The Trump phenomenon's most telling and characteristic moments – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of multiple weeks, the nation's leader began displaying the public his plans for an ornate dance hall two times larger of the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing to construct it.
He has done things ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of fatalities resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance stands at 600,000 and growing, and presently a study projected his petroleum strategies would kill another 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No previous president would have risked – truly, no previous leader would have contemplated – solo demolishing significant portions of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of numerous America's wealthiest, almost all of whom maintain dealings with public institutions.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the world' to 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the chief executive try to upend the established notion about democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we were raised with into the complete reverse of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they converted a persona of compassion into a symbol of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in the Gospel; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, across decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless disturbing through similar means, a bewildering emotional blow for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and since the rapidly expanding group of Americans might have little sense about him since they are skeptics or agnostics or spiritual independents. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; yet I maintain that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the narrative of an authoritative monarch emerging; rather, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a storage space, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his teaching concerns compassion for other people, specifically for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. Jesus' answer to violence is to turn the opposite cheek – not as a demonstration of passive acceptance, but as a method to educate the assailant; his crime policy states that when a person pilfers your jacket you should give them your pullover also.
The evident and straightforward fact that the Savior of the gospels calls for a kind of radical love concentrated on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christian religion somewhat of a controversial faith: engaging for the populace, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be controlled. During the 1950s it was contained through watering down – Protestantism was so prevalent that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Finest Within Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to observe the steadfast resistance regarding Trump develop in this past year. It has served as significant comfort to participate in developing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, featuring US banners throughout each rally and calls to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or reject?
America is best defended, essentially, through connection to the best about American history, just as Christianity is best defended through connection to that which renders it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of Christ. In neither case does it imply acting as if the worst regarding America and Christian faith was nonexistent; it means both meekness and faith, a combination that genuine US believers should be comfortable with.
