Trumpism's most telling and distinctive occasions – not its most significant, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of several weeks, the nation's leader began displaying all observers his designs for a gilded ballroom two times larger than the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing to construct it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to foreign assistance amounts to 600,000 and increasing, and this week research projected his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have attempted – really, no former commander would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying major areas of the executive mansion to construct a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the direct cooperation of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which conduct transactions with public institutions.
We moved from 'the humble will receive the planet' toward 'the meek shall die of cholera'
As confusing as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the old idea about democracy and exchange it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion within America who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – within elder demographics almost a majority – who were brought up as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we grew up with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they converted a persona of love into a symbol of animosity who approves specifically the brutality that he criticized in scripture; this has happened at a slower pace, through multiple decades instead of months, yet it remains unsettling via comparable methods, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Jesus from my upbringing, since in theory Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and since the fastest-growing cadre of Americans might have little sense about him as they consider themselves atheists or agnostics or nones. I take no issue with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of great price within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically absolutely not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; instead, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to a different country to evade undercover officers. The infant develops in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching is about love for others, particularly for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and housing. Christ's response to violence is to offer the additional cheek – not as a demonstration of submissive tolerance, but as a means to educate the aggressor; his crime policy indicates that whenever an individual takes your jacket you must offer the person your additional clothing as well.
The apparent and direct reality that the Savior of the gospels requests a form of extreme compassion concentrated on the poor has consistently rendered Christian religion somewhat of a controversial faith: appealing to the populace, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be contained. In the 1950s it was contained via weakening – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Finest Among Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to observe the persistent defiance against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has been great solace to participate in developing the initiative that has protested openly in rally after rally, and appears to have motivated voters to show up in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to persist with it, and in the same spirit, displaying national flags at every demonstration and calls to the highest qualities of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the immigrant? Did you receive him and receive them or reject?
America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the finest within national tradition, similar to Christianity is best defended through connection to what makes it special and wonderful, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In all circumstances does it imply acting as if the worst regarding America and Christian faith was nonexistent; it means both meekness and faith, a mixture that committed US believers should embrace.
