The Trump phenomenon's most telling and distinctive occasions – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of several weeks, the American president began displaying everyone his intentions for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions compared to the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing portion to construct it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the current estimate of casualties from his cuts to international aid amounts to 600,000 and growing, and recently an analysis forecast his fossil fuel policies would result in fatalities an additional 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have attempted – genuinely, no other president would have conceived – solo demolishing significant portions of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of multiple the richest Americans, nearly all of which conduct transactions with the government.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the chief executive attempt to overturn the old idea of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who should not find it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics close to half – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have witnessed over the years as rightwing evangelical churches converted the Savior we learned about into the complete reverse of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they converted a persona of love into a figure of hostility who blesses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in scripture; this has happened more slowly, over decades rather than months, yet it remains disconcerting through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Savior from my upbringing, because theoretically Jesus is the center within Christian belief, and given that the fastest-growing cadre within America may possess limited understanding regarding him because they identify as atheists or uncertain individuals or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these different approaches, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that contain precious wisdom of great price in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly not the story of an authoritative monarch emerging; instead, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a storage space, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to avoid undercover officers. The child matures in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his message concerns compassion for others, specifically for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, shown by providing food and housing. The Savior's reaction to aggression is to present the additional cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a way to instruct the aggressor; his crime policy is that if a person pilfers your jacket you must offer him your sweater also.
The obvious and direct truth that Christ of the gospels calls for a form of extreme compassion focused on the poor has consistently rendered Christian religion somewhat of a scandalous religion: attractive to the populace, but owing to its intrinsic extremism needing to be controlled. In the fifties it was controlled by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Conflict for the Best Within Us
Hence I have become inspired to observe the persistent defiance to Trump develop over the last twelve months. It has served as great solace to participate in developing the movement that has demonstrated publicly in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired citizens to participate in numbers in the off-year elections. We shall require to maintain it, and with identical determination, featuring US banners during all protests and appeals to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you receive him and embrace them or refuse?
The country is optimally secured, essentially, by reference to the finest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by reference to that which renders it special and magnificent, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In neither case does it mean pretending the most negative of both America and Christian faith never occurred; it represents both modesty and belief, a combination that serious American Christians should be comfortable with.
