All of us who are a part of the Calvin community share a common vocation. We have been called to love God and neighbor and to anticipate — in our work, in our relationships, both inside and outside of Calvin, in our political engagement, and yes, if we are engaged on social media platforms, then even in our presence there — the coming, consummated kingdom of God. In that kingdom, the all-inclusive love of God abounds. There is fullness in that kingdom. There is wholeness. There is justice. There is mercy, grace and forgiveness. And there is joy. In short, in the kingdom we are called to anticipate, there is human and terrestrial flourishing — shalom. To be a part of this grand project is to be an “agent of renewal” in God’s world, and where there are forces opposed to that kingdom, we are called to bear prophetic witness.

When I teach Fundamental Questions in Philosophy — Philosophy 153 — I engage students in a thought experiment involving Socrates, the late Catholic nun and missionary Mother Teresa and Donald Trump. Before I share that thought experiment, allow me to set the stage.

In Plato’s Republic, there’s a story about a shepherd who finds a corpse on a bronze horse under the ground. On the finger of the corpse is a ring. The shepherd takes that ring and discovers that when turned inward he becomes invisible, and when turned outward, he becomes visible again. He uses the ring to engage in all manner of wickedness. He seduces the queen, sleeps with her and conspires with her to kill the king and take over the kingdom.

The story is meant to illustrate the view of human nature held by a guy called Thrasymachus (Thra-sim-ick-is). The shepherd is supposed to be a picture of you and me and every human being. If we are brutally honest with ourselves, Thrasymachus thought, we would all acknowledge that if we could act immorally and were assured of no accountability, all of us, like the shepherd, would be up to all manner of wickedness. Thrasymachus believed that it is our nature to be self-absorbed, hedonistic, pleasure and power-seeking miscreants. This, he believed, is what it means to be human. It is our telos, our goal, our purpose… and the grander the scale on which we can carry out this immorality, without getting caught, the more admirable.

Socrates thought Thrasymachus was dead wrong. He believed that it never benefits you to be immoral, even if you can get away with it. This is where the thought experiment begins. Can Socrates really be right that it never benefits us to be immoral, even if we can get away with it? Let’s compare two kinds of human life exemplified by the two individuals I mentioned earlier: Mother Teresa and Donald Trump. Mother Teresa enjoyed precious few of what might be called “the pleasures of the earth” and certainly none that money could buy. She sacrificed everything to minister to the poorest of the poor on the streets of Calcutta, India. Now imagine that after 40 years of spending herself in acts of other-regarding, compassionate love and service she dies, and that God says to her, “Well done my good and faithful servant, enter into your rest.”

Now, consider Donald Trump, a man whose life is the complete opposite to that of Mother Teresa’s. His has been a life dedicated to the pursuit of selfishness, to money and things, to pleasures and power. Now, imaginatively project yourself into the future, where Donald Trump dies. But just before he does, imagine that he embraces Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Now imagine that God welcomes Donald Trump into his kingdom, where he high-fives Mother Teresa and Saint Paul.

Whose was the better life? Whose was the happy life? Most students say Mother Teresa’s. Probably you do, too. But allow me to put on what I call my “Thrasymachean hat” and push back. What if the only reason you say this is because you have accepted the same lie that your “sucker” and “loser” parents and churches have accepted, a lie designed to keep them (and you) down and subservient. That lie is that the moral life is the good life and the only kind of life worthy of pursuit. But consider: on our telling, both Mother Teresa and Donald Trump make it to heaven. And Donald Trump got to enjoy all of the goodies of immorality in addition to inheriting heaven! How can he not be the one whose life was best and happy? 

Removing, now, my Thrasymachean hat, one of the tasks of philosophy — indeed one of the tasks of this university — is to invite you into a way of life and to do what we can to make that way of life alluring and attractive. Part of that task involves getting you to care about the right things — because, as Plato taught us, we can care about the wrong things. When we do, we mislabel vices as virtues. Embrace the Thraymachean view and you do just that: you care about the wrong things; you come to praise vices and mock virtues and fundamentally misunderstand what it means to live a good human life.

