Trumpism's most telling and characteristic moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most threatening, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of several weeks, the American president started showing all observers his plans for an ornate dance hall twice the size than the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing to erect it.
He has done things ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of casualties due to his slashing to USAID amounts to 600,000 and growing, and this week an analysis predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have risked – genuinely, no previous leader would have conceived – independently wrecking significant portions of the presidential residence to build a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the enthusiastic participation of numerous America's wealthiest, almost all of whom maintain dealings with the government.
We moved from 'the gentle will obtain the Earth' into 'the humble will perish from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the traditional concept of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there is one large group among Americans who should not find it entirely new. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics almost a majority – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.
We have witnessed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we learned about into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. Essentially, they transformed an image of compassion into a symbol of hostility who blesses specifically the brutality that he denounced in the Gospel; this has happened more gradually, over decades rather than months, yet it remains unsettling in the same ways, a confusing personal impact for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, as conceptually Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and given that the rapidly expanding group within America could have minimal awareness regarding him since they are non-believers or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of significant worth in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly definitely not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; instead, a baby is born to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to escape secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his doctrine concerns compassion for fellow humans, specifically for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but tangible care, expressed by feeding and housing. The Savior's reaction to violence is to present the other cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a means to teach the aggressor; his crime policy states that when someone steals your jacket you ought to provide him your sweater as well.
The obvious and straightforward truth that Christ in biblical accounts advocates for a kind of extreme compassion focused on the impoverished is what has always made Christian religion somewhat of a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality requiring to be restrained. In the 1950s it was contained via weakening – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Highest Among Us
Therefore I have felt inspired to observe the steadfast resistance to Trump develop during the previous year. It has provided significant comfort to participate in developing the campaign that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated electorate to show up in large quantities during minor elections. We will need to persist with it, and in the same spirit, with American 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 welcome him or refuse?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the best within national tradition, just as Christianity is optimally secured by reference to that which renders it unique and magnificent, specifically the model of Jesus. In neither case does it imply acting as if the most damaging regarding America and Christianity never occurred; it signifies both modesty and belief, a mixture that serious national faithful ought to accept.
