Trumpism's most revealing and characteristic moments – not its most significant, nor cruelest, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. During the period of several weeks, the American president commenced revealing everyone his designs for a gilded ballroom two times larger of the White House and then began independently demolishing the East Wing to erect it.
He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of casualties resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance is 600,000 and rising, and presently an analysis projected his energy policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have attempted – really, no other president would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying significant portions of the executive mansion to build a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the direct cooperation of numerous America's wealthiest, almost all of whom have business with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the leader attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who might not perceive it entirely new. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics close to half – who were brought up within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have watched throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we learned about into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hostility who blesses specifically the brutality that he criticized in scripture; this change developed more slowly, across decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and since the rapidly expanding group of Americans might have little sense of him as they consider themselves skeptics or uncertain individuals or nones. I take no issue with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; however I believe that exist valuable insights of great price in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly not the narrative of an authoritative monarch arising; conversely, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to avoid secret police. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his teaching focuses on affection for others, particularly for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Jesus' answer to aggression is to turn the opposite cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a means to teach the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing states that when someone steals your outer garment you must offer him your sweater too.
The evident and straightforward truth that the Savior of the gospels calls for a kind of extreme compassion concentrated on the poor is what has always made Christian religion rather a provocative belief system: appealing to the populace, but owing to its natural unconventionality needing to be restrained. In the 1950s it was restrained by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Highest Among Us
So I have been encouraged to see the steadfast resistance against Trump develop during the previous year. It has served as significant comfort to participate in developing the movement that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to show up in large quantities during minor elections. We will need to continue it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags throughout each rally and calls to the finest aspects of American history.
We're going to be asked ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you receive him and receive them or reject?
The country is optimally secured, in other words, through connection to the highest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended by relationship to that which renders it special and beautiful, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In all circumstances does it mean acting as if the most damaging about the nation and Christian faith was nonexistent; it represents both humility and belief, a mixture that genuine US believers should embrace.
