Peter Walks for Democracy

Dear Pastor E,

I’m writing this letter out of respect for our former friendship and to state what conscience demands. 

You have told me many times that your religion is not politics and my politics are a religion. You are concerned with more eternal things, the teachings and words of Christ, and the end of abortion. For some time, I took these statements seriously, considering each of them a worthwhile proposition. As you know, I temporarily curtailed my own behavior, in part as a response to what you’d said. Having soberly thought about your behavior, though, and the behavior of many pastors in the Evangelical church, your collective flock’s behavior, and their unwavering support for the Make America Great Again movement, I have concluded that the Evangelical Church has become so fixated on power that it has subordinated everything to a single end—a Christian nation made its own warped image.

I love my country as a full and free citizen. No doubt, I am a flawed man. But I am committed to the promise of this incredible Constitutional democratic republican experiment built on liberty and justice for all. It is the nation that the abolitionists, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis fought so dearly for, a nation where all people are treated fairly and can be equally involved in their lives’ fates, no matter their races, creeds, or stations. It is also a nation where people who abuse their fellow humans, the judicial and media systems, are held accountable by the people and for the people. I don’t want just any justice, and certainly not the false justice of the Evangelical Republican Party.

You and I have not seen one another in person in some time but we have talked frequently enough. Often, we have found common ground as friends do: asking about our wives and children, the ups and downs of our own versions of public life, and the trials of addiction. You have been kind to me about my alcoholism, understanding well the challenges from your years on this planet. I, too, have listened to your pains from aging and near-death experiences and the fear of your wife’s bouts with illness. I am grateful for the prayer you offered me and the time I have spent in loving kindness meditations for you.

Feelings of affection and care may call us back, but my care and love for this one special planet, Lincoln’s more perfect union, and the love of my queer sister, my Jewish wife, and the nation’s many children demand that I call attention to conditions that you either don’t know about, ignore, deceive yourself about, or deceive me about. And so, I return to your statements that your religion is not politics, that my politics border on a religion, and that you are concerned with things that are more eternal. 

I look around and see our nation is infected by a religion of politics and a politics of religion. All of it is enflamed by profiteering media personalities and corporations. So much of it is built on rage, lies, and corruption. It is by far the worst and most widespread on the political right, the Evangelical right, and ultimately the white Christian nationalism dominating our so-called “conservative” political factions.

I wonder if we will meet again. If we do, our friendship will have been over for some time. You will be immersed in a church that has continued to buckle under the weight of its true leader’s—Donald J. Trump’s—lies, grift, and irresponsibility. Perhaps he will win the presidency. Perhaps not. Either way, his addiction to resentment, his demands for fealty and loyalty, and his predilection for incitement will lead to violence. He will be the cause of that violence and the goal of that violence because he is your church’s means and ends. No matter what, you and your flock will have voted for him, aligning action with spirit, your spirit with his mendacity, that mendacity to violence, and that violence with a will to power. “Gott mit uns,” the Nazis would say: “God is with us.” See the number of Evangelical ministers lining up to say God is with Trump. Ultimately, your soul will have been deformed and Christ defeated within you all as servants of Trump’s, the GOP’s, and the Church’s government’s and government’s Church’s universal wolf. 

Today and on a day in the future when we see one another again (should it pass), I will be close to you in spirit. But more importantly, I will be your opponent and perhaps your enemy. Today, the people of the political left face two opponents: themselves as a peaceful people and you and the white Christian nationalists who’ve been in an alliance with the most powerful polluters in the world for decades. For us, ugly fights for power have never been to our liking. Many—not all—simply wish to make things easy and mellow, despising needless rancor, and even the idea of us vs. them. Since the emergence of the Tea Party and its intense nativism, we on the left struggled to respond because we wanted to do so through facts and reason, through “understanding.” Then Trump emerged as a silly reality television show host and then a demagogue juiced up by Twitter. His endless and invidious lies and constant attention seeking turned the Tea Party into what Isaac Asimov called “the armies of the night.” Today, its base is fully a third of the country. And yet, few on the political left have been willing to call this what it is out of fear of intemperance, overreaction, and a stubbornness that we must be “rational.” What a colossal mistake we have made. While I do not wish to become like your brethren in the violent white Evangelical movement, I see that we have been too easygoing. We must place lines in the sand and go to war using reason instead of trying to negotiate with deceivers and fake victims. We will apply the force of justice where necessary.

