The Trump phenomenon's most illuminating and defining occasions – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the American president started showing the public his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size compared to the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing to erect it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of casualties due to his slashing to USAID stands at 600,000 and increasing, and recently an analysis forecast his energy policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have attempted – really, no other president would have conceived – solo demolishing major areas of the presidential residence in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of some of the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which have business with the government.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the president attempt to overturn the old idea regarding democracy and exchange it with its direct contrary, there is one large group among Americans who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. This includes individuals like us – 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 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 hate who endorses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this has happened more slowly, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Christ that I grew up with, as conceptually Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and given that the quickly increasing segment among Americans could have minimal awareness about him since they are skeptics or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with different religions; but I do think that contain precious wisdom of great price in biblical accounts.
It is unquestionably absolutely not the narrative of a powerful ruler arising; instead, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to evade covert authorities. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his message concerns compassion for other people, especially for the impoverished – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and housing. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a means to educate the aggressor; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater also.
The obvious and straightforward reality that Christ of the gospels calls for a type of radical love concentrated on the needy is what has always made Christianity something of a provocative belief system: attractive to the masses, but because of its intrinsic extremism demanding to be contained. During the 1950s it was controlled by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Conflict for the Finest Within Us
Hence I have become encouraged to see the steadfast resistance regarding Trump develop during the previous year. It has served as significant comfort to assist in constructing the movement that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated electorate to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We shall require to maintain it, and in the same spirit, with American flags during all protests and requests to the best parts in US history.
We're going to be asked ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you accept these individuals and embrace them or reject?
The country is optimally secured, essentially, through connection to the highest about American history, just as Christianity is best defended through connection to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the worst regarding America and Christian faith never occurred; it represents both humility and belief, a combination that serious American Christians should embrace.
