Trumpism's most illuminating and defining instances – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of a few weeks, the nation's leader started showing all observers his designs for a lavish reception room twice the size of the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of casualties resulting from his reductions to USAID stands at 600,000 and rising, and recently a study forecast his petroleum strategies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have risked – truly, no former commander would have conceived – solo demolishing large sections of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of numerous the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which conduct transactions with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader try to upend the old idea regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there exists a significant segment within America who wouldn't consider it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts close to half – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed across decades as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we learned about into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of love into a symbol of hostility who blesses specifically the brutality that he denounced in biblical teachings; this change developed more gradually, across decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disturbing in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, as conceptually Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and given that the quickly increasing segment among Americans might have little sense of him since they are atheists or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of substantial value within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically not the narrative of a mighty king appearing; rather, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to a different country to escape secret police. The child matures in simple surroundings, a working carpenter; his message concerns compassion for others, specifically for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and protecting. Christ's response to hostility is to turn the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a way to teach the aggressor; his crime policy indicates that whenever someone steals your outer garment you must offer the person your additional clothing also.
The obvious and clear truth that the Savior of the gospels advocates for a kind of extreme compassion centered on the needy is what has always made the Christian faith rather a provocative belief system: engaging for the masses, but because of its intrinsic extremism requiring to be restrained. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestantism was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Highest of Us
Hence I have become encouraged to observe the steadfast resistance to Trump emerge in this past year. It has been great solace to help build the movement that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to turn out in large quantities in interim political contests. We shall require to continue it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags throughout each rally and calls to the highest qualities of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the immigrant? Did you receive him and receive them or reject?
America is best defended, to put it differently, by reference to the finest about American history, just as Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to elements that cause it to be unique and magnificent, which is the example of the Savior. In all circumstances does it mean acting as if the most negative regarding America and Christianity did not happen; it signifies both meekness and faith, a blend that genuine US believers ought to accept.
