The Trump phenomenon's most revealing and characteristic moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of several weeks, the nation's leader started showing the public his designs for a gilded ballroom twice the size compared to the White House and then began independently demolishing the East Wing portion to erect it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of casualties resulting from his reductions to international aid is 600,000 and increasing, and recently a study projected his petroleum strategies would result in fatalities another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have dared – genuinely, no other president would have imagined – solo demolishing significant portions of the executive mansion to construct a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of numerous the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which conduct transactions with federal agencies.
We went from 'the gentle will obtain the Earth' into 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the old idea of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there is one large group within America who wouldn't consider it totally unfamiliar. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have watched over the years as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we were raised with into the complete reverse of our understanding of him. Essentially, they turned a figure of compassion into a symbol of hostility who endorses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this has happened more slowly, across decades instead of months, however it is still unsettling via comparable methods, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
Hence I shall explain the Christ from my childhood, since in theory the Savior is the core of Christian religion, and given that the rapidly expanding group within America might have little sense of him as they consider themselves skeptics or uncertain individuals or nones. I have no problem with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; but I do think that there are pearls of substantial value in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the narrative of a powerful ruler arising; conversely, an infant arrives to displaced parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to avoid undercover officers. The child matures in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching is about love for other people, especially for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ's response to aggression is to present the opposite cheek – not as a demonstration of compliant endurance, but as a method to instruct the aggressor; his method regarding offenses indicates that whenever someone steals your coat you should give them your pullover also.
The evident and direct fact that the Savior of the gospels calls for a form of profound affection focused on the needy is what has always made Christian religion something of a provocative belief system: attractive to the general public, but owing to its intrinsic extremism needing to be restrained. In the fifties it was contained via weakening – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it basically blessed current circumstances.
A Battle for the Best Within Us
Therefore I have felt inspired to see the steadfast resistance against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has provided great solace to participate in developing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and likely has encouraged electorate to show up in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We will need to persist with it, and with identical determination, with American flags at every demonstration and requests to the finest aspects in US history.
We're going to be asked ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you receive him and welcome him or refuse?
The nation is most protected, to put it differently, through connection to the highest within national tradition, just as Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to that which renders it distinctive and wonderful, specifically the model of Jesus. In all circumstances does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and Christian faith did not happen; it represents both modesty and belief, a combination that committed US believers should embrace.
