The Trump phenomenon's most revealing and characteristic moments – not its most important, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. During the period of multiple weeks, the US president started showing all observers his designs for a lavish reception room double the dimensions than the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the eastern section to construct it.
He has done things ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of deaths due to his slashing to international aid is 600,000 and increasing, and this week a study forecast his fossil fuel policies would kill 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have dared – really, no other president would have conceived – unilaterally destroying significant portions of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of some of the nation's most affluent, almost all of whom conduct transactions with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' into 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to witness the president try to upend the old idea regarding democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there remains a substantial portion within America who might not perceive it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics close to half – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed across decades while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we were raised with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they transformed an image of compassion into a figure of animosity who approves specifically the brutality that he criticized in biblical teachings; this change developed more gradually, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting through similar means, a confusing personal impact for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Takes Hold
Therefore allow me to outline the Jesus from my childhood, as conceptually the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and because the rapidly expanding group within America could have minimal awareness about him because they identify as atheists or agnostics or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; yet I maintain that contain precious wisdom of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; rather, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to another nation to evade undercover officers. The infant develops in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching is about love for other people, particularly for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Christ's response to hostility is to present the additional cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a method to educate the aggressor; his crime policy indicates that whenever a person pilfers your coat you must offer him your sweater too.
The evident and clear fact that Christ from scripture calls for a form of radical love centered on the impoverished has consistently rendered Christian religion something of a provocative belief system: engaging for the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality requiring to be restrained. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so prevalent that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Best Within Us
So I have been inspired to observe the determined opposition regarding Trump emerge in this past year. It has been significant comfort to help build the movement that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired citizens to show up in large quantities in interim political contests. We will need to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags at every demonstration and requests to the highest qualities of American history.
We're going to be asked ... regarding how you welcomed the immigrant? Did you welcome them and embrace them or not?
The country is optimally secured, in other words, by relationship to the highest in US heritage, just as Christianity is best defended through connection to what makes it unique and wonderful, which is the example of the Savior. In neither case does it mean pretending the worst regarding America and Christianity did not happen; it means both meekness and belief, a blend that committed national faithful ought to accept.
