The Trump phenomenon's most telling and characteristic instances – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of several weeks, the American president started showing all observers his designs for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions compared to the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to erect it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of casualties due to his slashing to international aid stands at 600,000 and increasing, and recently research projected his petroleum strategies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have risked – genuinely, no other president would have conceived – independently wrecking significant portions of the executive mansion in order to erect a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the direct cooperation of some of the richest Americans, the majority of whom conduct transactions with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the world' to 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to witness the president try to upend the traditional concept of democracy and substitute it with its complete opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who should not find it entirely new. This includes individuals like us – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.
We have observed over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we were raised with into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of love into a figure of hostility who endorses specifically the brutality that he denounced in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting through similar means, a confusing personal impact for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
Therefore allow me to outline the Savior from my childhood, because theoretically the Savior is the core of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment within America might have little sense about him because they identify as skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that there are pearls of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is emphatically definitely not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; rather, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a storage space, who must quickly flee to another nation to evade undercover officers. The baby grows up in simple surroundings, a working carpenter; his doctrine focuses on affection for others, specifically for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but tangible care, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. Jesus' answer to aggression is to turn the additional cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a means to educate the attacker; his method regarding offenses states that when a person pilfers your coat you ought to provide the person your additional clothing too.
The obvious and clear fact that the Savior from scripture advocates for a form of extreme compassion concentrated on the impoverished is what has always made the Christian faith rather a scandalous religion: engaging for the general public, but owing to its intrinsic extremism demanding to be contained. In the 1950s it was contained by dilution – Protestantism was so widespread that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Best of Us
Therefore I have felt inspired to see the persistent defiance against Trump arise over the last twelve months. It has served as substantial consolation to participate in developing the movement that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged electorate to participate in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We must have to maintain it, and with identical determination, with American flags at every demonstration and calls to the highest qualities in US history.
We're going to be asked ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or reject?
The nation is most protected, to put it differently, through connection to the highest about American history, just as Christianity is best defended by relationship to what makes it special and wonderful, specifically the model of Christ. In all circumstances does it suggest pretending the worst of both America and Christian faith was nonexistent; it represents both modesty and belief, a mixture that serious American Christians should embrace.
