Alex Morris, writing for Rolling Stone, has created a new literary and journalistic form: an imprecatory prayer, shameless self-promotion and all-purpose rant packaged as an open letter to the president of the United States.
It is a breathtaking achievement in the realm of chutzpah, but is neither informative nor insightful. What form of journalism is this?
“Imprecatory” prayer refers to asking God to bring harsh justice against one’s enemies. See, for instance, Psalm 55:15: “Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive; for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart” (English Standard Version).
This is the closest thing to a prayer that could suit the purposes of Morris, who uses her brief essay to respond to President Donald Trump’s impeachment and to the editorial by my former boss and longtime friend, Mark Galli of Christianity Today, that Trump should be removed from office.
Despite the headline on her essay (“Mr. President, You Asked for a Prayer…”), Morris lurches from the voice of narrator (“On Wednesday, as it became clear that by day’s end he would become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, Trump took to Twitter to call upon Americans to ‘Say a PRAYER!’”) to addressing Trump directly:
We have been saying a PRAYER that the divisions you have sown and the hatred you have propagated will not live on after you. We have been saying a PRAYER that your arrogance and narcissism will not plunge us into war, that your willful aggression against science and facts will not lead to the destruction of God’s creation within our children’s lifetimes. We have been saying a PRAYER that the support you have received from powerful evangelical leaders will not permanently taint our Christian witness. We have been saying a PRAYER that the damage you have done to the moral fiber of this nation can be mended. Yes, we pray for you, President Trump, but we do not believe you to be The Chosen One. In a fallen world, God allows bad things — and bad presidents — to happen.
Notwithstanding her fourfold repetition and all-caps subtlety, Morris is not so much recounting Christian prayers as telling Trump how repulsive she finds him.
In his book The Molten Soul, my friend Gray Temple Jr. (no admirer of Trump) says that a measure of forgiveness is when you can pray for God to bless someone who has harmed you — not praying that God would smite him or even change him, but bless him.
I consider that a good Christian model for praying for everyone, including the person who cuts you off in traffic or the politician who makes you hurl invective at the TV set. Praying in this way does not forbid you to work for your opponent’s electoral defeat. It does not mean you have to believe he is the Chosen One. It means not confusing one’s list of grievances with Christian prayer.