The Trump phenomenon's most telling and distinctive moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of several weeks, the American president started showing everyone his intentions for a gilded ballroom twice the size than the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it.
He has committed acts countless times more severe – the present calculation of fatalities resulting from his reductions to international aid is 600,000 and rising, and recently a study projected his fossil fuel policies would kill 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have dared – really, no other president would have conceived – independently wrecking large sections of the executive mansion to build a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of multiple the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which conduct transactions with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the Earth' to 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the chief executive try to upend the old idea regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were raised within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have watched across decades as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they converted a persona of love into an icon of hate who blesses exactly the harshness that he denounced in scripture; this change developed at a slower pace, across decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Jesus from my upbringing, because theoretically Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and given that the rapidly expanding group within America might have little sense about him as they consider themselves skeptics or agnostics or nones. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that there are pearls of substantial value in the Christian story.
It is emphatically absolutely not the story of a mighty king appearing; instead, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to a different country to evade secret police. The infant develops in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his teaching concerns compassion for fellow humans, especially for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and protecting. Christ's response to hostility is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a means to educate the aggressor; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever someone steals your jacket you ought to provide the person your additional clothing also.
The evident and straightforward fact that the Jesus of the gospels requests a kind of extreme compassion focused on the poor has perpetually caused the Christian faith rather a controversial faith: attractive to the masses, but owing to its intrinsic extremism requiring to be controlled. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestantism was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Highest of Us
Hence I have become inspired to see the determined opposition against Trump arise during the previous year. It has served as substantial consolation to help build the campaign that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated electorate to participate in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We shall require to persist with it, and in the same spirit, with American flags at every demonstration and requests to the best parts within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or not?
America is best defended, essentially, by reference to the best within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended by reference to that which renders it distinctive and magnificent, which is the example of Jesus. In both situations does it mean feigning the most damaging of both America and Christian faith never occurred; it represents both meekness and conviction, a combination that committed national faithful should be comfortable with.
