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How To Know a President Has Done a Really Bad Job

A simple way to know whether or not a President has done a really bad job while in office is to observe what happens to their country after they leave office. Where there is succession crisis or social and economic breakdown after they leave office, you can tell the President did a really bad job while in office. The succession crisis indicates that they did nothing to prepare their people for a time after their rule and the social and economic breakdown speak of the lack of societal well-being and cohesiveness that existed during their time in office. President Barack Obama made the first point on his recent visit to Africa when he noted that Presidents who remain in power long after their due dates are those who have not prepared their people for a time after them well. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation Prize for outstanding African President also takes into consideration what happens after a President leaves office. Perhaps nothing speaks to the success of a President more than the issue of what happens after they leave office. It is after them that the superficiality of their schemes is revealed.

Some may think that judging a President by what happens after they leave office is unfair because the country might have been screwed by their successor. Well, in some cases, like we have in Burkina Faso right now, the question of succession is the crisis itself. Where there is no crisis of succession, we can make the claim that if good institutions are build during one's time in office, those institutions would endure long after one leaves office. Presidents therefore need to be thinking of what happens after them rather than only what is going on during their time in office. However, politicians hardly look far ahead.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Western Refugee Crisis

In his memorable "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" the legendary civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. intoned that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." At the time he was talking about the interconnection between Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, or, more broadly, the racial situation in America. However, we can see how that applies to the refugee crisis plaguing Europe and America today.

The wars that are the root causes of the refugee crisis in the West today are either direct or proxy wars fought on behalf of the West. These wars have been fought on the Machiavellian notion, articulated by Condoleezza Rice, that it is necessary to fight a war in another's country so that another's country could be plundered rather than one's own. Machiavelli apparently did not see the fact that plundering someone else's country in a war may occasion the refugee crisis we see today. Machiavelli's idea is based on the assumption that it is better to commit injustice in someone else's country than in one's own. However, with the refugee crisis today, we are seeing that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right. Because Iraq and Syria have been plundered, Iraqis and Syrians are flooding into Europe, throwing the place into confusion.

Kentucky Gay Problem and the Evolution of Christian Resistance

There is a woman in Kentucky who works for the government in an office that is supposed to be issuing marriage licenses to couples but she has refused to issue such licenses to gay people because she holds that it is against her Christian faith to do so. She has been thrown in jail. She sees what she is doing as her way of resisting a government which many good Christian people see as becoming increasingly godless. This post intends to show this this is a different form of Christian resistance than has hitherto been the case. It is a form of Christian resistance that is wedded to power. However, original versions of Christian resistance have been anchored in powerlessness.

The first Christians lived in a context which they saw as positively godless and working against their very existence in the world. One only need to read the Book of Revelation to see what those first Christians thought of this world. In a world which was seen as positively godless, the way of resistance these Christians chose was that of separation. Thus, many early Christians would not participate in occupations which they saw as compromising their moral integrity. They would not be teachers if that meant teaching books that promoted Greco-Roman polytheism; they would not become actors because they saw that as promoting a false notion of life, and they would not join the military because it involved killing - Christians were not to kill. However, when after about three hundred years Christians began to get comfortable with the power that be, they began rationalizing why and how Christians may participate in these activities. By the time Christianity came to America from Europe, many Christians had come to believe that Christian distinctiveness meant that everyone living in a city had to be a Christian. This means that the way that had to prevail in a city had to be the Christian way. This could be so because Christians were the ones now running the government.

It is in the context where Christians run the government that the gay marriage debacle in Kentucky may be understood. Because Christians run the government, they have power to say what was to be the nature of society. However, increasingly, Christians are not only divided about what should be the nature of society; the nature of society is also being questioned by people of other religions and people of no religion. Christians who used to run society are therefore feeling power evaporating from them. That is why many Christians, especially the professional politicians (politics being about who has the power), are portraying Christians as a persecuted people in America.

However, there are some scholars who are making peace with the fact that America and the West in general has entered a post-Christian era, that is, an era in which Christians may not have all the power. It is like being again in the era of the early church. What needs to happen at this time is that Christians who want to resist need to behave like their early Christian forebears. This means that Christians do not have to join the army if they believe that killing is wrong. Christians do not have to join the civil service if they believe that they may be called upon to perform services that contradict their faith. Thus, the best thing for the woman in Kentucky to do at this point is to resign her post and look for a new line of work that honors her conviction. However, because many Christians still associate being Christian with power, they want to be Christian only if all other people will succumb to their vision. It is the opposite of resistance in early Christianity.