I watched last week’s Presidential Debate listening, as I always do, subconsciously or not, for where I might hear the Gospel lifted up or desecrated. 

It’s not that Jesus figures centrally in American political dialogue, but, inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I’m convinced that the Gospel is all-too relevant to our modern-day lives, including the political arena. And I’m certain that Jesus cares, if not about which political party has the advantage, then certainly about the millions of people, including you and I, whose lives are impacted by national public policy.

The reality for most of you reading this is that, like me, we’re sheltered by our relative privilege. Or at least we think we are. We’re far too often ignorant of the ways that, unlike the fantasy of a trickle-down economy, what happens instead is that the pain and suffering of political policies that harm the most vulnerable among us do not leave any of us untouched. Pain simply spreads much more widely than wealth in America. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated that striking truth in unavoidable ways in 2020. For years many of us have purchased meat at the supermarket, sorting through myriad shrink wrapped packages to pick out just the right pound of ground beef or overstuffed mass of hormonally enhanced chicken breasts. 

Most of us never paused to think about the slaughterhouse floors where poor and often undocumented workers sat shoulder to shoulder for several hours a day, paid wages which were barely livable. Still they eked out lives across America’s heartland, living together with extended family and caring for one another.

Then, the pandemic hit the slaughterhouses and the Amazon distribution centers. Suddenly the ignored workers were essential. We damned them with faint praise, and then public policy ordered them back to work. The pandemic spread most quickly among those who couldn’t afford to stay home. The so-called essential workers learned that while their work was essential, the American government had deemed their lives nonessential.

A few weeks ago, President Donald Trump contracted COVID-19. He was airlifted to the hospital and treated by a team of doctors with a variety of therapeutics. He rested. Soon, his fever lifted. Mercifully, he recovered, unlike more than 200,000 Americans.

At the debate, he was asked about COVID-19.

Among other things, President Trump said: “We’re learning to live with it.”

His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, responded incredulously. 

“He says that we’re … we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it.”

 In that moment I felt a chill stiffen my back. It is so hard to listen to American politics and attempt to find the Gospel, to weed through the patronizing claims of prayer and national pride, the pledged allegiance to a civic religion much wider than it is deep.

It is in quiet moments like these when I remember that the Gospel is always in the room, my edit of religion reporter Jack Jenkins’ claim that religion is “always in the room.”

You have to look hard for a defense of life in American politics today, but occasionally it’s there. Biden is a lifelong politician, and carries within himself the baggage that comes with being a prominent American of privilege for so many years. Every once in a while, though, a defense of common humanity peers underneath his words, a naked display of an empathy too often silenced in 2020, too often pushed aside for being too vulnerable, too nice, too weak.

As I listened to the rest of the debate, my ear seeking to find the places where a Gospel of truth, grace, mercy, forgiveness, love, and righteousness would ring out, I found myself searching for the voices beneath the voices of these two white men. I found myself seeking to hear the voices we cannot hear, those who are silenced by virtue of their poverty or their position, their race or their gender, their immigration status. 

Two more times I heard again the cry of the silenced rise up in the debate. Formidable moderator Kristen Welker refused to allow the substance to drain out of the room, for us to miss the ideas beneath the screeching blather. It’s the ideas that have killed us, that could kill us.

During the past four years, thousands of desperate people have attempted to immigrate to America, some of them parents with their children, some of them children sent ahead by parents who had no good choices. The American government changed its policy and enforcement strategy under President Trump to determine to separate parents and children who came across the border and ended up in U.S. custody. Some of the children were nursing infants. Many of them were younger than 5. Now, the parents of 545 of those children cannot be located: a bona fide humanitarian disaster on American soil in the midst of a global pandemic. 

Asked about the children, the President said, among other things: “They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean.”

Still today, there are some American Christians who will defend the legacy of slavery for Black Americans, suggesting that “it wasn’t that bad.” “Many of them were treated well.” 

White Americans in particular have become skilled at ignoring national trauma, of imagining we can sweep it onto someone else, onto those people. If only we lock the trauma behind the wall, redline it, maybe it won’t affect us.

Near the end of the debate, Welker raised the topic of climate change, in the warmest year in recorded history, when wildfires have already ravaged the West Coast and battered Colorado while the debate took place. She asked the candidates about Fence Line communities, about the fact that people of color are more likely to live near oil refineries and chemical plants, where they suffer the consequences of air pollution. People of color and people of all races who live in poverty are also most likely to suffer the consequences of global warming: whether from coastal flooding and hurricanes or the devastation of wildfires and rising temperatures.

In response, the President mentioned finances.

“The families that we’re talking about are employed heavily and they are making a lot of money, more money than they’ve ever made.”

I thought about how little money means when someone you love dies. How you need the settlement or insurance money to live, but if you had the chance you’d throw it all out the window, set a match to all of it, just for one more day together.

How when you get the cancer diagnosis you don’t wish you’d bought more things but you do wish you’d really lived more of your days, with the ones you love.

In 2020 American political discourse, it often seems like everything and everyone has a price. Sometimes we mistakenly believe too that everyone has an equal chance to have their say, to exercise their voice. And that in this equal playing field there are no more rules: may the best man (and yes, it’s always a man) win. If you don't like it, leave.

But Jesus said Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple, because he wanted it to be clear that money is not God’s language. God does not hear the voice of the one with the most dollar bills.

God hears the voices of the ones who have been silenced. The cries of the separated children at night, who wail and wail but cannot be picked up by their government caregivers. The wheeze of the old man who lived for years in a decaying trailer park next to a chemical plant. The growl, hum, and squeak of an Alaskan polar bear, floating alone as the Arctic snow melts.

The voice of your children, and mine. Jesus raises his still, small voice above us all and demands we listen: not to the shouting politicians but to all the ones who Jesus hears, and Jesus loves.