This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Michael Gerson, one of my favorite writers going today – his work appears usually in the Washington Post – produced a long essay a day or so ago to decry the linkage between “real Christianity” and Donald Trump’s rabid appeal to the “religious right.”

I cannot do justice to Gerson’s words, so read all of them for yourself in a long essay I credit the Washington Post for publishing.

In one part of his essay, Gerson provides a list of what he calls, “Imagine if today’s believers were to live out the full implications of their faith.”

Here is the list, which is worthy of study and contemplation:

• Instead of fighting for narrow advantage, they would express their love of neighbor by seeking the common good and rejecting a view of greatness that makes others small.
• Instead of being entirely captive to their cultural background, they would have enough critical distance to sort the good from the bad, the gold from the sand.  This might leave them uncomfortable within their own tribe or their own skin — but the moral landscape is often easier to see from the periphery.
• Instead of being ruled by anger and fear, they would live lightly, free from grudges and ready to offer forgiveness — thus preserving the possibility of future reconciliation and concord.
• Instead of turning to violence in word or deed, they would assert the power of unarmed truth.  They would engage in argument without slander or threats — demonstrating not wokeness or weakness, but due regard for our shared dignity.
• Instead of being arrogant and willful, they would approach hard issues with humility, recognizing that even the most compelling principles are applied by fallible men and women.  They would know that people who esteem the same ideal can come to different policy conclusions — and be open to the possibility of changing their own mind.
• Instead of ignoring the cries of the ill, poor, and abused, they would honor the unerasable image of God we see in one another.  Believers don’t accept a society divided by rank or dominated by the illusion of merit — they seek to subvert such stratification in constructive ways, to prioritize justice and common provision for people in need.
• Instead of giving in to half-justified despair, they would assert that there is hope at the end of a twisting road.  Even when their strength is drained by long struggle and the bitterness of incoming attacks, they would live confidently rather than desperately, with faith in God’s mercy and hope for a tearless morning.

So, just imagine!

I will as a real Christian who deplores the depth to which Trump will go to aggrandize himself, even as, incredibly, he gains new sycophants.

This morning, however, I thank Gerson for summarizing real Christianity in such a compelling and transparent way.