The Trump movement's most telling and characteristic moments – not its most important, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of multiple weeks, the nation's leader began displaying the public his designs for a lavish reception room twice the size compared to the White House and then commenced solo dismantling the eastern section to erect it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the current estimate of fatalities from his cuts to international aid amounts to 600,000 and increasing, and this week research forecast his fossil fuel policies would kill an additional 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have attempted – really, no former commander would have imagined – independently wrecking major areas of the White House to construct a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of numerous America's wealthiest, the majority of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the humble will receive the world' into 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the leader try to upend the old idea regarding democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have witnessed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we learned about into the complete reverse of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they converted a persona of affection into a symbol of hostility who endorses exactly the harshness that he criticized in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more gradually, across decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Jesus from my childhood, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment among Americans might have little sense of him since they are atheists or uncertain individuals or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of substantial value in biblical accounts.
It is unquestionably absolutely not the account of a powerful ruler arising; conversely, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to escape undercover officers. The infant develops in simple surroundings, a working carpenter; his message concerns compassion for other people, especially for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but tangible care, expressed by feeding and protecting. Christ's response to violence is to offer the other cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a method to educate the aggressor; his crime policy states that when a person pilfers your outer garment you ought to provide him your sweater also.
The obvious and straightforward reality that the Jesus from scripture calls for a form of profound affection concentrated on the needy has perpetually caused the Christian faith somewhat of a controversial faith: engaging for the general public, but owing to its inherent radicalness needing to be restrained. In the 1950s it was restrained by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it essentially sanctified existing conditions.
A Conflict for the Highest of Us
So I have been inspired to see the steadfast resistance to Trump emerge in this past year. It has served as great solace to help build the movement that has demonstrated publicly in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired citizens to turn out in numbers in interim political contests. We shall require to maintain it, and in the same spirit, with American flags during all protests and appeals to the finest aspects of American history.
We're going to be asked ... about how you treated the stranger? Did you welcome them and receive them or reject?
America is best defended, essentially, through connection to the highest in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by relationship to elements that cause it to be unique and beautiful, particularly the pattern of Christ. In neither case does it suggest acting as if the worst of both America and Christian faith never occurred; it means both humility and conviction, a combination that committed American Christians should be comfortable with.
