The Trump phenomenon's most telling and distinctive moments – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of a few weeks, the American president commenced revealing the public his plans for a lavish reception room twice the size than the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to erect it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to international aid stands at 600,000 and rising, and recently an analysis predicted his energy policies would kill 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have dared – truly, no other president would have imagined – independently wrecking significant portions of the presidential residence in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the direct cooperation of multiple the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which have business with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As bewildering 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 might not perceive it entirely new. That is those of us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were raised within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed over the years as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we grew up with into exactly the opposite of our understanding of him. Essentially, they transformed an image of love into a figure of hostility who blesses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this transformation occurred more gradually, over decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Savior from my upbringing, because theoretically Christ is the focus within Christian belief, and given that the fastest-growing cadre of Americans may possess limited understanding regarding him since they are atheists or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that there are pearls of substantial value in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically absolutely not the account of an authoritative monarch emerging; conversely, an infant arrives to displaced parents in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to evade undercover officers. The infant develops in simple surroundings, a laboring woodworker; his teaching focuses on affection for others, especially for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but tangible care, shown by providing food and housing. Christ's response to hostility is to present the additional cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your outer garment you ought to provide the person your additional clothing too.
The evident and straightforward reality that the Jesus of the gospels requests a form of extreme compassion focused on the poor has consistently rendered Christianity somewhat of a scandalous religion: engaging for the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be restrained. In the 1950s it was controlled via weakening – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Battle for the Best of Us
Hence I have become encouraged to observe the steadfast resistance against Trump emerge in this past year. It has served as great solace to help build the movement that has protested openly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged citizens to participate in numbers in the off-year elections. We will need to persist with it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners during all protests and appeals to the highest qualities in US history.
We will be questioned ... about how you treated the immigrant? Did you welcome them and embrace them or not?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by relationship to the best in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured through connection to elements that cause it to be special and beautiful, which is the example of the Savior. In both situations does it imply pretending the worst about the nation and Christian faith did not happen; it means both meekness and conviction, a combination that committed national faithful ought to accept.
