So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day." But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, "No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles." (I Samuel 8, NRSV)
"Hitler had used an act of terror (the burning of the Reichstad), an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people...." Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, makes it clear in his slim but profound new book that Americans today are not any smarter than were the Germans in the 1930's. Nor are we much smarter than were the people of Israel in the 11th century BCE, when the people wanted a tyrant to save them from attacks by neighboring nations. We are one terrorist incident away from a severe threat to the survival of our democracy. This threat is heightened by a president who daily undercuts the foundations on which our Constitution rests, with attacks on the free press, the judiciary, the rule of law, and the concept of truth itself.
Do we really want to "be like other nations" such as Russia, Turkey, and China, ruled by strongmen who define reality by their own preferences, each believing that "only I can fix it"? So many of us are already the wage-slaves of the three billionaires who own half of America's private assets. With the tax-deform plan in Congress now, those billionaires will amass even more of the nation's wealth, while millions of Americans will be deprived of access to health care and other government services. (See USC Professor Ed Kleinbard's scathing analysis of that plan here.) We have a political democracy, but suffer from an economic oligarchy today. Things can only get worse if power gets even more concentrated. The kind of tyranny that threatens our Republic is very well-described in the First Book of Samuel.
The Bible contains much for us to reflect upon in these precarious times for freedom and democracy. Let us lift up our Judeo-Christian heritage of resistance to tyranny, and amplify its call for justice and compassion.
(To see my "Resistance Bible Study" program, being used by churches across the US, look here.)