Hakeem Jeffries is Right About God

Progressives need to reclaim the language of faith for moral clarity, effective communication, and solace.

1.

My favorite tweet of the week is one that many liberals hated. Since I don’t like to link out to X, here’s a screencap:

Many pundits, and some of my friends, loathed this tweet from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Some complained that it was improperly religious, and that Democrats should not mimic the God-rhetoric of the Right. Others complained that it wasn’t actionable advice, that it sounded like Jeffries saying we should surrender instead of, in the words of one commenter, “take the damn gloves and knuckle up.”

I disagree. In the wake of an impressively, astonishingly broad attack on American democratic norms — 37 executive orders, numerous illegal firings of government officials, the proposed-then-rescinded freeze on nearly all government expenditures, roundups of legal residents of America’s cities, attacks on the country’s educational and scientific infrastructure, and a vast expansion of executive power — Jeffries is sending exactly the right message, for several reasons.

First, obviously Jeffries and other Democrats aren’t being passive. In numerous other social media posts, Jeffries’ rhetoric has been extremely combative. Democrats in the Senate are assertively trying to stop Trump from packing unqualified extremists into his cabinet. NGOs, from the ACLU to the American Federation of Government Employees to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, have already taken the administration to court. Jeffries’ tweet is obviously not a call to give up.

As in the first Trump administration, progressives love to attack the Democrats and media for being ineffectual. “Do more,” they say. But what, exactly, should the Democrats be doing? Doing more takes power, and congressional Democrats don’t have much of it. Of course, it's understandable to want someone to knuckle up: this is a profoundly disorienting time , and a quite dangerous one for millions of people. But what’s needed is cold, ruthless calculation; rhetoric that calls us to account; and protection of those in danger. Not shaking one’s fist at the sky and demanding that someone, somewhere “do more.” I don’t think Jeffries is being passive at all. I think his rhetoric is exactly right for this moment.

2.

Jeffries is right that “presidents come and presidents go.” People vote for individuals, but they get parties. And each major party has an entire policy infrastructure alongside it: official party entities, a constellation of NGOs competing for influence, industry groups, and so on. I wish normal people understood that. We’re seeing the proof right now, exactly as the much-maligned “media” desperately tried to explain last Spring, when the Heritage Foundation promulgated a policy and implementation blueprint that the Trump administration is now following to the letter.

Back in the George W. Bush days, I remember a sticker (we didn’t have memes yet) that said “Elect a madman, you get madness.” That’s true, but it’s also true that you get a network of non-madmen implementing policies that have very little to do with what low-information voters think about. And not just parties: while presidents come and presidents go, vast forces — capital, religion, nationalism, liberalism — are what endure, and they invite basic, fundamental choices: between self-interest and collective wellbeing, individual flourishing and religious values, tradition and change.

Which brings us to “God.”

Obviously, this word means many different things to different people, and as such is quite unhelpful. One of my core teachers, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, used to say “I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.” But at a high enough level of generality, religion and God are about what theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern.” As a rabbi and religious scholar, most of my God-talk focuses on the mystical: the experience of the numinous and the transformations that it brings about. But the mystical is nothing without integration into life, and that implicates, immediately, questions of ethics, morality, and justice. These are ultimate concerns, whether one is atheistic, theistic, agnostic, non-dualistic, or who knows what else.

Translating Jeffries into the kind of language more likely to resonate with a Both/And reader, “God is still on the throne” means that our fundamental commitments to justice and the sacred are more important than whoever wields temporal power. As a religious progressive, my textual, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of ultimate concern teach me that it is wrong that some people lack basic necessities for survival while others live in Supertalls. It is wrong that humans despoil the planet for short-term enrichment and enjoyment. It is wrong that human flourishing is thwarted because of constricted notions of personhood.

Obviously, others hold different views: that God ordained a certain order to creation that is set forth in texts He wrote, for example, or and that that order is more important than some people’s flourishing or even sustenance. Or that strength and order are essential to human survival, even at the expense of compassion or freedom. And so on.

