The Trump movement's most telling and defining occasions – not its most crucial, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of multiple weeks, the US president commenced revealing the public his designs for a lavish reception room double the dimensions of the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing to erect it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of fatalities from his cuts to foreign assistance is 600,000 and growing, and recently an analysis predicted his energy policies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have risked – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – independently wrecking large sections of the presidential residence in order to erect a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the direct cooperation of multiple the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We went from 'the gentle will obtain the world' into 'the meek shall die of 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 remains a substantial portion of Americans who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were raised within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we were raised with into the complete reverse of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they transformed an image of love into an icon of hate who blesses exactly the harshness that he criticized in the Gospel; this change developed at a slower pace, across decades rather than months, yet it remains disconcerting via comparable methods, a confusing personal impact for countless people.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Hence I shall explain the Savior from my upbringing, because theoretically Christ is the focus within Christian belief, and because the fastest-growing cadre within America might have little sense of him because they identify as skeptics or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with any of these traditions, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that contain precious wisdom of great price in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically not the account of a mighty king arising; conversely, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to escape secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his teaching concerns compassion for fellow humans, specifically for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and protecting. Jesus' answer to violence is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of submissive tolerance, but as a means to instruct the attacker; his crime policy indicates that whenever someone steals your outer garment you should give them your pullover also.
The obvious and direct fact that the Savior of the gospels advocates for a form of extreme compassion focused on the impoverished has consistently rendered the Christian faith rather a controversial faith: attractive to the masses, but because of its inherent radicalness demanding to be restrained. In the fifties it was restrained through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Best Within Us
So I have been heartened to see the steadfast resistance against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has served as substantial consolation to participate in developing the movement that has protested openly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in numbers during minor elections. We must have to persist with it, and in the same spirit, displaying national flags during all protests and calls to the finest aspects in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you receive him and welcome him or refuse?
America is best defended, to put it differently, through connection to the best about American history, similar to Christianity is best defended through connection to what makes it special and magnificent, which is the example of the Savior. In both situations does it mean acting as if the most negative regarding America and religious tradition did not happen; it represents both modesty and belief, a mixture that committed US believers ought to accept.
