The Trump phenomenon's most illuminating and defining moments – not its most crucial, 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 began displaying all observers his plans for an ornate dance hall twice the size compared to the White House and then commenced independently demolishing the eastern section to build it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of casualties resulting from his reductions to international aid amounts to 600,000 and rising, and presently a study projected his energy policies would kill another 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No previous president would have risked – genuinely, no other president would have imagined – solo demolishing major areas of the White House to build a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of numerous the richest Americans, nearly all of which have business with public institutions.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the world' to 'the gentle will succumb of cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the chief executive attempt to overturn the traditional concept of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who wouldn't consider it entirely new. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts close to half – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched across decades as politically conservative religious groups converted the Savior we learned about into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they converted a persona of compassion into a figure of animosity who blesses exactly the harshness that he criticized in scripture; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, over decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disturbing through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, as conceptually the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and since the fastest-growing cadre among Americans could have minimal awareness of him as they consider themselves atheists or doubters or nones. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; yet I maintain that there are pearls of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is decidedly definitely not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; rather, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to avoid secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his doctrine focuses on affection for fellow humans, specifically for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and protecting. Christ's response to violence is to turn the additional cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a means to educate the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing indicates that whenever someone steals your jacket you must offer him your sweater as well.
The apparent and clear fact that the Savior in biblical accounts advocates for a form of extreme compassion concentrated on the impoverished has consistently rendered Christianity rather a controversial faith: engaging for the general public, but owing to its inherent radicalness requiring to be contained. During the 1950s it was restrained via weakening – Protestantism was so dominant that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Best Within Us
So I have been heartened to witness the persistent defiance against Trump arise over the last twelve months. It has provided great solace to assist in constructing the movement that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in numbers during minor elections. We must have to maintain it, and with identical determination, with American flags throughout each rally and appeals to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the immigrant? Did you welcome them and receive them or reject?
America is best defended, to put it differently, by reference to the best within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured through connection to what makes it unique and beautiful, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In neither case does it mean acting as if the worst regarding America and Christianity was nonexistent; it means both meekness and belief, a combination that serious US believers ought to accept.
