Trumpism's most telling and characteristic occasions – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. During the period of multiple weeks, the US president started showing all observers his intentions for a lavish reception room twice the size of the White House and then began independently demolishing the East Wing portion to build it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of casualties resulting from his reductions to USAID stands at 600,000 and increasing, and presently an analysis forecast his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have risked – truly, no other president would have conceived – solo demolishing significant portions of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of numerous the richest Americans, nearly all of which have business with the government.
We went from 'the humble will receive the Earth' toward 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the leader try to upend the traditional concept regarding democracy and exchange it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who should not find it entirely new. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed across decades as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we learned about into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they converted a persona of affection into a symbol of hostility who endorses specifically the brutality that he condemned in biblical teachings; this has happened more slowly, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disturbing through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ from my childhood, because theoretically Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and given that the fastest-growing cadre within America may possess limited understanding regarding him as they consider themselves atheists or uncertain individuals or nones. I take no issue with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of great price within Christian narrative.
It is unquestionably absolutely not the story of a powerful ruler appearing; conversely, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a storage space, who must quickly flee to another nation to evade covert authorities. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his teaching focuses on affection for others, particularly for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and housing. Christ's response to hostility is to offer the opposite cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a means to educate the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing is that if an individual takes your jacket you must offer the person your additional clothing as well.
The obvious and straightforward truth that Christ from scripture calls for a kind of extreme compassion focused on the needy is what has always made the Christian faith somewhat of a controversial faith: appealing to the general public, but due to its intrinsic extremism demanding to be restrained. During the 1950s it was controlled via weakening – Protestant Christianity was so prevalent that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Highest of Us
So I have been heartened to observe the persistent defiance against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has been substantial consolation to help build the campaign that has protested openly in rally after rally, and likely has encouraged electorate to turn out in large quantities during minor elections. We will need to persist with it, and in the same spirit, with American flags throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... about how you treated the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and embrace them or refuse?
The nation is most protected, to put it differently, by relationship to the highest within national tradition, similar to Christianity is best defended through connection to what makes it special and beautiful, specifically the model of Jesus. In all circumstances does it imply pretending the most damaging of both America and Christianity never occurred; it represents both modesty and conviction, a combination that serious US believers ought to accept.