On your side, you have a scion image of heroes. In fewer and fewer cases, the hero is Jesus as the apostles portrayed him, and more and more like rogue heroes in action films, desperate despots, and lost madmen. Certainly, the heroes of the white Christian nationalists with whom Trump surrounds himself are either wannabe mavericks, terrorist sympathizers, or actual terrorists. They are all saviors of false white Christian civilization who commit idolatry.

They say the Jews will not replace them. Genders will be secure. The cities—Blacks—will be held to account for their vote. Children will learn the right history, the White history: of, by, and for the right white people. They will practice the right faith: Christian nationalism. The globalists who want to take care of the planet will bow before the fossil fuel tycoons and be revealed as the watermelons they are—green on the outside but pink on the inside. They will attack the so-called Communists. I have in front of me Jackson Spielvogel’s Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History. Spielvogel, one of the most knowledgeable people about the rise of the Third Reich lives across the street from me. From rhetoric to tactics to strategy, he sees unassailable parallels between the National Socialist Worker’s Party (Nazi) and today’s GOP.

Your movement is obsessed with overt strength and supplication. Ours is not. It is based on fair treatment and equal involvement of all people. Summoning the will to fight with such an ethic is hard. It has made us slow. But our unwillingness to fight is evaporating.

We are conquering this weakness for the sake of our fellow human beings and this one wild and precious home, the Creation on planet Earth. The image we have formed of an integrated union calls us forward today. We are putting aside our hopes for careful deliberations and discussions to work now, for hope in those actions, that love for our fellow citizens and residents would transcend the depraved cultish fixations of the fascist right, and our own allergy to overt conflict. 

My side has taken a long and meditative side road. It had to be done to discern the truth with observation, evidence, and reason, something we might also call discernment or wise judgement. It has placed justice as fair treatment and equal involvement linked to the truth on our side. While we have paid for our slowness, I would not have done it another way. We have the book of law, the scales of justice, the eyes of truth, the heart of courage, and the mind of reason on our side. While deeply imperfect as all human beings are, we know that the arc of history will bend toward justice if walk the road. We bend the arc. I know many of us do not wish for a war to come, but having been threatened ourselves, we are prepared.

In our past discussions, I have shared with you some troubling stories. A dear friend’s father was killed by the KKK in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979. Donald Trump was endorsed by the KKK through The Daily Stormer in 2016. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the white Christian nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us.” One of them rammed his car into a crowd and killed a young woman. My wife is Jewish. Donald Trump said there were fine people on both sides. In 2020, hate groups like the Oath Keepers, 3%, the Proud Boys, and others started appearing at anti-COVID rallies and recruiting on college campuses, including here in Pennsylvania and Penn State. Donald Trump told them to “stand down and stand by” from the podium at a debate. They knew he was speaking directly to them as testimony in the many January 6^th trials have shown. Those same hate groups defaced a Pride Wall, the MLK, Jr. Plaza, and tried to burn down the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship here in Centre County, PA. On January 6^th, 2021, these groups orchestrated an attack on the Capitol with and for Donald Trump and his inner circle. There were swastikas and Confederate battle flags in the Capitol.

