Sunday Thoughts: "We Want a King"

So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah.  They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord.  And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.  As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you.  Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. The Lord answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.” (I Samuel 8) 

***

In thinking about the way that politics have co-opted American Christianity, I have been struck by a few things. 

First, I was raised in a faith community that instilled in me a love for the Bible and taught me innumerable lessons from it for decades. Yet somehow, they - particularly the Baby Boomer generation - seems to have forgotten the very lessons they taught me. 

Second, as I have pointed out in previous “Sunday Thoughts,” (on my facebook page) white evangelicals in particular treat Trump as if he were a god, not a mortal. And they believe that he provides them with a certain something that they cannot get from anyone else. (Otherwise, they would have supported impeachment of Trump - because they could have had Pence as president - someone supposedly one of them.) 

I believe that this passage in I Samuel is particularly illuminating as to the dynamic here - and also troubling in its implications. 

Like so many stories in the Bible, this one saves the most important part until the end. This is something I have noticed in both the parables of Christ and in so many of the stories in the Old Testament. The writers of the Bible were, if nothing else, experts at the art of the story, and this is no exception. 

Let’s dive in:

First, the problem starts with the corrupt children of Eli, the high priest and Israel’s last “Judge.” But I believe that this, while relevant, isn’t the most important part. After all, pretty much every Judge died and the next generation made a royal mess of things - if the judge himself didn’t do that first. So why a king? 

I believe there are two answers to this question. The first is repeated twice - at the beginning and the end - and I believe it is crucial to understanding this story. I remember being taught this as a kid, and subsequently in Sunday School or church my whole lifetime. 

“We want a king like every other nation has.” 

They wanted to be like every other nation. I was taught that this was a wrong, evil desire. The people of God are to be different from every other nation. Israel should have been content to follow God without needing a powerful authority to take the places of God in their nation. And likewise, the Church - the Kingdom of God on earth - was to have different values and structure than other human institutions. 

I believe, however, that the way to understand this first part of the answer is to understand the second part of the answer:

“We want a king to go out and fight our battles.”

They wanted someone to beat up the enemy. They thought that by having a strong leader who hated the people they hated, they could finally “win” over their enemies. Hey, the other nations make war as a matter of course. Why couldn’t Israel do it too, and make their own empire? 

I think to understand why evangelicals - and white evangelicals in particular - want a king, and thus why they worship Trump, you have to understand that they want someone to fight their “enemies” for them. 

Because Trump very much fulfils that wish. He is indeed aggressive and violent and nasty toward various groups of people, and (in my experience) a solid majority of white evangelicals love that about him. He does indeed lead them into battle against their enemies. 

As Ben Howe put it:

"The more he fights, the more they feel justified, like, He’s our hero because we needed someone to do this for us. Trump’s appeal is not judges. It’s not policies. It’s that he’s a shit-talker and a fighter and tells it like it is. That’s what they like. They love the meanest parts of him.”

Which begs the question: who are their enemies?

This is a partial list:

1. “Liberals” - meaning people who do not vote Republican, obviously, but particularly people who believe in freedom and access to society for everyone, not just evangelicals. (See below.) This also includes a lot of Christians with different beliefs than theirs, which is why I am definitely on the “enemy” list these days. Although the reasons we left organized religion are many, it was obvious that we were no longer welcome if we spoke out against Trump. 

2. LGBTQ people. Not much explanation needed here. Evangelicals want the right to persecute gay people, with no consequences.

3. Scientists. Evangelicals have been waging a jihad against science ever since it first challenged their belief in biblical literalism.  

4. Immigrants and non-whites. And yes, white evangelicals get furious with me for pointing out the obvious. But their words (and posts online) betray them. They want millions of people deported. They want a wall. They want a change to dramatically reduce legal immigration. And they don’t think we have any moral duty to take in refugees. (James Dobson is, unfortunately, par for the course for evangelicals.) White evangelicals are also the one group most likely to think racism is no longer a problem in our country - or if it is, it is racism against white people. And again, it isn’t close. I wish I could believe otherwise, but so many in my life, including extended family – people I thought were better than that – weren’t.

5. The poor and vulnerable. Evangelical politics right now are social darwinist. Full stop. There is no other group in our nation so intent on grinding the faces of the poor. And I believe this is related to the endemic racism. There is a history of associating certain social programs that literally every first world country (and an increasing number in the third world) have with “taking money from white people who earned it and giving it to lazy brown-skinned people.” And with the Covid-19 pandemic, it appears that anyone vulnerable to dying is in this category now. 

6. People with different religious beliefs. So certainly Muslims. But also “liberal” Christians too. And the sort of Catholics who speak Spanish. And so on. 

