The Trump phenomenon's most illuminating and characteristic instances – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of multiple weeks, the nation's leader started showing the public his plans for a gilded ballroom double the dimensions than the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing portion to build it.
He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of casualties from his cuts to USAID amounts to 600,000 and growing, and presently an analysis projected his fossil fuel policies would result in fatalities an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have attempted – really, no former commander would have conceived – solo demolishing significant portions of the presidential residence in order to erect a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the enthusiastic participation of multiple the richest Americans, almost all of whom conduct transactions with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' to 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the established notion of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. This includes individuals like us – among senior generations close to half – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches converted the Savior we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of compassion into a figure of animosity who endorses specifically the brutality that he denounced in the Gospel; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting via comparable methods, a confusing personal impact for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Savior from my childhood, as conceptually the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and because the fastest-growing cadre within America might have little sense regarding him since they are atheists or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that exist valuable insights of great price within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically not the story of a powerful ruler appearing; instead, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to evade secret police. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his message focuses on affection for others, especially for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and housing. Jesus' answer to aggression is to offer the other cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a means to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if an individual takes your coat you must offer them your pullover as well.
The apparent and direct truth that the Jesus from scripture advocates for a form of extreme compassion concentrated on the needy is what has always made Christianity rather a provocative belief system: engaging for the populace, but owing to its inherent radicalness demanding to be controlled. In the fifties it was restrained by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Best Among Us
Hence I have become inspired to observe the persistent defiance to Trump emerge during the previous year. It has been substantial consolation to help build the movement that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated electorate to participate in large quantities in interim political contests. We must have to maintain it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners throughout each rally and requests to the best parts within national heritage.
We're going to be asked ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or not?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by relationship to the finest within national tradition, similar to Christianity is optimally secured through connection to that which renders it distinctive and beautiful, particularly the pattern of Christ. In neither case does it imply acting as if the most damaging about the nation and Christianity was nonexistent; it represents both meekness and faith, a combination that serious national faithful should embrace.