But since my moral views roughly align with those of Hakeem Jeffries’s, I take deep comfort in the reminder that “God sits on the throne.” At some point, I think we collectively will be judged for the sins of our present moment — not by a vengeful anthropomorphic deity, but by history. Though we are entering a period of extreme conservatism, corruption, and vulgarity, there is still right and wrong, despite the prevailing winds of the moment. And I will not surrender my faith in mercy, justice, humanity, pleasure, joy, spirituality, beauty, reason, culture, decency, diversity, interdependence, and the holiness of the natural world. I love these things even if the government hates them.

This is how I understand “God sits on the throne.” And how I understand faith.

3.

So why not just say that? Why use the language of God and thrones? Because the shared, contested language of faith is more effective. It resonates with more people, crossing lines of class, background, and education. It calls us to conscience. It joins our timely struggle to the timeless.

As Bishup Mariann Budde showed in her plea to Trump to show mercy (something he has never, in his life, displayed), religious language has a power that secular rhetorics do not. After all, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did not speak in terms of constitutional guarantees. And yet many progressives, being skeptical of theism and rightly critical of religion’s bloody history, often abandon this entire way of speaking to conservatives. This is a tragic mistake, and in my own modest way, I’ve dedicated much of my career to remedying it. Jeffries’ appeal to heaven isn’t giving up the fight — it is clarifying the kind of fight we ought to be fighting.

Jeffries may lack temporal power, but his tweet evokes spiritual power. This is what an opposition leader should be doing: calling us to account, reminding us that there are fundamental values deeper than the ones held by people in power, and doing so in terms to which the vast majority of Americans can relate.

I am, of course, entirely supportive of secular constitutional and civic values, and the separation of church and state. But a tweet is not a statute or a statement in a court of law. It is part of a public conversation, and religious language is entirely appropriate in that context. And when only one side claims that language, the other side loses by default.

If the extremism of Trumpist nationalism is to be defeated, it must be exposed for the unrighteousness that it is. Its cruelty, its vulgarity, its duplicity (riding popular resentment to shower benefits on the ultra-rich) — these are profound spiritual offenses. And while I recognize that many people cannot embrace religious language wedded to beliefs and histories they cannot accommodate, I would urge them to reconsider this aversion for the sake of those currently in great danger.

But even if we lose; even if this period lasts not two years, not four, but forty; even if the America my daughter lives in is unrecognizable to me, and even if I lose my livelihood and my family’s right to exist, I would still reach for the language of faith in this moment. If nothing else, it is a desperate message to the future that some of us knew what was happening in front of our eyes, and tried our best to tell the truth about it.

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Here are some excellent pieces I’ve read this week. There are doubtless many more which I’ve chosen not to read… please leave some suggestions in the comments.

• One of the most effective aspects of the Trump “flood the zone with shit” strategy is how it covers up vast corruption. Judd Legum did a great analysis of the Trump meme coin and just how outrageously corrupt it is.

• The HRC has really done an excellent job of cataloguing the anti-gay and anti-trans orders of the last two weeks. Here’s one report on the national ban on trans healthcare for people under 18. And here’s another on the other anti-LGBTQ orders.

• Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day did a great piece on “Discourse as Governance.”

• It’s comforting to know that, actually, the second Trump administration may turn out to be as incompetent as the first one. Executive orders with huge formatting errors, misspelling “Columbia,” a president who has no idea what’s in the orders he’s signing… this is good news and Daniel W. Drezner did a great round-up of it.

• Finally, as I wrote about recently, it’s exceptionally disorienting that the Trump disorientation is coinciding with a round of Extreme AI Disorientation. Daniel Pinchbeck (fresh off of having me on his podcast) did a great essay on that.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to see what I’ve been working on lately, check out the website for the Harvard Symposium on Psychedelics in Monotheistic Traditions, and the open source casebooks I’ve created for my courses on Antinomianism and Psychedelics, Law & Religion.