled across the Iron Curtain to non-communist Austria. We managed to travel on a tourist visa (which was difficult to get from the communist government).
But my parents do not intend to do the tourist thing and then return to communist Hungary: their master plan is to emigrate to the West. They apply for political asylum, which is how we became refugees.
And like the thousands of other Eastern European refugees in camps across Austria at the time, we wait our turn for political salvation.
My brothers and I, however, haven’t yet been told about this plan to leave Hungary for good—it’s too risky. If our parents tell us their real plans but then fail to get refugee status and we’re sent back to Hungary, our teachers would ask what we were doing in Austria. And if we innocently tell them ‘we were hoping to escape to the West’, my parents would be cancelled communist style.
So they tell us a different story about why we’re not yet going back to Hungary—a story that makes sense to my four-year-old mind: ‘We’ve lost the housekey and are just waiting until we find it.’
Simple.
After growing up under communism, my parents know to tread carefully with their words. They know what they can and can’t say (even to close family like us) and realise the serious consequences of falling afoul of the system.
For millions of people like my parents, communism meant walking on eggshells, sometimes daily.
The One Thing I Did Not Expect After Trump Won
But as you might have noticed, we in the West have started treading more carefully over the last decade around what we say - especially around sexuality and gender.
But it’s not just Christians that have noticed this shift. Soon after Trump won the election, former Family Ties actress and Filmmaker Justine Bateman – no die-hard MAGA supporter – put out this surprising tweet:
Much to my surprise, she and many other non-MAGA people in America feel relieved that Trump won.
That’s not what I expected after Trump’s victory.
I expected Democrats to be sad. And MAGA people to be happy. But non-MAGA people to feel relieved? Why on earth would she feel this way?
Well, it’s not because she thinks Trump is great (she doesn’t say anything about that). Instead, she’s concerned about how cancel culture grew under a Democrat administration:
Only “permitted position” behaviour and speech was “allowed”. Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.
And she’s not the only one who had concerns.
Big, former Democrat Party supporters swung away from the Democrat Party toward Trump—think Elon Musk and others like Venture Capitalist Marc Andreeson, in part because of this culture espoused by the Left.
And this shows that the West has reached a ‘civilisational moment’.
Our Civilisational Moment: The non-Christian ideology that dominates our culture
According to Christian author and commentator Os Guinness, the West is at a ‘civilisational moment’, which he defines as follows:
‘A civilisational moment is a critical transition phase in the life of a civilisation, when it loses a decisive connection with the [beliefs] that inspired it.
He continues:
‘Such a moment must result in one of three broad options: a renewal of the dynamic that inspired the civilisation in the first place, a successful replacement of the original dynamic by another, or the decline of the civilisation.’
We are at a watershed moment like this in the West. We have rejected the Christian faith story that laid the foundations for our civilisation – think human equality and freedoms. The attempt to replace them with Enlightenment secularism and reason has proven inadequate.
And so, into this breech has come the very thing that people like Bateman fear: critical Theory. This ideology reduces people to some characteristic, such as race or gender (which is profoundly dehumanising). It then views society as broken up into these various identity groups: the oppressors (among the worst being white heterosexual conservative males) and the oppressed (e.g. black people, LGBTIQ people, Muslim people etc).
And to achieve their vision of equality, critical Theorists and the people inspired by it use illiberal means, such as cancelling people such as J.K. Rowling, who spoke out against Transwomen in women’s only spaces. Or moving to impose laws that constrain and limit free speech.
It’s an ideology that doesn’t complement the gospel; it competes directly with it.
And so, here’s what Christians need to keep in mind:
Anti-Christian ideologies aren’t just bad for Christians; they’re bad for everyone.
Whenever a non-Christian ideology competes with Christianity, it will be bad not just for Christians but for non-Christians.
Whether it’s the ‘woke’ illiberalism that Bateman criticises. Or more overt and destructive forms of Marxism, such as what my family fled. This means Christians should speak up and oppose these ideologies not just for the sake of the gospel and Christian freedom – as important as these are – but for the sake of our non-Christian neighbours.
I’ve heard some Christians say that, well, if the government becomes anti-Christian, Christians will survive. After all, they reason, look at the early church. They thrived under much more oppressive conditions. And didn’t Jesus promise that if we followed him we’ll be persecuted?
And they’re partly right: as Christians, we should expect opposition from the world.
But this view is only half the story. The other half is what happens to non-Christians when anti-Christian ideologies take hold of a society.
Because it’s not just Christians who suffer.
Just ask Justine Bateman.