The Trump phenomenon's most telling and characteristic instances – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – occurred earlier this fall. During the period of multiple weeks, the American president commenced revealing the public his intentions for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions of the White House and then commenced independently demolishing the East Wing portion to construct it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of casualties from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and growing, and presently a study projected his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have risked – really, no former commander would have conceived – unilaterally destroying large sections of the executive mansion in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the humble will receive the Earth' to 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the chief executive attempt to overturn the established notion regarding democracy and exchange it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics close to half – who were brought up as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we learned about into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they converted a persona of love into a symbol of animosity who endorses exactly the harshness that he criticized in scripture; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades as opposed to months, however it is still disturbing via comparable methods, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Therefore allow me to outline the Christ from my childhood, since in theory Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and since the fastest-growing cadre among Americans could have minimal awareness of him since they are skeptics or uncertain individuals or nones. I take no issue with these different approaches, nor with any other faith; however I believe that there are pearls of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the story of an authoritative monarch appearing; rather, an infant arrives to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to a different country to evade undercover officers. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his teaching concerns compassion for fellow humans, specifically for the disadvantaged – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and housing. Christ's response to hostility is to turn the other cheek – not as a demonstration of passive acceptance, but as a way to teach the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing is that if someone steals your outer garment you must offer him your sweater also.
The evident and clear fact that the Jesus of the gospels advocates for a kind of extreme compassion focused on the poor is what has always made Christianity something of a controversial faith: attractive to the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness needing to be contained. In the fifties it was contained through watering down – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it essentially sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Finest Among Us
Therefore I have felt inspired to see the steadfast resistance to Trump develop over the last twelve months. It has provided significant comfort to participate in developing the movement that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated voters to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to continue it, and with identical determination, with American flags at every demonstration and requests to the best parts in US history.
We're going to be asked ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you welcome them and welcome him or reject?
America is best defended, to put it differently, by relationship to the best about American history, similar to Christianity is most protected by relationship to elements that cause it to be special and wonderful, specifically the model of Christ. In both situations does it suggest pretending the most damaging about the nation and Christian faith never occurred; it signifies both meekness and conviction, a blend that serious national faithful should be comfortable with.
