Trumpism's most revealing and defining instances – not its most crucial, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of a few weeks, the US president began displaying everyone his designs for a lavish reception room twice the size than the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to build it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of deaths from his cuts to USAID stands at 600,000 and growing, and presently an analysis projected his fossil fuel policies would kill an additional 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have risked – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – solo demolishing significant portions of the executive mansion in order to erect a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the enthusiastic participation of multiple America's wealthiest, the majority of whom have business with the government.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' into 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader try to upend the established notion regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion within America who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics close to half – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we grew up with into the complete reverse of our perception of his character. Essentially, they transformed an image of affection into an icon of hate who endorses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in biblical teachings; this has happened more gradually, over decades instead of months, yet it remains unsettling in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, because theoretically Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and because the rapidly expanding group among Americans may possess limited understanding about him since they are skeptics or doubters or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of great price in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly absolutely not the story of an authoritative monarch emerging; conversely, a baby is born to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to evade secret police. The child matures in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message concerns compassion for other people, particularly for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. Christ's response to hostility is to turn the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a method to teach the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing states that when an individual takes your outer garment you should give him your sweater too.
The obvious and clear reality that the Savior in biblical accounts calls for a form of radical love concentrated on the poor has consistently rendered Christianity somewhat of a scandalous religion: engaging for the populace, but due to its natural unconventionality requiring to be contained. In the 1950s it was restrained through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Conflict for the Best Among Us
So I have been heartened to see the persistent defiance regarding Trump arise in this past year. It has served as significant comfort to assist in constructing the movement that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated electorate to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We shall require to continue it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags during all protests and requests to the best parts in US history.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and welcome him or not?
America is best defended, essentially, by relationship to the finest in US heritage, just as Christianity is optimally secured through connection to what makes it unique and wonderful, which is the example of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest pretending the most negative about the nation and Christianity never occurred; it signifies both humility and conviction, a blend that serious US believers should embrace.