7. Young people. This is increasingly obvious. Facing a demographic bloodbath, evangelicals cannot conceal their contempt for “millennials,” by which they often mean Gen Z. And as far as political policies, they have sold their grandchildren’s future for political power now.

So, it becomes clear that Trump is very much the sort of “king” who will fight the “enemies” of evangelicals. 

He makes no pretense of being the president for all of America - he only serves his voters. (And his ego, of course.) He constantly attacks the other side with vicious language and slander about their motives. 

He has taken positive steps to persecute LGBTQ people, and promises more, in the form of “religious freedom” to persecute in the name of god. 

He is aggressively anti-science, both in rhetoric and in policies. That his policies are to open the earth to catastrophic exploitation by the ultra-rich does not trouble evangelicals, because they believe that god will just destroy the earth any day now, so who cares what we do with it now. 

He is (and this is not even remotely arguable) viciously anti-immigrant, anti-minority, and white supremacist. The only people who seem unable to see or admit this are...evangelicals. The KKK certainly has no illusions - they trumpet how great Trump is for their cause. (“Hail Trump! Hail Our People!” [Nazi salute]) 

He has done more than any other president in my lifetime to try to strip food and healthcare from the bottom 50% of our population. He shows contempt for anyone who is struggling financially. He sees no point in a living wage, public healthcare, or food stamps. He has zero empathy for people who lack his privilege. And he has enacted the greatest transfer of wealth to the ultra-rich in 100 years. 

And, of course, the Muslim ban, the non-stop rhetoric against non-evangelicals combined with his promise to give evangelicals special treatment. 

Even when it comes to young people, all that Trump offers is contempt. 

It’s all there. White Evangelicals hate a lot of people, unfortunately. And Trump hates them too. And is willing to lead them into battle against those enemies. Which is the number one reason they forgive his faults and defend the indefensible.

I guess that sounds good if you are on the “winning” side. But not so much for the rest of us.

There is more to the story, of course. The Israelites got Saul, a tall, blustering bully. A guy who refused to listen to wise advice, believed he knew better, got the nation into never-ending and catastrophic war with its neighbors, got in trouble for hoarding the spoils of war, went crazy and started tweeting saying a bunch of nutty stuff, and eventually caused mass disaster to his nation. 

It didn’t end well. 

***

Just a final thought: it seems to me that white Evangelicals have basically given up on the idea of making converts by persuasion. Whether it is the appeal of cults like Gothardism that promise that your kids will be political and cultural clones of their parents, or the enthusiastic embrace of King Donald, there is no belief that Evangelicalism might, you know, convince outsiders to join them. This isn’t exactly wrong: nobody who isn’t already an Evangelical has any interest in becoming one. And that goes double for us ex-evangelicals. 

And that is the point. What decent person would want to embrace the hate and violence and anger that Evangelicalism is so full of right now? What compassionate person would want to give up their desire to care for immigrants, refugees, the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable? What reasonable person would want to decide that those they love and interact with every day are suddenly “the enemy”? For that matter, who would want to go from considering humanity to be one species that thrives on cooperation and caretaking to believing most other humans are an evil enemy to be defeated and destroyed? 

That is why I expect that as Evangelicalism faces catastrophic collapse (as the Boomers die off), it will get more and more hateful, and more and more shrill - and alienate even more people.

Hidden in the account above is another telling statement - this one from God speaking to Samuel:

[I]t is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you.

It’s sad to see, but the tragedy of white Evangelicalism is the natural result of rejecting a religion of following Christ in humility and love for one’s neighbor in favor of a king to lead one into battle against the enemy. Asking for a king isn’t just a bad idea: it is IDOLATRY. Ultimately, this is the heart of the issue. In following Trump, evangelicals have forsaken any pretense of following Christ. You cannot do both. 

Evangelicals - particularly the white ones.

The Dunio Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Source of book: I own this

Rilke had a resurgence in popularity during the so-called New Age Movement - along with Rumi. His often ambiguous, vaguely spiritual, and introspective poems seemed to fit with an ethos of “spirituality” and inspirational self help. It is rather a shame that this happened - for Rumi too, honestly. I believe that in both cases, the poets were more misunderstood than not. Essentially, their works functioned much the way that science works for snake-oil-alternative medicine: as a nice gloss to make hippie consumerism and hucksters seem deep and grounded. And, just as woo in the biological realm continually makes elementary-school level errors about science, woo in the psychological and spiritual realm makes elementary mistakes about mysticism and art. But, that is my opinion. Your mileage may vary. 

