The Trump movement's most illuminating and defining instances – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most hazardous, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the US president began displaying the public his designs for a lavish reception room double the dimensions compared to the White House and then commenced solo dismantling the East Wing to construct it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of casualties due to his slashing to foreign assistance amounts to 600,000 and rising, and presently a study forecast his petroleum strategies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have risked – truly, no former commander would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying major areas of the executive mansion to construct a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of multiple the richest Americans, the majority of whom have business with federal agencies.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As confusing as it is to witness the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there is one large group within America who wouldn't consider it entirely new. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics close to half – who were educated as conventional Protestant believers.
We have observed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we were raised with into the total contrary of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they converted a persona of love into a figure of hate who endorses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this transformation occurred more gradually, through multiple decades instead of months, however it is still disconcerting through similar means, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, because theoretically Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and because the fastest-growing cadre within America may possess limited understanding about him because they identify as atheists or agnostics or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that exist valuable insights of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically absolutely not the account of an authoritative monarch emerging; rather, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to avoid undercover officers. The child matures in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching is about love for others, especially for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and protecting. Jesus' answer to violence is to turn the opposite cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a way to educate the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing is that if someone steals your outer garment you must offer the person your additional clothing too.
The obvious and direct fact that Christ of the gospels calls for a kind of profound affection focused on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christianity somewhat of a controversial faith: appealing to the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness requiring to be controlled. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestantism was so widespread that it essentially blessed current circumstances.
A Conflict for the Best Among Us
So I have been heartened to observe the persistent defiance against Trump arise in this past year. It has provided great solace to help build the movement that has protested openly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in numbers in interim political contests. We will need to persist with it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners at every demonstration and requests to the best parts of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you receive him and receive them or refuse?
America is best defended, in other words, through connection to the best within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended through connection to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of Christ. In neither case does it suggest pretending the worst about the nation and religious tradition was nonexistent; it signifies both modesty and conviction, a blend that committed US believers should embrace.
