The Trump movement's most revealing and distinctive instances – not its most significant, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – occurred earlier this fall. During the period of a few weeks, the nation's leader commenced revealing everyone his intentions for an ornate dance hall two times larger of the White House and then began independently demolishing the eastern section to erect it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of casualties due to his slashing to foreign assistance stands at 600,000 and increasing, and recently a study predicted his petroleum strategies would result in fatalities 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No previous president would have dared – really, no other president would have conceived – unilaterally destroying major areas of the presidential residence to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of multiple the richest Americans, the majority of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the humble will perish of cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the chief executive attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there is one large group within America who should not find it entirely new. That encompasses people such as ourselves – among senior generations a near majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched across decades while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we grew up with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of love into a symbol of hostility who blesses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in scripture; this has happened at a slower pace, across decades rather than months, yet it remains unsettling via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for numerous individuals.
A Harmful Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ from my childhood, since in theory Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment among Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him because they identify as skeptics or doubters or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with any other faith; however I believe that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the account of a mighty king emerging; instead, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to evade secret police. The child matures in simple surroundings, a laboring woodworker; his message is about love for other people, particularly for the disadvantaged – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and protecting. Christ's response to hostility is to turn the additional cheek – not as a gesture of submissive tolerance, but as a means to teach the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing states that when someone steals your jacket you must offer him your sweater also.
The evident and direct truth that the Jesus from scripture calls for a kind of extreme compassion focused on the poor is what has always made Christian religion somewhat of a controversial faith: attractive to the general public, but because of its inherent radicalness demanding to be contained. In the fifties it was restrained through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so prevalent that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Conflict for the Finest of Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to observe the persistent defiance to Trump develop in this past year. It has been significant comfort to help build the movement that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to participate in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags during all protests and calls to the finest aspects in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and welcome him or refuse?
The nation is most protected, essentially, through connection to the best about American history, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended by reference to elements that cause it to be unique and wonderful, specifically the model of Jesus. In both situations does it mean feigning the worst of both America and Christian faith never occurred; it signifies both meekness and faith, a combination that committed US believers ought to accept.
