The Trump phenomenon's most illuminating and distinctive occasions – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of multiple weeks, the US president began displaying the public his designs for an ornate dance hall twice the size than the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to erect it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of casualties due to his slashing to international aid is 600,000 and increasing, and presently research projected his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have risked – truly, no former commander would have conceived – solo demolishing significant portions of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of multiple America's wealthiest, the majority of whom maintain dealings with public institutions.
We moved from 'the gentle will obtain the Earth' toward 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the old idea of democracy and exchange it with its complete opposite, there remains a substantial portion within America who should not find it entirely new. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were brought up within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we were raised with 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 change developed at a slower pace, over decades as opposed to months, however it is still disturbing through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
Therefore allow me to outline the Savior from my upbringing, as conceptually Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment among Americans might have little sense of him as they consider themselves skeptics or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with different religions; however I believe that there are pearls of substantial value in the Christian story.
It is emphatically absolutely not the account of an authoritative monarch arising; instead, an infant arrives to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to escape secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his teaching is about love for other people, particularly for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but tangible care, shown by providing food and protecting. Jesus' answer to aggression is to present the additional cheek – not as a demonstration of compliant endurance, but as a way to educate the aggressor; his method regarding offenses states that when someone steals your jacket you should give the person your additional clothing also.
The evident and direct fact that Christ in biblical accounts requests a form of extreme compassion concentrated on the impoverished is what has always made the Christian faith rather a provocative belief system: appealing to the populace, but owing to its natural unconventionality needing to be contained. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it essentially blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Highest of Us
Hence I have become inspired to see the persistent defiance to Trump develop in this past year. It has provided great solace to help build the movement that has protested openly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in significant amounts during minor elections. We shall require to continue it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags throughout each rally and calls to the highest qualities in US history.
We will be questioned ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you welcome them and embrace them or reject?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the finest about American history, similar to Christianity is most protected through connection to that which renders it special and wonderful, which is the example of the Savior. In neither case does it mean feigning the most negative regarding America and Christian faith never occurred; it means both humility and faith, a mixture that committed American Christians ought to accept.