But leaving aside the fact that most people will first encounter Rilke and Rumi in less than ideal places, there is actually much to love about their poetry. (You can read my post on Rumi here, if you like.) For someone like me, who has long felt a connection to the more mystical side of Christianity, and who greatly enjoys poetry, poets like Rumi and Rilke and Tagore touch a part of me that resonates with the more universally human search for the Divine - for transcendence. Thus, poets who express spiritual ideas and experiences in a form that isn’t didactic but rooted in those “groanings which cannot be uttered” speak to me in a deeply personal way. This applies across a broad range. So, for example, the poetic parts of the Old Testament I find to be breathtaking. (Isaiah in particular is pure art.) I find certain expressly Christian poets to be wonderful. Milton, Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, and especially Rossetti come to mind. But there are others who do not share the specifics of my own faith tradition but who I find to be equally inspired, so to speak. (It is the epitome of arrogance to believe that somehow the Only True Faith™ somehow was revealed to white European and American theologians in the 16th through 19th Centuries - and that nobody else in history or geography had truth revealed to them. It seems more likely that God didn’t in fact love white people more than anyone else, and that there are visions of the truth - “through a glass, darkly” - that have appeared to many around the world and throughout history.) So, for me, I find Sufi Muslim Rumi’s exploration of truth and search for the Divine to be valuable as well. Ditto for the “song offerings” by the Hindu Rabindranath Tagore. 

And then there is Rilke, who was raised Catholic, but whose spirituality was…complicated to say the least. He had a rather unpleasant childhood. His mother was obsessed with his older sister, who died when she was a week old. His mother apparently saw him as a replacement for her, and dressed and treated him like a little girl for years. In a possibly related development, his parents’ marriage broke up eventually. Rilke left the Catholic church for a while and explored the Eastern Orthodox experience while traveling in Russia. One result of this journey was The Book of Hours, which is one of my all time favorite poetry collections. (Particularly in the luminous translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.) 

Later, Rilke would continue to identify as Catholic, but he didn’t really participate in religious observance, and wrote much more like a mystic. In some ways, I feel closer to that sort of a journey these days, having left organized religion. Although I probably have a different overall viewpoint than Rilke, I would say - and closest to that of Tagore, perhaps? 

Anyway, the Dunio Elegies are usually considered, along with the Sonnets to Orpheus, to be Rilke’s greatest works. I found them quite intriguing, although I think The Book of Hours is still my favorite. 

An elegy is often defined as “a poem of serious reflection, usually a lament for the dead,” but that rather misstates the idea in my experience. For example, Donne’s elegies are not always serious, and are far more expansive than a lament for the dead. Likewise, Rilke’s elegies are indeed serious, but are more about contemplation of life, the universe, and everything, than a reflection on any specific dead person. Mortality is certainly a central theme. But the poems are directed toward the living and the question of how we live with our knowledge of our mortality. 

A central figure in the poem is an angel. Although it seems mostly metaphoric and functions as an outsider to the human experience. It is in a sense a messenger from the Divine (a very Christian idea) but not in the literal sense those of us raised in the Evangelical tradition would think of an angel. But as a metaphor for the boundary between beings living in eternity and those living in spacetime, it works quite well. Which is, I think, Rilke’s intent. Again, this is poetry, not theology. The truth lies in the spaces between the literal meaning of the words. 

I’m kind of unsure how to describe the poems themselves beyond that. They are written in a far freer verse than the more traditional Book of Hours. My particular edition contains the original German and the English translation on facing pages - which is really handy for comparing the poetic form. (My German is limited to performance instructions in Wagner and Mahler, so I can only sort of get the meaning once in a while.) Stephen Mitchell was the translator in my edition, and I thought his work was good. 

Since the elegies are all fairly long, I won’t quote any in full. However, there are individual lines which stood out. 

The opening lines of the first elegy are breathtaking - and an excellent portent of what is to follow:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ 

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.

Rilke plays with the idea that we mortal humans have one difference with the rest of nature: we are aware of our own mortality and fail to become one with the Divine because of our fear and alienation from the rest of creation. Within the world of the poem cycle, this is Rilke’s view of “salvation.” It is wholeness with creation and a return to communion with the Divine. It is a psychological and spiritual healing. It is a light burden, an easy yoke; not rigid beliefs clung to in order to avoid hellfire. Obviously, this idea is anathema to modern Evangelicals - they are wedded to salvation as a legal transaction whereby God commits a brutal human sacrifice so that he can avoid eternally torturing all the flawed humans he made - now he’ll just eternally torture most of them. This is not, to be clear, the view of Christianity in general or the primary historical view. Rather, it is a way of looking at what Saint Paul called a “mystery” that appealed to some influential white European males during the Protestant Reformation. Many of us feel that, however satisfying it was 500 years ago, it rings really hollow now, and seems to reduce what is arguably the most shocking event in religious teaching (god becomes human, and, rather than come in triumph, suffers and is brutally murdered by humans) into a mere transaction. While also sidelining all the references to restoration, healing, the establishment of a kingdom which looks nothing like earthly power, and so on. 

