The Trump movement's most revealing and distinctive occasions – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing the public his plans for a lavish reception room two times larger of the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing portion to erect it.
He has done things ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of casualties due to his slashing to foreign assistance is 600,000 and rising, and this week an analysis projected his fossil fuel policies would kill 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No previous president would have risked – truly, no other president would have imagined – independently wrecking large sections of the White House to build a royal-themed celebration hall, with the direct cooperation of multiple America's wealthiest, almost all of whom maintain dealings with public institutions.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the president try to upend the traditional concept of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.
We have observed across decades while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we learned about into the total contrary of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they converted a persona of compassion into a symbol of hate who blesses specifically the brutality that he criticized in biblical teachings; this transformation occurred more slowly, across decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disturbing in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, since in theory Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and given that the rapidly expanding group among Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him since they are non-believers or doubters or nones. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; but I do think that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story.
It is emphatically absolutely not the narrative of a powerful ruler arising; instead, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a storage space, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade covert authorities. The child matures in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his doctrine is about love for other people, particularly for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. The Savior's reaction to violence is to turn the other cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a means to teach the aggressor; his method regarding offenses is that if someone steals your jacket you should give them your pullover also.
The evident and direct fact that the Savior from scripture advocates for a kind of radical love focused on the impoverished is what has always made Christianity somewhat of a controversial faith: attractive to the populace, but owing to its natural unconventionality demanding to be restrained. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Highest Within Us
Therefore I have felt encouraged to observe the steadfast resistance to Trump develop during the previous year. It has been great solace to participate in developing the movement that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and seems to have inspired voters to turn out in large quantities in the off-year elections. We will need to persist with it, and with identical determination, with American flags throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the immigrant? Did you welcome them and embrace them or not?
The nation is most protected, to put it differently, by relationship to the highest in US heritage, just as Christianity is most protected by reference to that which renders it unique and magnificent, specifically the model of Christ. In neither case does it suggest pretending the most damaging of both America and religious tradition never occurred; it signifies both humility and belief, a mixture that genuine American Christians should be comfortable with.
