The Trump movement's most illuminating and characteristic occasions – not its most crucial, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the American president started showing all observers his designs for an ornate dance hall twice the size compared to the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths resulting from his reductions to USAID amounts to 600,000 and growing, and this week an analysis predicted his petroleum strategies would result in fatalities an additional 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have attempted – really, no former commander would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of multiple the richest Americans, almost all of whom conduct transactions with public institutions.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' into 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to witness the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and exchange it with its complete opposite, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who might not perceive it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts close to half – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we learned about into the total contrary of our understanding of him. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of compassion into an icon of hate who endorses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this change developed more gradually, through multiple decades instead of months, yet it remains disturbing through similar means, a bewildering emotional blow for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Hence I shall explain the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and given that the quickly increasing segment within America may possess limited understanding regarding him as they consider themselves skeptics or agnostics or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that contain precious wisdom of great price in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically definitely not the narrative of a mighty king appearing; instead, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to evade secret police. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his teaching is about love for others, especially for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Jesus' answer to aggression is to offer the additional cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a means to teach the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing is that if a person pilfers your coat you must offer him your sweater too.
The obvious and straightforward truth that the Savior of the gospels requests a form of profound affection concentrated on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christianity something of a scandalous religion: appealing to the populace, but because of its natural unconventionality demanding to be contained. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Finest Within Us
Therefore I have felt inspired to observe the steadfast resistance to Trump develop in this past year. It has provided great solace to help build the initiative that has demonstrated publicly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in large quantities in interim political contests. We must have to continue it, and with identical determination, with American flags at every demonstration and appeals to the finest aspects of American history.
We're going to be asked ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and receive them or reject?
America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the best in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by reference to elements that cause it to be unique and beautiful, which is the example of Jesus. In neither case does it mean acting as if the worst of both America and religious tradition did not happen; it means both meekness and belief, a mixture that genuine American Christians should be comfortable with.
