With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror, we turn our attention to Advent and Christmas. In the midst this busy time and all of the difficulties this country (and the world) is facing, I (along with a whole lot of other people) continue to find myself puzzling over the strange allegiance of so many evangelical Christians to a certain former president. The media I read on a regular basis consistently admits to a general state of bafflement at the tenacious attachment of so-called Christians to the former president, now charged with various crimes, and sounding more and more brazenly thuggish and mean-spirited. Recent news headlines include: “Facing Off in Washington, DeSantis Tries to Shake Trump’s Hold on Christian Right” (New York Times, 9/15/23); “Donald Trump and Christian Nationalism” (Opinion, New York Times, 10/24/23); “Vulgarities, Insults, Baseless Attacks. Trump backers follow his lead” (Washington Post, 11/19/23); “The GOP’s top ‘person of faith’: More Republicans think Trump is religious than Pence, Romney” (Salon.com, 9/27/23).

Advent and Christmas offer an especially stark contrast between basic Christian teachings and the near constant barrage of utterances (verbal or otherwise) from the former president. So, I wonder: what’s going on here? My mother might offer a clue.

About a year ago, I was visiting with my mother at the nursing home where she now lives, as she continues her aggressive descent into dementia. We were in the nursing home’s atrium area and there was a television on, broadcasting the news. I don’t know what news story they were covering, but a video or a picture of the current president popped up. My mother pointed and said, “I don’t like him. I like the other guy.” I knew what she was talking about. My mother, a life-long Christian although not an evangelical, had been a big fan of Donald Trump and I am sure, if she were in a healthier state, she would be cheering him on still and forwarding obnoxious emails to relatives and friends about how great Trump is.

I asked her why, why she preferred that other guy to the current guy. She thought for a moment, furrowing her brow. Finally, she said, “strength.” After thinking a bit more she said, “The other guy was stronger. This guy [Joe Biden, who’s face had disappeared from the television at that point] is weak. Strong is better.”

Despite her dementia, my mother offers a bit of insight into what may be a steep, uphill battle to separate at least some self-identified Christians from their allegiance to Trump. There’s really no way another candidate is going to come across as stronger than Trump. Pretty much every other candidate is, more or less, in their right mind and is not an egotistical crazed power-hungry fanatic who will say anything to regain the presidency, including egregiously dangerous statements about power and strength.

Strength is certainly a significant issue. But, how do faithful Christians grapple with the complex intersection of strength, in terms of the teachings of Jesus, and strength, as an element of public and national safety and security?

We are about to begin Advent, the season of spiritual preparation leading to Christmas. Pretty much every Christian in this country will have some sort of representation of the story of the birth of Jesus in their home and in their church and maybe even outside their church. The “manger” scene will, typically, involve a strange, but familiar, mash-up of the birth stories offered in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew (Mark and John don’t include birth narratives and those in Luke and Matthew don’t actually line up all that well— but that’s another issue). In the middle of those scenes, there will be a very small human, clearly an infant: Jesus. God incarnate. Presumably, God could have taken on human flesh in a whole bunch of different ways. But God chose the path of pregnancy, birth, infancy, and childhood. God chose to take on human flesh in the small and vulnerable.

There is no strength here. Instead, there is dependence. One might even say “weakness.”

So how in the world can it be that so many Christians, mostly of an evangelical inclination, are so smitten with a very different kind of strength? How can it be that so many evangelical Christians seem to relish in the guns blazing approach of Trump, contorting that sort of strength to line up with the very different image of strength that Christmas so blatantly and obviously provides?

If we consider other crucial components of Jesus‘s life, and certainly the end of Jesus‘s earthly life, it is crystal clear that Jesus did not subscribe to the notion that armies, tanks, guns and high-powered weaponry are the way to show strength. In fact, Jesus did just the opposite by submitting to the violence of the age, trying to demonstrate through his life, and death, that the worldly desire for strength leads only to destruction, chaos and fear.

This final Christmas before the next presidential election, the situation we are in feels very precarious and shakier still when there’s such a wide gap between perceptions and reality, or basic theology. For my mother, I suspect her desire for strength has a lot to do with wanting to feel secure, that a certain kind of rhetoric, and demonstration of forcefulness, could offer the equivalent of a security blanket, something that feels like it will protect when life gets scary.

The problem is that Jesus never had anything to do with that kind of strength, except to teach— time and time again— that it was not part of his ministry, or what he expected from his followers. Yet, many seem completely convinced that Jesus and a Trump-style strength are easily connected. This year, they ought to take a closer look at that beloved manger scene and consider anew what that tiny infant is trying to say.