The Trump movement's most revealing and distinctive moments β not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening β occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of a few weeks, the US president commenced revealing everyone his designs for a gilded ballroom two times larger compared to the White House and then began independently demolishing the East Wing portion to construct it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse β the present calculation of fatalities from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and increasing, and this week a study predicted his energy policies would result in fatalities 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have attempted β truly, no other president would have conceived β independently wrecking large sections of the executive mansion to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of numerous the richest Americans, almost all of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the humble will receive the world' to 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to witness the president try to upend the old idea about democracy and exchange it with its polar opposite, there is one large group within America who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves β in older age cohorts almost a majority β who were educated as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of compassion into a figure of animosity who approves precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, through multiple decades instead of months, yet it remains disconcerting via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Jesus from my upbringing, since in theory Christ is the focus within Christian belief, and because the quickly increasing segment of Americans may possess limited understanding of him as they consider themselves skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of substantial value within Christian narrative.
It is unquestionably definitely not the account of a powerful ruler appearing; conversely, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to evade undercover officers. The child matures in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message concerns compassion for other people, specifically for the impoverished β and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the other cheek β not as a demonstration of passive acceptance, but as a method to educate the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too.
The obvious and clear fact that the Savior of the gospels calls for a type of profound affection centered on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christian religion rather a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but owing to its intrinsic extremism needing to be controlled. During the 1950s it was contained through watering down β Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Best Among Us
So I have been inspired to witness the steadfast resistance against Trump arise in this past year. It has been substantial consolation to assist in constructing the initiative that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged citizens to show up in large quantities during minor elections. We must have to persist with it, and in the same spirit, displaying national flags at every demonstration and appeals to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or refuse?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the best about American history, similar to Christianity is best defended by relationship to what makes it special and wonderful, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In neither case does it imply acting as if the most damaging regarding America and religious tradition was nonexistent; it represents both meekness and conviction, a mixture that committed American Christians should be comfortable with.
