The Trump movement's most revealing and defining instances – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the nation's leader began displaying everyone his designs for an ornate dance hall two times larger than the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to erect it.
He has done things ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of deaths resulting from his reductions to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and recently a study forecast his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have dared – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – solo demolishing large sections of the executive mansion in order to erect a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of some of the nation's most affluent, almost all of whom have business with the government.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the gentle will succumb of cholera'
As confusing as it is to witness the chief executive try to upend the traditional concept about democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were educated as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we grew up with into the total contrary of our understanding of him. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of compassion into an icon of animosity who endorses specifically the brutality that he criticized in biblical teachings; this has happened at a slower pace, across decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless disturbing via comparable methods, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically the Savior is the core of any Christian faith, and because the fastest-growing cadre of Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him because they identify as atheists or agnostics or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that there are pearls of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically definitely not the story of a powerful ruler arising; conversely, a child comes into the world to displaced parents in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to evade covert authorities. The infant develops in simple surroundings, an employed craftsman; his teaching concerns compassion for others, particularly for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and protecting. Jesus' answer to violence is to turn the other cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a means to instruct the attacker; his crime policy is that if an individual takes your outer garment you should give him your sweater too.
The apparent and straightforward reality that the Savior in biblical accounts requests a kind of extreme compassion concentrated on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christian religion rather a scandalous religion: appealing to the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness demanding to be contained. During the 1950s it was restrained via weakening – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it essentially sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Finest of Us
So I have been encouraged to see the determined opposition against Trump develop during the previous year. It has served as great solace to assist in constructing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged citizens to show up in large quantities during minor elections. We will need to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or not?
The nation is most protected, essentially, by relationship to the finest in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended by relationship to elements that cause it to be special and beautiful, specifically the model of Christ. In all circumstances does it imply pretending the most negative about the nation and Christianity was nonexistent; it represents both humility and faith, a mixture that serious American Christians ought to accept.
