The Trump movement's most telling and distinctive moments – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of multiple weeks, the US president began displaying everyone his plans for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions than the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing to erect it.
He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of fatalities from his cuts to foreign assistance is 600,000 and growing, and recently an analysis forecast his petroleum strategies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have risked – truly, no previous leader would have imagined – independently wrecking large sections of the White House in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the enthusiastic participation of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which conduct transactions with public institutions.
We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the Earth' toward 'the humble will perish from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and exchange it with its complete opposite, there exists a significant segment within America who should not find it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years as politically conservative religious groups converted the Savior we grew up with into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they transformed an image of love into a figure of animosity who endorses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in biblical teachings; this change developed more gradually, over decades as opposed to months, yet it remains disconcerting in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, as conceptually Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and given that the fastest-growing cadre within America could have minimal awareness of him as they consider themselves skeptics or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically not the account of a powerful ruler appearing; conversely, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade secret police. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his doctrine focuses on affection for fellow humans, particularly for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Jesus' answer to hostility is to present the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the assailant; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever someone steals your coat you should give the person your additional clothing as well.
The obvious and direct reality that the Savior from scripture requests a kind of radical love centered on the poor has consistently rendered Christian religion something of a scandalous religion: attractive to the masses, but because of its natural unconventionality needing to be restrained. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Highest Within Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to witness the steadfast resistance regarding Trump develop in this past year. It has served as great solace to participate in developing the movement that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and likely has encouraged citizens to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to maintain it, and with identical determination, with American flags at every demonstration and appeals to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or refuse?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, through connection to the highest about American history, similar to Christianity is best defended by reference to elements that cause it to be distinctive and magnificent, which is the example of Jesus. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and Christianity did not happen; it signifies both modesty and conviction, a combination that serious national faithful ought to accept.
