The Trump phenomenon's most revealing and distinctive moments – not its most important, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. During the period of a few weeks, the US president began displaying all observers his designs for a gilded ballroom two times larger of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of fatalities from his cuts to USAID amounts to 600,000 and rising, and this week an analysis forecast his energy policies would kill an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have risked – really, no previous leader would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the presidential residence to build a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of multiple America's wealthiest, the majority of whom maintain dealings with the government.
We transitioned from 'the meek shall inherit the world' into 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the leader try to upend the established notion of democracy and substitute it with its complete opposite, there exists a significant segment within America who might not perceive it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were brought up as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we grew up with into the total contrary of our understanding of him. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of love into a symbol of animosity who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades rather than months, yet it remains disconcerting through similar means, a confusing personal impact for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Jesus from my childhood, since in theory Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and since the quickly increasing segment of Americans may possess limited understanding about him since they are skeptics or uncertain individuals or nones. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with different religions; but I do think that exist valuable insights of great price in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the story of a mighty king emerging; rather, a baby is born to homeless parents in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to evade covert authorities. The infant develops in simple surroundings, a working carpenter; his teaching focuses on affection for others, particularly for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and sheltering. Christ's response to violence is to turn the opposite cheek – not as a demonstration of compliant endurance, but as a way to instruct the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing indicates that whenever an individual takes your jacket you ought to provide them your pullover also.
The evident and straightforward truth that Christ from scripture calls for a type of radical love concentrated on the needy has consistently rendered Christian religion rather a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be restrained. During the 1950s it was restrained via weakening – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it essentially sanctified existing conditions.
A Conflict for the Highest Among Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to observe the steadfast resistance to Trump emerge in this past year. It has been significant comfort to help build the initiative that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated electorate to participate in large quantities in interim political contests. We will need to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, featuring US banners at every demonstration and calls to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the immigrant? Did you welcome them and embrace them or not?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by reference to the best about American history, similar to Christianity is optimally secured through connection to that which renders it unique and magnificent, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In both situations does it imply feigning the most negative about the nation and Christian faith did not happen; it represents both modesty and faith, a mixture that serious US believers should be comfortable with.
