The Trump phenomenon's most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. During the period of multiple weeks, the US president began displaying everyone his intentions for a gilded ballroom double the dimensions of the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to erect it.
He has done things ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of fatalities resulting from his reductions to USAID stands at 600,000 and increasing, and presently an analysis predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill an additional 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have dared – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – solo demolishing major areas of the White House to construct a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of multiple the nation's most affluent, the majority of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the chief executive try to upend the established notion of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics close to half – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we grew up with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they transformed an image of compassion into an icon of animosity who endorses specifically the brutality that he condemned in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more gradually, across decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disturbing through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ from my upbringing, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment among Americans might have little sense regarding him as they consider themselves skeptics or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with any of these traditions, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that contain precious wisdom of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is decidedly not the narrative of a powerful ruler arising; instead, a child comes into the world to displaced parents in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to escape covert authorities. The infant develops in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his doctrine is about love for fellow humans, especially for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, shown by providing food and housing. Jesus' answer to aggression is to present the other cheek – not as a demonstration of submissive tolerance, but as a way to educate the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing indicates that whenever a person pilfers your jacket you should give him your sweater as well.
The apparent and clear truth that Christ from scripture advocates for a form of radical love centered on the impoverished is what has always made the Christian faith something of a controversial faith: engaging for the populace, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be controlled. During the 1950s it was controlled by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Best of Us
So I have been encouraged to see the steadfast resistance against Trump arise in this past year. It has been significant comfort to participate in developing the campaign that has protested openly in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired citizens to turn out in significant amounts in interim political contests. We will need to continue it, and through comparable resolve, featuring US banners at every demonstration and calls to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the immigrant? Did you receive him and welcome him or reject?
The nation is most protected, in other words, through connection to the finest in US heritage, similar to Christianity is optimally secured by reference to elements that cause it to be special and magnificent, which is the example of Jesus. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most negative about the nation and Christian faith never occurred; it signifies both meekness and conviction, a blend that committed American Christians should be comfortable with.
