The Trump movement's most telling 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. Over the span of a few weeks, the American president began displaying all observers his designs for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and subsequently started solo dismantling the East Wing portion to construct it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of casualties from his cuts to international aid is 600,000 and increasing, and recently a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have attempted – truly, no other president would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying large sections of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of numerous the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which have business with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' into 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the leader seek to颠覆 the traditional concept regarding democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.
We have observed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we learned about into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they transformed an image of love into a figure of hostility who blesses precisely the cruelties that he denounced in scripture; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disturbing in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ that I grew up with, because theoretically Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and since the rapidly expanding group within America may possess limited understanding regarding him since they are non-believers or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these different approaches, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that there are pearls of great price within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically definitely not the story of a powerful ruler appearing; instead, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a garage, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to evade covert authorities. The child matures in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his message concerns compassion for fellow humans, specifically for the impoverished – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and housing. Jesus' answer to violence is to turn the other cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a method to teach the attacker; his crime policy indicates that whenever someone steals your jacket you must offer them your pullover too.
The obvious and direct fact that the Savior of the gospels calls for a form of extreme compassion centered on the poor has consistently rendered Christianity rather a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but owing to its natural unconventionality demanding to be controlled. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Best of Us
Hence I have become encouraged to witness the determined opposition regarding Trump develop in this past year. It has provided great solace to assist in constructing the movement that has taken to the streets in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged citizens to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to persist with it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners during all protests and requests to the finest aspects in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you welcome them and embrace them or reject?
America is best defended, essentially, by relationship to the finest within national tradition, just as Christianity is best defended through connection to what makes it unique and magnificent, which is the example of Jesus. In all circumstances does it suggest pretending the most damaging about the nation and Christianity was nonexistent; it represents both humility and faith, a combination that genuine national faithful should embrace.
