Trumpism's most telling and distinctive occasions – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of a few weeks, the American president started showing everyone his designs for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions compared to the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the eastern section to erect it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of fatalities due to his slashing to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study projected his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have attempted – genuinely, no other president would have conceived – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of numerous America's wealthiest, the majority of whom maintain dealings with the government.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the meek shall die of cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the established notion of democracy and replace it with its direct contrary, there is one large group among Americans who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics almost a majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we learned about into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of affection into a figure of hostility who endorses exactly the harshness that he denounced in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless disturbing in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Savior that I grew up with, since in theory Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and because the rapidly expanding group among Americans may possess limited understanding about him because they identify as skeptics or doubters or spiritual independents. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that there are pearls of substantial value in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly definitely not the narrative of a mighty king arising; instead, a baby is born to displaced parents in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to evade undercover officers. The child matures in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his teaching concerns compassion for fellow humans, especially for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ's response to hostility is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a method to educate the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing is that if a person pilfers your coat you ought to provide them your pullover too.
The evident and straightforward fact that Christ from scripture requests a form of extreme compassion centered on the needy has perpetually caused Christianity somewhat of a scandalous religion: engaging for the populace, but due to its natural unconventionality needing to be contained. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Finest of Us
So I have been encouraged to observe the determined opposition to Trump emerge over the last twelve months. It has served as significant comfort to assist in constructing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and seems to have inspired electorate to participate in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We must have to maintain it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners at every demonstration and requests to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you receive him and receive them or reject?
America is best defended, in other words, through connection to the finest within national tradition, similar to Christianity is most protected through connection to what makes it unique and magnificent, specifically the model of Christ. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most negative regarding America and Christian faith never occurred; it represents both humility and conviction, a combination that genuine national faithful should embrace.
