The Trump movement's most telling and characteristic moments – not its most significant, nor most harsh, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of several weeks, the American president began displaying everyone his designs for a lavish reception room two times larger than the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to erect it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of fatalities from his cuts to foreign assistance stands at 600,000 and rising, and presently research projected his petroleum strategies would result in fatalities another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have risked – genuinely, no former commander would have conceived – independently wrecking large sections of the White House in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the direct cooperation of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which conduct transactions with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the gentle will obtain the planet' to 'the meek shall die of cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the leader attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and exchange it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion within America who should not find it entirely new. That is those of us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were brought up as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched across decades as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we learned about into exactly the opposite of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they transformed an image of love into a symbol of hate who endorses precisely the cruelties that he denounced in scripture; this has happened more gradually, through multiple decades rather than months, yet it remains unsettling via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for many of us.
A Harmful Christianity Establishes Itself
Therefore allow me to outline the Christ from my upbringing, as conceptually the Savior is the core of any Christian faith, and given that the quickly increasing segment among Americans could have minimal awareness of him since they are non-believers or agnostics or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that there are pearls of great price in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically absolutely not the account of a powerful ruler appearing; rather, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to a different country to avoid undercover officers. The child matures in simple surroundings, a working carpenter; his teaching concerns compassion for other people, particularly for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. The Savior's reaction to aggression is to present the other cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a method to instruct the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing states that when a person pilfers your coat you should give them your pullover as well.
The obvious and straightforward truth that the Jesus from scripture advocates for a form of extreme compassion centered on the needy is what has always made Christianity somewhat of a controversial faith: appealing to the populace, but due to its inherent radicalness demanding to be controlled. In the fifties it was controlled via weakening – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Finest Among Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to witness the determined opposition against Trump develop over the last twelve months. It has provided significant comfort to help build the movement that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged electorate to turn out in numbers in the off-year elections. We shall require to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags throughout each rally and appeals to the best parts of American history.
We're going to be asked ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you welcome them and embrace them or not?
America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the finest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured through connection to what makes it unique and beautiful, specifically the model of Christ. In neither case does it imply acting as if the most damaging regarding America and Christianity never occurred; it means both modesty and faith, a combination that genuine American Christians should embrace.
