The Trump phenomenon's most telling and defining moments – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of multiple weeks, the US president began displaying everyone his plans for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions of the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing to build it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the existing assessment of fatalities resulting from his reductions to USAID stands at 600,000 and increasing, and recently a study projected his energy policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have risked – genuinely, no previous leader would have imagined – independently wrecking large sections of the executive mansion to build a royal-themed celebration hall, with the enthusiastic participation of some of the richest Americans, the majority of whom conduct transactions with the government.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there is one large group within America who should not find it entirely new. This includes individuals like us – in older age cohorts close to half – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we grew up with into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of affection into a figure of hate who endorses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, over decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless unsettling via comparable methods, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and since the rapidly expanding group of Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him because they identify as atheists or uncertain individuals or nones. I take no issue with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that exist valuable insights of great price in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the account of an authoritative monarch emerging; instead, a baby is born to displaced parents in an automotive shelter, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to escape secret police. The child matures in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his teaching is about love for others, especially for the impoverished – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. The Savior's reaction to aggression is to offer the other cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a method to instruct the aggressor; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever an individual takes your outer garment you ought to provide them your pullover also.
The apparent and straightforward fact that Christ from scripture calls for a form of radical love focused on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christian religion something of a scandalous religion: appealing to the populace, but owing to its natural unconventionality requiring to be contained. In the fifties it was contained by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Best Among Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to see the persistent defiance regarding Trump arise in this past year. It has served as great solace to help build the campaign that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated voters to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to persist with it, and with identical determination, with American flags throughout each rally and calls to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the immigrant? Did you welcome them and receive them or refuse?
America is best defended, essentially, by reference to the best in US heritage, just as Christianity is most protected by reference to elements that cause it to be special and wonderful, specifically the model of Christ. In neither case does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and religious tradition never occurred; it represents both humility and faith, a mixture that serious US believers should embrace.
