The Trump movement's most illuminating and distinctive moments – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of several weeks, the nation's leader began displaying all observers his intentions for an ornate dance hall twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of fatalities resulting from his reductions to USAID amounts to 600,000 and rising, and this week an analysis projected his energy policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have attempted – really, no other president would have contemplated – solo demolishing major areas of the White House to construct a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of numerous America's wealthiest, the majority of whom have business with the government.
We moved from 'the humble will receive the planet' to 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the chief executive attempt to overturn the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it entirely new. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were educated as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have witnessed across decades as rightwing evangelical churches converted the Savior we learned about into the total contrary of our perception of his character. Essentially, they converted a persona of love into a figure of hostility who approves specifically the brutality that he denounced in scripture; this has happened at a slower pace, across decades instead of months, however it is still disconcerting in the same ways, a confusing personal impact for numerous individuals.
A Harmful Christianity Takes Hold
Therefore allow me to outline the Savior from my childhood, since in theory Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and because the fastest-growing cadre among Americans may possess limited understanding of him as they consider themselves skeptics or doubters or nones. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that there are pearls of great price in biblical accounts.
It is unquestionably not the account of an authoritative monarch emerging; conversely, a baby is born to displaced parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to escape secret police. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his doctrine concerns compassion for other people, especially for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but tangible care, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the additional cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a method to educate the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing indicates that whenever an individual takes your outer garment you must offer him your sweater also.
The apparent and direct truth that the Savior from scripture advocates for a form of radical love concentrated on the poor is what has always made the Christian faith somewhat of a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but because of its intrinsic extremism requiring to be controlled. In the 1950s it was restrained by dilution – Protestantism was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Finest Among Us
So I have been encouraged to witness the persistent defiance to Trump arise during the previous year. It has provided substantial consolation to help build the initiative that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired citizens to show up in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to maintain it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners at every demonstration and requests to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We're going to be asked ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you welcome them and embrace them or not?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the highest in US heritage, just as Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to elements that cause it to be special and wonderful, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In all circumstances does it mean pretending the worst of both America and Christian faith never occurred; it represents both meekness and belief, a combination that serious American Christians should be comfortable with.