America has never been perfect. Throughout its history, it has failed, sometimes spectacularly, to live up to the noble aspirations it established for itself and codified in its founding documents. We can all admit this, I think. But over the course of the past four weeks, what we have witnessed in the Trump-Elon Musk version of America is the wholesale repudiation of such aspirations and the making of a mockery of them. Honor, decency, empathy — these so-called virtues are for “losers and suckers” in the Thrasymachean universe of selfishness and lust for power.

President Trump and Elon Musk have been jubilant — gleeful, even — and stunningly shameless in their quest for and abuse of unchecked power. They publicly relish insulting and inflicting pain and harm on others, especially on the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Just consider as one example the recent video tweeted out on the official White House X-account that shows deportees in shackles, their chains rhythmically clinking together with the accompanying title — chosen by the White House, mind you — “Deportation flight ASMR.” Mocking and delighting in the suffering of the deportees is morally reprehensible. Only Thrasymachus and his devotees would applaud such cruelty.

We, however, should not. It is true that all of us, at times, fail to care about the right things and fail to live the kind of life to which we aspire. All of us can be petty, vain, dishonest, cruel. But this is precisely the point. The task of living an examined life involves recognizing these moral failures as failures. The goal of becoming a lover of wisdom and an honest observer of oneself is to become the kind of person who is moving away from vanity, dishonesty and heartlessness and moving toward virtue.  Thasymachus and his modern-day acolytes, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about this moral project.  They are “all-in” on self-worship, malice and power, and they wear these vices like a crown.

Those of us committed to the project of self-examination, the project of moral improvement and anticipating God’s kingdom, must surely find the admiration paid to Trump and Musk by the tens of millions of Americans who do admire them — including millions of “Christians” — bewildering. Why do so many admire them? Many admire them precisely for their shamelessness. Anyone who has ever felt proper shame knows that it is not a pleasant emotion. So, what most of us do to combat it, at least those of us engaged in the project of moral improvement, is to try to conform our lives more and more to the good, to the virtuous life, the Christ-like life, so that we experience that unpleasant emotion less and less.

But the gospel of Thrasymachus holds out an alternative way of addressing shame and that is to assert that there is nothing in self-aggrandizement, nothing in cruelty, nothing in wanton disregard for the humanity of others, to be ashamed of. This is our nature! Get over it! Embrace it! Donald Trump and Elon Musk have. This “gospel” can be powerfully seductive.

It must be frankly admitted that there is one particular moral fault that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are free of, and that is the sin of hypocrisy. There’s no example anyone can give of anything they have done that could count as a “counterexample” to their being good people. But that’s because they don’t even pretend to be good people. You can’t be a hypocrite if you have no standard by which to be judged. If you aim for dishonesty, inhumanity and viciousness, and there is no standard by which to judge these as vices and moral failures, then you are free to indulge them, shame free. And this is exactly what Trump and Musk do.

If, however, you’re a Christian, even a bad one (like me), there is only one proper emotional response to the moral depravity we have seen on display in these first four weeks of the Trump administration, and that is the moral emotion of disgust. It is the same proper emotion we feel when we examine ourselves and recognize that we have behaved cruelly toward our neighbor or been dishonest or selfish or petty. Feeling anything less than moral disgust is at best an indication that your moral compass is broken or perhaps turned off. At worst, it may be an indication that you are a disciple of Thrasymachus, a moral nihilist, one wholly uninterested in the moral project of pursuing wisdom and living a good life. If that describes you, then, I humbly invite you to consider that grand vision of God’s kingdom with which I began this essay. For in it, there is the enchanting opportunity to trade the wretchedness of self-serving sadness for the joy of God’s all-inclusive love.