Jamin Bradley

“Make America Great Again” is a slogan built around a tradition of political nostalgia that reaches all the way back into Bible times. On one page of the Bible, Psalm 137 encourages exiled Israelites to remember the good ol’ days of Jerusalem, but on another page, you have the prophets decrying Jerusalem for its horrible treatment of the poor. Political nostalgia is only great for those who had it great. As theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, “The capacity for disregard of social reality suggests that the backward looking of the Psalm is on the lips of the elite who never experienced or noticed the socioeconomic realities of the city that were carefully kept from view.” This is the problem with ideologies like “Make America Great Again.” What timeframe of greatness are we returning to, and who was it great for?

This kind of nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. For example, ethicist David P. Gushee says that Nazi Germany thrived off three particular individuals that developed an ideology that was “backward-looking, in that it yearned for a lost Germany, or at least elements of an ‘ancient tradition’ that supposedly existed in the mists of the past …. But it was also utopian, in that it dreamed of a future Germany that was not just better than the modern era, but better than any previous era. That makes little sense, but we are not in the realm of the rational here.”

Our nostalgia is not everyone else’s nostalgia. The old policies and frameworks that we deem to be great often faded away for a reason. So when Trump celebrates bringing back a law from 1798, many can’t help but wince. I can’t remember ever rewinding 200+ years to make something better. Old rules are replaced with new rules, typically because we learned something along the way. The past is not what’s best. If even God can say, “I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life,” and then lead us to change such statutes, then humans should look forward as well.