The Trump phenomenon's most telling and defining instances – not its most significant, nor most harsh, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – came earlier this autumn. In the course of multiple weeks, the American president began displaying everyone his designs for a lavish reception room two times larger than the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to build it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of casualties resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance amounts to 600,000 and growing, and this week a study predicted his energy policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have attempted – truly, no former commander would have conceived – solo demolishing large sections of the executive mansion to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of multiple America's wealthiest, nearly all of which maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the gentle will obtain the Earth' to 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the president attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and exchange it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – in older age cohorts close to half – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have watched throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we learned about into the complete reverse of our understanding of him. Fundamentally, they transformed an image of compassion into an icon of animosity who endorses exactly the harshness that he criticized in biblical teachings; this has happened more gradually, across decades rather than months, however it is still disturbing in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Christ that I grew up with, because theoretically Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and because the fastest-growing cadre of Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him because they identify as atheists or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that contain precious wisdom of great price in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly definitely not the story of a mighty king appearing; instead, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to evade covert authorities. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, an employed craftsman; his doctrine is about love for fellow humans, especially for the disadvantaged – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and housing. Christ's response to hostility is to offer the opposite cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a means to instruct the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing indicates that whenever an individual takes your outer garment you should give them your pullover as well.
The apparent and straightforward fact that Christ in biblical accounts calls for a form of extreme compassion centered on the poor is what has always made the Christian faith rather a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality requiring to be restrained. In the fifties it was controlled through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Finest of Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to see the persistent defiance against Trump emerge in this past year. It has served as great solace to assist in constructing the campaign that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged citizens to turn out in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We shall require to maintain it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags during all protests and appeals to the finest aspects of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the immigrant? Did you receive him and embrace them or refuse?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by reference to the finest about American history, similar to Christianity is best defended by reference to elements that cause it to be unique and beautiful, specifically the model of the Savior. In all circumstances does it mean acting as if the most damaging of both America and Christian faith did not happen; it means both meekness and faith, a combination that committed US believers should embrace.