In 2023, the man who sponsored the founder of the Proud Boys to come to Penn State and his wife—a school board candidate—trespassed into the public high school’s library to take pictures of books they deemed pornographic. When I turned the video footage of them entering the building over to a reporter and the news went public, they called on me to be removed from the Board, be censured, or resign. They called me a security threat. Never mind that they have affiliated themselves with violent anti-American terrorists. Never mind they are associated with Lions for Liberty who are themselves connected to Moms for Liberty, that hypocritical cult of false femininity. Never mind that the Moms are friends of the Proud Boys. Amazing the circularity of these Christo-fascists who wish to take over our schools. It is an open secret that their church was the local base of operations for Doug Mastriano’s campaign for Pennsylvania governor. Mastriano spoke on January 6^th and is a known Christian dominionist with ties to anti-Semites. I have friends who live in the house of a man who was convicted of attacking the seat of our democratic republic that day. He was bussed there by Mastriano. They betrayed the Constitution.

I say all of this because you have tried to convince me that these Christo-fascists are not a threat. You live in Columbus, Ohio. Funny that these hateful nationalists marched on a Drag Brunch in Columbus last year and you’ve done nothing to denounce them.

Funny that you call my politics a religion. The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of religion while guaranteeing our individual free exercise. As an American, I want established religion out of my government and I want and believe each person and our faith and non-faith communities should be able to practice our rituals of observance. As an American, I seek no special favor from my government and no vaunting of any religion above any other. Let them peacefully coexist in the ecosystem of faiths.

Mastriano. Flynn. Franklin Graham. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation. The list will go on. They have no such belief as mine. Their religion is their politics and their politics is their religion. They have unironically hitched themselves to Donald Trump and his anti-social, racist, nativist, corrupt, and resentful march to hoped-for power. Power and power alone.

You are part of a movement that is soul sick. You have supplicated your good judgement and spiritual fitness to megalomaniacs. You have given all power to one parameter, the end of abortion. As a practical matter, not only will abortion never end, your unwavering support for this cause has made that one element of your political religion eminently corruptible. 

If you will give up everything else to win that particular outcome, what else will you compromise? What have you compromised? Though small, you have sacrificed all the respect I ever had for you. The least Christ-like person in American controls the network of your churches. He has turned you into a vessel of evil and probably a weapon of evil. You’ve already surrendered time and attention to one of your parishioners who you acknowledge is a conspiracy theorist. As Neville Chamberlain taught us, you should not compromise with fascists. Perhaps it is not too late. But I doubt it.

I doubt I ever believed that the truth alone would set people free or guard them from the evil that people will do. But it is good to know that when truth is given its time in the transparency of the court for us to see, it wins by its superiority in the heart, the mind, and the collective spirit of honor. We are bolstered today by this unavoidable fact. Donald Trump is a fraud and your political religion is therefore a fraud. Donald Trump is a rapist and your political religion is an accessory to rape. Donald Trump is a convicted liar and your political religion is an amplifier of lies. Donald Trump is a convicted felon and your political religion is an obsequious sycophant to that felon. Donald Trump is not contrite as a Christian and your political religion is no longer Christian. You are lost in a myth that is untrue but believed, confused about its ends and its means, hopelessly flailing to find purpose behind a leader whose only purpose is himself. We will always stand against such an anti-moral movement, discerning through wise practice where and when we must have courage, are called to sacrifice, be strong, discern truth from lies, and quiet the cowardly human gods your movement reveres.

Out of respect and the fierce compassion I have been taught, I had to share this with you in the midst of our nation’s escalating fray. “Your politics is your religion,” you said. This was a projection. As a pastor you are deeply enmeshed in politics and you have tried to deceive those around you, me included. Sadly, I see you and your political religion have given yourselves to spiritual and cultural delusion and decay. You are diseased by your addictions to power. How saddened Christ must be.

I am part of a persevering people who marched at Selma, walked the walk of Freedom Summer, and fought for emancipation. We are courageous, connected to truth and reason, open to the possibility of change through good works, prepared to conquer these armies of the night, and lit by the fire of love for our more perfect union. 

We are Americans. We are America.

Peter D. Buck

June 11, 2024