Trumpism's most telling and defining occasions – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the American president started showing everyone his designs for a lavish reception room twice the size compared to the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing to build it.
He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of casualties from his cuts to foreign assistance stands at 600,000 and rising, and this week an analysis forecast his fossil fuel policies would result in fatalities 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No former leader would have attempted – really, no previous leader would have imagined – solo demolishing large sections of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which maintain dealings with public institutions.
We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the planet' toward 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the president attempt to overturn the old idea regarding democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – among senior generations close to half – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we learned about into the complete reverse of our perception of his character. Essentially, they converted a persona of love into a symbol of hostility who blesses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this transformation occurred more slowly, over decades instead of months, however it is still unsettling in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Christ from my upbringing, because theoretically the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and because the fastest-growing cadre among Americans might have little sense about him since they are skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that there are pearls of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the account of a powerful ruler arising; conversely, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to escape undercover officers. The child matures in simple surroundings, an employed craftsman; his doctrine concerns compassion for other people, especially for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, shown by providing food and protecting. Christ's response to aggression is to turn the other cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a way to instruct the attacker; his method regarding offenses is that if a person pilfers your jacket you ought to provide the person your additional clothing too.
The obvious and clear reality that the Jesus of the gospels advocates for a kind of radical love centered on the needy is what has always made Christianity something of a provocative belief system: appealing to the masses, but because of its intrinsic extremism demanding to be restrained. During the 1950s it was contained by dilution – Protestantism was so prevalent that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Conflict for the Highest Within Us
So I have been heartened to witness the steadfast resistance to Trump arise over the last twelve months. It has served as great solace to participate in developing the campaign that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired citizens to participate in numbers during minor elections. We shall require to maintain it, and in the same spirit, with American flags during all protests and requests to the highest qualities of American history.
We're going to be asked ... how did you receive the immigrant? Did you welcome them 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 most protected by relationship to elements that cause it to be unique and wonderful, specifically the model of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most damaging about the nation and Christian faith did not happen; it represents both modesty and conviction, a combination that committed US believers ought to accept.
