The Trump phenomenon's most telling and defining instances – not its most significant, nor cruelest, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but perhaps its most illuminating – occurred earlier this fall. During the period of several weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a lavish reception room twice the size than the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the eastern section to erect it.
He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of deaths due to his slashing to international aid amounts to 600,000 and growing, and recently a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would result in fatalities an additional 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have dared – truly, no other president would have conceived – unilaterally destroying large sections of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which have business with public institutions.
We transitioned from 'the meek shall inherit the world' toward 'the gentle will succumb of cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the president attempt to overturn the traditional concept of democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion within America who wouldn't consider it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – among senior generations almost a majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed throughout the years as politically conservative religious groups converted the Savior we learned about into the complete reverse of our perception of his character. Essentially, they transformed an image of love into an icon of animosity who blesses specifically the brutality that he criticized in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless unsettling through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Harmful Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Christ from my childhood, because theoretically the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and because the fastest-growing cadre of Americans could have minimal awareness of him since they are skeptics or agnostics or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with different religions; but I do think that there are pearls of great price within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically not the narrative of a powerful ruler emerging; conversely, an infant arrives to displaced parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to another nation to avoid secret police. The child matures in simple surroundings, an employed craftsman; his teaching concerns compassion for other people, particularly for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. The Savior's reaction to violence is to offer the opposite cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a way to teach the assailant; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever a person pilfers your jacket you should give them your pullover as well.
The evident and direct reality that the Jesus in biblical accounts advocates for a type of extreme compassion focused on the needy is what has always made the Christian faith somewhat of a provocative belief system: engaging for the masses, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be restrained. During the 1950s it was restrained by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Finest of Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to see the steadfast resistance against Trump emerge over the last twelve months. It has been great solace to participate in developing the movement that has taken to the streets in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired electorate to turn out in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to continue it, and with identical determination, with American flags throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities in US history.
We will be questioned ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or not?
The nation is most protected, in other words, by reference to the best in US heritage, just as Christianity is most protected by relationship to that which renders it distinctive and magnificent, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and religious tradition did not happen; it signifies both modesty and conviction, a combination that serious American Christians should embrace.
