Trumpism's most illuminating and characteristic moments – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most foolish, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the US president started showing everyone his intentions for an ornate dance hall twice the size of the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing to construct it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of fatalities resulting from his reductions to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and presently a study projected his petroleum strategies would result in fatalities another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have risked – really, no previous leader would have conceived – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of multiple America's wealthiest, almost all of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the humble will perish of cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – among senior generations close to half – who were raised within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have witnessed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they converted a persona of affection into an icon of animosity who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this change developed at a slower pace, over decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless unsettling through similar means, a bewildering emotional blow for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Therefore allow me to outline the Jesus from my childhood, as conceptually Jesus is the center within Christian belief, and given that the fastest-growing cadre within America might have little sense regarding him because they identify as skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that contain precious wisdom of substantial value in the Christian story.
It is decidedly absolutely not the story of a powerful ruler emerging; conversely, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to avoid secret police. The child matures in simple surroundings, a laboring woodworker; his teaching concerns compassion for fellow humans, specifically for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and protecting. The Savior's reaction to hostility is to present the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a means to instruct the aggressor; his crime policy states that when an individual takes your jacket you should give them your pullover too.
The evident and straightforward truth that the Jesus of the gospels requests a type of profound affection focused on the poor has consistently rendered Christianity something of a provocative belief system: appealing to the populace, but owing to its natural unconventionality needing to be restrained. During the 1950s it was restrained through watering down – The Protestant faith was so prevalent that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Best of Us
So I have been heartened to observe the determined opposition to Trump arise over the last twelve months. It has been great solace to participate in developing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to turn out in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to maintain it, and with identical determination, featuring US banners at every demonstration and appeals to the best parts of American history.
We will be questioned ... about how you treated the stranger? Did you welcome them and embrace them or reject?
The country is optimally secured, in other words, by relationship to the highest in US heritage, just as Christianity is best defended by reference to elements that cause it to be distinctive and beautiful, specifically the model of Jesus. In both situations does it mean pretending the worst of both America and religious tradition was nonexistent; it signifies both meekness and belief, a mixture that genuine US believers should be comfortable with.
