The Trump movement's most telling and characteristic instances – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but perhaps its most illuminating – occurred earlier this fall. During the period of a few weeks, the American president commenced revealing everyone his plans for an ornate dance hall twice the size compared to the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to build it.
He has performed deeds countless times more severe – the existing assessment of fatalities from his cuts to USAID amounts to 600,000 and growing, and recently an analysis projected his energy policies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No previous president would have attempted – really, no former commander would have conceived – solo demolishing major areas of the White House to build a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of some of the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which maintain dealings with the government.
We moved from 'the gentle will obtain the world' to 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the president try to upend the established notion regarding democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who wouldn't consider it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were educated as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we grew up with into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they converted a persona of compassion into a figure of hate who approves precisely the cruelties that he criticized in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more gradually, across decades as opposed to months, yet it remains unsettling through similar means, a confusing personal impact for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Hence I shall explain the Savior that I grew up with, because theoretically Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and given that the quickly increasing segment within America might have little sense regarding him as they consider themselves skeptics or agnostics or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is unquestionably not the account of a mighty king arising; conversely, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to escape secret police. The child matures in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his message is about love for others, particularly for the impoverished – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Jesus' answer to violence is to offer the additional cheek – not as a demonstration of passive acceptance, but as a method to teach the attacker; his crime policy indicates that whenever someone steals your jacket you ought to provide him your sweater as well.
The evident and direct reality that the Jesus of the gospels requests a type of profound affection focused on the poor has consistently rendered the Christian faith something of a scandalous religion: appealing to the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness demanding to be restrained. In the 1950s it was restrained by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Finest of Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to see the determined opposition regarding Trump emerge in this past year. It has served as significant comfort to assist in constructing the movement that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated citizens to participate in numbers in the off-year elections. We will need to maintain it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags during all protests and requests to the finest aspects of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and welcome him or not?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the finest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is most protected by relationship to elements that cause it to be distinctive and magnificent, particularly the pattern of Christ. In both situations does it mean acting as if the worst of both America and religious tradition never occurred; it represents both humility and conviction, a combination that committed American Christians should be comfortable with.
