The Trump movement's most revealing and defining instances – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. During the period of multiple weeks, the American president began displaying all observers his designs for an ornate dance hall twice the size of the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing portion to build it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of fatalities due to his slashing to international aid is 600,000 and increasing, and recently a study forecast his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have dared – genuinely, no other president would have contemplated – independently wrecking major areas of the presidential residence to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of multiple the richest Americans, nearly all of which maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the world' into 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to witness the president attempt to overturn the established notion regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there is one large group among Americans who should not find it entirely new. 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 while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we learned about into the complete reverse of our understanding of him. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of affection into an icon of hate who blesses exactly the harshness that he criticized in scripture; this has happened more gradually, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disturbing via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically the Savior is the core of Christian religion, and given that the fastest-growing cadre among Americans may possess limited understanding regarding him as they consider themselves skeptics or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that there are pearls of great price in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically not the narrative of an authoritative monarch arising; rather, a baby is born to homeless parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade undercover officers. The infant develops in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his doctrine concerns compassion for other people, particularly for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. The Savior's reaction to aggression is to turn the additional cheek – not as a demonstration of submissive tolerance, but as a means to instruct the attacker; his crime policy indicates that whenever a person pilfers your jacket you should give him your sweater also.
The obvious and straightforward reality that Christ in biblical accounts advocates for a type of radical love focused on the needy has consistently rendered Christianity something of a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but because of its intrinsic extremism requiring to be controlled. During the 1950s it was controlled via weakening – Protestantism was so widespread that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Finest Within Us
Hence I have become encouraged to see the determined opposition regarding Trump emerge during the previous year. It has provided great solace to participate in developing the initiative that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and likely has encouraged voters to turn out in large quantities in the off-year elections. We will need to maintain it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities in US history.
We will be questioned ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you receive him and embrace them or not?
America is best defended, essentially, through connection to the finest in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is most protected through connection to what makes it unique and magnificent, particularly the pattern of Christ. In both situations does it imply pretending the worst about the nation and religious tradition did not happen; it represents both meekness and belief, a combination that genuine US believers should be comfortable with.
