In today's Sunday School Lesson, we talk about intention and the desires to either build or destroy. After reading Noah Smith's blog today, I thought about the times in my own life when it seemed that I was more destructive than either helpful or productive. Although Noah Smith is writing about MAGA and the trump administration in 2025, I had to pause in personal reflection. I do not question the writer's summation of the gang of old white demented, destructive hooligans who work out of our nation's White House...the facts are apparent to anyone who is paying attention. However, I question my own experiences and choices: When was the destruction in which I participated intentional? What caused the destructive outcomes? Was the destruction/deconstruction necessary? What was built as a result of the destruction?
Because this is a Sunday School Lesson, I refer to a story from the Christian Bible. Jesus went into the Temple, uninvited and without authority, and violently flipped the money changers' tables to stop the Pharisees from using a place of worship as a place for personal profit. When I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s, this story was told to teach me that wealthy, powerful people are corrupt, that their wealth and power is a corrupting influence. The Pharisees were loyal to Judaism...so I did not at first connect this story's lesson to the anti-semitism of my mother's strict Baptist religion. I also heard from the pulpit that wealthy religious leaders are a contradiction to their faith in supernatural authority and the life hereafter. But I was too young and inexperienced to understand that religion/faith in the supernatural is contradictary to the entirety of our lives -- so much so that it is destructive instead of constructive.
An angry Jesus went into the Temple to overthrow Pharisaical religious authority. An angry Jesus would have known that, althought his intention was good, the reality was too powerful to change in that moment, on that day. In fact, did not this defiant, destructive act eventually lead to his imprisonment and death?
When I want to clean a room, I choose to either do a mere surface clean or a thorough top/down, inside/out clean. The easier surface cleaning will do nicely just to maintain order and prevent the accumulation of dust and grime. This task requires an hour, once or twice a week. Things are tidy. I feel better, and I've no worries about company arriving unexpectedly.
But twice a year, I do a thorough cleaning. Furniture is moved around and flipped over so that I get underneath them. Objects and pictures are moved and cleaned, sometimes replaced with others that I've stored for later use. Seasonal clothing is exchanged. Curtains and windows are washed. Upholstery is vacuumed and shampooed. Rugs are shampooed. Closets are turned inside out and rearranged. All of this requires several hours or a couple of days of real-time confusion and chaos. A thorough cleaning is a deconstruction. It looks from an outsider -- which happens to be my oldest daughter or granddaughter -- as if I am on a rampage. It looks as if I do not know what I am doing and where I am going. But I am breaking down the room to its elemental parts and deciding which ones are to be cleaned, tossed, replaced, moved, or changed in some way more effective or pleasing or functional. The decisions could not be made while everything was in its usual place. The decisions were absolutely necessary because time and use acquire hidden muck and stale odors and disorganization. Have you ever been to an estate sale held by a family in the home of their grandparent? If the elder person lived in that home for decades, you know what I mean about muck, odors, piles, and untended maintenance. To build a cleaner, nicer space, manageable chaos must occur.
Jesus would not have gone into the Temple to destroy the Pharisees. Corruption and organized religion/government go hand in hand. Other Pharisees would willingly and easily step into the shoes of the ones he found there. The Pharisees were willing to destroy the trust they held with Jewish worshippers; they willingly focused on commerce instead of service; their victims were the poor and vulnerable. They held no empathy; they sacrificed the people's trust and ministerial dignity for personal profit. Where power exists, so do the profiteers.
However, Jesus made himself an example to the people. If you know that corruption exists within an organization or institution, that abuse exists within a relationship or place of trust, that a place or person/persons accumulates filth and distrust that is harmful to others, you act on it. He alone could not change the system. He could and did show others that the system must be changed. It was a destructive moment, and the action did lead to his own destruction. We tell the story repeatedly over millenia because the story is powerful and universal...One person acting alone against an evil giant is courageous and influential.
MAGA and the Christian Nationalists are not conservatives, and the press would be accurate if they reminded their readers of that fact. As Noah Smith reminds us. Conservatives were builders. MAGA, the trump cult, Christian Nationalists, today's Republican leaders are not conservatives. They do not want to build on the liberal democratic foundation left to us by previous generations of voters and elected officials and business leaders. They desire personal profit. They are greedy. They mean only to replace every institution and every democratic precept with private, profit-making enterprises...even if those enterprises are criminal. Therefore, the destruction we are witnessing is essential to their goals. Like the Pharisees of Jesus' time, and many religious leaders today, the MAGA movement willingly destroys vulnerable people and great ideas and trustworthy institutions with nefarious intent. This is the kind of destruction that is not easily fixed. Empty the closet to build a clean, organized closet. That is easy. But emptying federal departments of career, experienced, qualified, trustworthy, and unbiased experts will not be remedied for at least another generation.
Destroying the public school system to build private schools is exploitation. Children will be denied a good public education; the owners and property owners of private schools will profit...while exluding students they do not want to attend. The Public Education system that helped build our liberal democratic republic exists for the good of all children, of all families, of the nation. A system of private schools supported with public dollars will serve select students and families, and will be used by those in power to indoctrinate the children. This destruction will take generations to repair... if the repairs ever begin.
I began by wondering whether we must choose between building or destroying what we target. Sometimes these actions are not exclusive. Often, we must destroy or deconstruct something to understand it or rebuild it. If this corrupt administration is destroying with the intention of rebuilding, the evidence is not apparent. Even the Project 2025 manual provides very little proof that ReBuilding Better is their intention. Jesus acted alone. Organizations in politics and religion are inherently corrupt. Jesus knew that Judaism, under the influence of the Pharisees or any other leaders, could not survive centuries of internal corruption and purposeful profiteering. Yet, he acted. For the same reasons, I do not believe that Christianity can survive the corrupting influence of the Christian Nationalists and the politcally powerful, wealthy white evangelicals. And yet...Is that a bad thing?