Dear President Biden,
I know you are a man of faith, a Catholic, to be precise. I myself am not a Catholic. I’m a Jew by birth. But I became a Christian in my youth and raised my eldest son in the Catholic Church. I later became a Protestant minister.
I no longer attend church, but I’m still a firm believer in the idea that, among the Christian churches, Catholicism is the most Jewish, i.e., the Christian church that hews most clearly to the mythological structures of Judaism, its “parent religion,” if you will. Catholicism’s historical relationship to Judaism doesn’t matter to me because I have any sociological loyalty to Jews or even Judaism. It matters to me because I have loyalty to what I take to be the two essential insights or revelations at the heart of Judaism: 1) that there is one God, one unifying energy at the heart of all the energies we encounter in this world into which we’re thrown; and 2) that the primary nature of that one God is altruistic, is self-sacrificing; that God makes space, by way of Its own freely chosen self-annihilation, for humanity to experience its own share in the divinity of all Being. To put it another way: …in Him, With Him, and Through Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, forever and ever, amen.
I’m sure that in these days since the debate with former president Trump, you’ve been measuring your insights and moods, notions and ideas against the plumb line of your faith; and if I am to believe what the papers say — and I don’t, quite — you’ve decided to stay in the race. But I’m writing to you today to offer you humbly — because certainly I can’t imagine what it’s like to weigh the variables you’re weighing — a theological argument for stepping down.
As I said earlier, I believe the Christian tradition offers us a vision of God as one with the courage — and courage isn’t courage without fear and doubt — to freely choose Its own death in the service of others. This is precisely the opportunity, the fearsome opportunity history (or God Itself, if you will) has set before you. In this complex but essentially healthful era of what is known as “cancel culture” — a phrase which has a bad ring and a bum rap but points to what I think is a positive trend towards questioning ideas and people who were previously thought to be immune to interrogation — your opponent has proved to be immune to cancellation. He has demonstrated in every way that he’s deeply worthy of being cancelled, yet there he stands, in more ways than one like a Weeble, those things that wobble but don’t fall down. It must be maddening, truly maddening, to see him survive so many well-documented attacks while you are beset with calls to step down instigated by nothing more than the exigencies of being older. You’re not a convicted felon or a suspected rapist or a known philanderer or a blustering gasbag — and yet he’s being all but carried on a litter to his party’s convention while you’re being urged not to attend your own, or attend it in a diminished role. It must be enraging. Nothing’s worse than when life is incomprehensible. And yet, I think there’s a way to see this moment as comprehensible to the point of being obvious, and graciously so. This is a moment to be Christ-like.
While you haven’t done anything near as wrong as your opponent, you are, like him, like the Pharisees Jesus spoke against, one of the “old guard.” You are a totem of an older dispensation, a previous generation — even if your heart was in the rightest place possible (and it isn’t, quite, but that’s fine, you’re a human being), you’re still in line to be replaced by what comes next, what God decrees must come next, you’re still available to be removed. But it is the particular gift of the Christian tradition that at its center is a figure who, presented with the fearsome prospect of his own painful death, ultimately chose it not because he had certainty that to do so would be a boon to others, but because he had faith that it would be so. You have that same faith, although, like any imperfect mortal, like any real hero, it may be hard to see the simple way forward, or hard to accept it, hard to assent to such a public destruction of one’s most treasured idol, that of the indispensability of one’s self in the unfolding of creation. But that’s what, I believe, you’re being called by God to do right now, Mr. President. In the face of your incomprehensibly uncancellable opponent, it falls to you to cancel yourself, to cancel your own maleness, your own whiteness, your own unearned power and earned power, all of it, to take yourself off the board armed with the faith that God will fill the space where you stood with something — something you don’t even have to be able to imagine. To believe in Christ or what Christ means doesn’t require us to have the complete vision of what’s to come, it only requires us to admit, at any given moment, that our vision is only partial, that now we see through a glass darkly, but someday face to face. It requires that we find the strength to make space for others the same way that our God made space for us: by freely choosing to suffer the death of the self in the service of others.
I feel I have to reiterate: I have no idea what it’s like to be you right now; but I’m telling you, with absolute certainty, that what lies before you is an epic opportunity to model for this nation wracked with confusion and neurotic panic a way forward that your opponent has neither the faith nor the basic human manhood to even consider. You can step aside. It’s the Christ-like thing to do. Persisting in clinging to the forms and features of this human moment you’re in will only yield human gains. You may even win the election. I don’t think you will, but you may. But by refusing to step aside, you will have missed your chance to be, like Christ, a window into what’s best in us — into a faith that’s vast enough to know that no one is indispensable but God.