The Trump movement's most telling and defining moments – not its most crucial, nor cruelest, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of several weeks, the nation's leader began displaying all observers his intentions for an ornate dance hall two times larger compared to the White House and then commenced independently demolishing the East Wing to construct it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of deaths resulting from his reductions to international aid stands at 600,000 and growing, and presently research projected his energy policies would result in fatalities 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have dared – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying significant portions of the White House to build a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of numerous the nation's most affluent, the majority of whom have business with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' toward 'the meek shall die of cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the old idea about democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – in older age cohorts close to half – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have witnessed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we were raised with into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of love into an icon of animosity who blesses precisely the cruelties that he denounced in biblical teachings; this has happened at a slower pace, through multiple decades as opposed to months, yet it remains disconcerting via comparable methods, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, since in theory the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and since the quickly increasing segment among Americans might have little sense regarding him because they identify as skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of great price within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically not the narrative of an authoritative monarch appearing; rather, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to avoid secret police. The child matures in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his teaching is about love for other people, especially for the impoverished – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and protecting. Christ's response to hostility is to present the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of submissive tolerance, but as a means to teach the aggressor; his crime policy indicates that whenever a person pilfers your jacket you must offer the person your additional clothing also.
The obvious and direct fact that the Savior of the gospels requests a kind of profound affection focused on the poor has perpetually caused Christian religion rather a scandalous religion: attractive to the masses, but because of its natural unconventionality needing to be contained. In the fifties it was contained by dilution – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Finest of Us
Therefore I have felt encouraged to see the steadfast resistance to Trump arise during the previous year. It has been significant comfort to help build the movement that has taken to the streets in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged voters to show up in numbers in interim political contests. We will need to maintain it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners during all protests and calls to the highest qualities of American history.
We will be questioned ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you welcome them and receive them or not?
America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the finest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is most protected through connection to elements that cause it to be distinctive and wonderful, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest pretending the most damaging regarding America and Christianity was nonexistent; it signifies both modesty and faith, a mixture that committed American Christians ought to accept.
