The Trump phenomenon's most illuminating and defining instances – not its most significant, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the American president began displaying all observers his plans for a lavish reception room twice the size compared to the White House and subsequently started solo dismantling the eastern section to build it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of casualties resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance amounts to 600,000 and increasing, and presently research predicted his petroleum strategies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have dared – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – independently wrecking significant portions of the White House in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of multiple the nation's most affluent, almost all of whom have business with federal agencies.
We went from 'the humble will receive the Earth' into 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As confusing as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who wouldn't consider it entirely new. That is those of us – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have witnessed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we learned about into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into an icon of animosity who endorses specifically the brutality that he denounced in the Gospel; this has happened more gradually, through multiple decades as opposed to months, however it is still unsettling through similar means, a confusing personal impact for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
Therefore allow me to outline the Savior from my upbringing, because theoretically Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and given that the rapidly expanding group within America may possess limited understanding about him as they consider themselves skeptics or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that exist valuable insights of substantial value within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically absolutely not the account of a mighty king emerging; rather, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to escape undercover officers. The baby grows up in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching focuses on affection for others, particularly for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, shown by providing food and protecting. Jesus' answer to violence is to offer the other cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a way to teach the attacker; his crime policy indicates that whenever a person pilfers your outer garment you should give him your sweater also.
The evident and clear truth that the Savior from scripture requests a form of extreme compassion centered on the impoverished is what has always made Christian religion something of a scandalous religion: attractive to the populace, but owing to its inherent radicalness demanding to be contained. In the 1950s it was contained by dilution – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Highest of Us
So I have been encouraged to see the persistent defiance to Trump develop during the previous year. It has been substantial consolation to assist in constructing the movement that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated voters to participate in significant amounts in interim political contests. We will need to persist with it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners at every demonstration and calls to the finest aspects of American history.
We will be questioned ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or not?
America is best defended, to put it differently, through connection to the finest in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by relationship to what makes it special and magnificent, which is the example of Christ. In all circumstances does it mean acting as if the most damaging about the nation and Christianity was nonexistent; it signifies both humility and conviction, a mixture that committed national faithful should embrace.
