The Trump movement's most telling and distinctive instances β not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing β occurred earlier this fall. Over the span of a few weeks, the American president began displaying everyone his designs for a lavish reception room twice the size compared to the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse β the current estimate of casualties due to his slashing to international aid amounts to 600,000 and growing, and presently an analysis forecast his energy policies would result in fatalities 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have risked β genuinely, no previous leader would have conceived β solo demolishing significant portions of the presidential residence to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of multiple the nation's most affluent, almost all of whom maintain dealings with the government.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' to 'the humble will perish of cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the president seek toι’ θ¦ the old idea of democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who should not find it completely novel. This includes individuals like us β in older age cohorts close to half β who were raised within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have watched across decades while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we were raised with into the complete reverse of our perception of his character. Fundamentally, they transformed an image of compassion into an icon of hate who approves precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; this change developed at a slower pace, over decades instead of months, however it is still disconcerting through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Hence I shall explain the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically the Savior is the core of any Christian faith, and since the fastest-growing cadre within America could have minimal awareness of him because they identify as atheists or agnostics or nones. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; but I do think that exist valuable insights of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is decidedly absolutely not the account of a mighty king appearing; rather, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in a storage space, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to avoid undercover officers. The child matures in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his doctrine is about love for fellow humans, specifically for the impoverished β and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and housing. Jesus' answer to violence is to turn the additional cheek β not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a means to instruct the aggressor; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever an individual takes your jacket you ought to provide them your pullover also.
The obvious and direct reality that Christ from scripture requests a type of profound affection concentrated on the impoverished has consistently rendered Christianity somewhat of a provocative belief system: appealing to the general public, but due to its inherent radicalness demanding to be controlled. In the fifties it was contained via weakening β Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Finest Within Us
So I have been heartened to see the persistent defiance to Trump arise in this past year. It has served as great solace to assist in constructing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to show up in large quantities during minor elections. We will need to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, featuring US banners at every demonstration and requests to the best parts within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not?
The nation is most protected, to put it differently, by relationship to the highest within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured through connection to that which renders it special and wonderful, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In all circumstances does it imply acting as if the worst about the nation and Christian faith did not happen; it signifies both modesty and belief, a combination that serious US believers ought to accept.
