The Trump phenomenon's most telling and defining occasions – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most hazardous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of several weeks, the American president commenced revealing the public his designs for a lavish reception room twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of fatalities resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance stands at 600,000 and rising, and this week a study projected his fossil fuel policies would result in fatalities 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have risked – really, no previous leader would have imagined – unilaterally destroying major areas of the presidential residence to construct a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the enthusiastic participation of numerous the nation's most affluent, the majority of whom conduct transactions with public institutions.
We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the Earth' into 'the humble will perish from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the president try to upend the established notion regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there is one large group within America who might not perceive it entirely new. This includes individuals like us – within elder demographics close to half – who were brought up within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have witnessed over the years as politically conservative religious groups converted the Savior we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they converted a persona of compassion into a figure of animosity who blesses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in the Gospel; this has happened at a slower pace, over decades instead of months, yet it remains unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ from my childhood, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and given that the quickly increasing segment within America might have little sense regarding him since they are non-believers or agnostics or nones. I take no issue with these different approaches, nor with different religions; but I do think that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story.
It is decidedly definitely not the account of a powerful ruler appearing; instead, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in a storage space, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to escape secret police. The child matures in simple surroundings, a working carpenter; his message focuses on affection for others, especially for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and housing. Jesus' answer to aggression is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a means to instruct the assailant; his method regarding offenses is that if a person pilfers your jacket you ought to provide them your pullover also.
The evident and straightforward truth that Christ in biblical accounts requests a type of extreme compassion focused on the impoverished has consistently rendered Christian religion somewhat of a provocative belief system: engaging for the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness requiring to be contained. In the fifties it was contained by dilution – The Protestant faith was so prevalent that it essentially blessed current circumstances.
A Conflict for the Highest Among Us
So I have been heartened to see the persistent defiance to Trump emerge over the last twelve months. It has provided great solace to help build the campaign that has protested openly in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired citizens to show up in significant amounts during minor elections. We must have to persist with it, and with identical determination, featuring US banners throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or not?
The nation is most protected, to put it differently, through connection to the finest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is most protected by relationship to elements that cause it to be unique and wonderful, particularly the pattern of Christ. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and Christianity was nonexistent; it signifies both meekness and belief, a mixture that genuine US believers should embrace.
