Trumpism's most telling and characteristic moments – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the American president started showing the public his designs for a gilded ballroom double the dimensions compared to the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the eastern section to build it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the existing assessment of fatalities from his cuts to USAID stands at 600,000 and growing, and recently research predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have attempted – truly, no other president would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying significant portions of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of multiple the nation's most affluent, the majority of whom have business with federal agencies.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' into 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who wouldn't consider it entirely new. That is those of us – among senior generations almost a majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched throughout the years as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they turned a figure of compassion into a symbol of hate who approves precisely the cruelties that he criticized in the Gospel; this has happened at a slower pace, through multiple decades as opposed to months, however it is still unsettling through similar means, a confusing personal impact for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Savior from my upbringing, since in theory the Savior is the core of Christian religion, and given that the quickly increasing segment within America may possess limited understanding of him because they identify as skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that there are pearls of great price within Christian narrative.
It is decidedly definitely not the story of a powerful ruler emerging; instead, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in a garage, who must quickly flee to another nation to escape covert authorities. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his doctrine focuses on affection for fellow humans, particularly for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and protecting. The Savior's reaction to violence is to offer the other cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a means to teach the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing states that when someone steals your jacket you ought to provide them your pullover too.
The obvious and clear truth that Christ of the gospels requests a kind of radical love centered on the needy has perpetually caused the Christian faith rather a provocative belief system: appealing to the masses, but owing to its natural unconventionality demanding to be restrained. In the fifties it was controlled by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so prevalent that it basically baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Finest Within Us
Therefore I have felt encouraged to observe the persistent defiance against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has served as substantial consolation to assist in constructing the movement that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged citizens to show up in significant amounts during minor elections. We must have to continue it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags during all protests and requests to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you welcome them and receive them or reject?
The nation is most protected, in other words, by relationship to the highest about American history, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by reference to what makes it unique and wonderful, particularly the pattern of Christ. In neither case does it imply feigning the most damaging of both America and Christianity was nonexistent; it signifies both humility and belief, a mixture that genuine US believers should be comfortable with.