I am not claiming here that Rilke is a theologian or that he has the pure truth here. Rather, he is expressing a mystical vision of union with the Divine and the salvation of humankind that is a powerful way of looking at things. Once you stop insisting on taking everything literally, you can see such an expansive and holistic vision. To use another metaphor, once you stop insisting on black and white, you can see in color. 

Moving on in the first elegy, here is another line that I loved. 

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

gnaws at our faces.

So many times, I have stood out at night and watched the stars. I have stood on a mountain near midnight at 11,000 feet and watched the Perseids fall. I have felt the wind gnaw at my face there. And in the desert on a winter night. Good lord, that is a great line. 

How about the opening to the fourth elegy? 

O trees of life, when does your winter come?

We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us

like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken’

we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind

and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.

Flowering and fading come to us both at once.

And somewhere lions still roam and never know,

in their majestic power, of any weakness.

The fifth elegy was inspired by a painting by Picasso: Les Saltimbanques. The poem addresses itself to each of the characters in the painting - while still focusing on the overarching theme. I won’t quote from it, because it really needs to be read as a unit. Here is the picture, though, because it is a great example from Picasso’s “rose period.” 

This next quote, from the ninth elegy, fascinates me as well. 

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)--: why then

have to be human--and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? . . .

            Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which 

would exist in the laurel too . . . 

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. 

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And wee too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

I particularly like the bit about happiness as “too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.” That’s a great line that I might have to steal. 

The tenth elegy is probably my favorite, with its personification of Lament as a race of miners who have fallen out of favor in our modern times when only “happy” emotions are socially acceptable. There are several outstanding lines in this one. This is my favorite passage. 

But how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief,

where, in the false silence formed of continual uproar,

the figure cast from the mold of emptiness stoutly

swaggers: the gilded noise, the bursting memorial.

Oh how completely an angel would stamp out their market of solace,

bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations:

clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday.

Farther out, though, the city’s edges are curling with carnival.

Swings of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!

And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,

which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance

he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions

are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only

there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked, 

right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,

the whole action--, educational, and guaranteed 

to increase your potency . . . . . . . . . 

Hot dang. That’s quite the indictment of capitalist consumer culture. And also an inconvenient truth about organized religion: it has “ready-made consolations” - empty platitudes ready to be whipped out whenever the harsh realities of life bump up against trite dogma. It is one of many reasons that religion is irrelevant for many of my children’s generation. Rilke is one hundred percent correct to link trite religious platitudes with consumer culture too. Also marvelous: describing “prettified happiness” as a carnival game. It’s hard to believe he lived a century before social media “influencers.” And what else? The linking of pornography with the pursuit of wealth is fantastic. The culture of wealth (as exemplified best/worst by the Trump family) is absolutely about “hand” measuring contests and toxic masculinity. As I said, this is my favorite poem in the collection. I encourage you to read the whole thing. 

In my book, the Dunio Elegies also includes a few additional poems in an appendix. The first is a fragment of an elegy that was never published. While it is obviously incomplete, it is pretty good. I like this line:

Once poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice

can outshout the rattle of this metallic age

that is struggling on toward its careening future?

While I don’t think war ever was glorious, poetry about war certainly has been. And Rilke (who was traumatized by WWI) certainly foresaw the brutal impersonality of modern warfare - and indeed the industrial age. 

There is also an early version of the tenth elegy - which is clearly inferior to the later version, although it does contain some interesting ideas which were dropped from the final version. Finally, there is a short poem entitled “Antistrophes,” which is kind of a sexist ode to women. Not Rilke’s best work, to say the least. 

But the elegies themselves are beautiful, moving, and insightful. 

***

Note on the name: 

Rilke started writing the elgies in 1912, while he was the guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Dunio Castle, on the coast at Trieste. The term “castle” is no longer particularly accurate. There was once a castle on the site, built in the 11th Century - the ruins of that building stand next to the current building. The current castle was initially built in the 14th Century and modified periodically thereafter. In its current form, it has far too many outward facing windows to be considered a proper fortress. But the location is, shall we say, spectacular. 

 Rilke didn’t finish the elegies at Dunio. World War One intervened, and the trauma from that experience affected his ability to write. He finally finished them in 1922.