Trumpism's most telling and defining occasions – not its most significant, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of a few weeks, the nation's leader commenced revealing all observers his plans for a gilded ballroom double the dimensions compared to the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to build it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of fatalities due to his slashing to foreign assistance is 600,000 and increasing, and presently research forecast his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have dared – genuinely, no previous leader would have contemplated – independently wrecking significant portions of the presidential residence in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of some of the richest Americans, nearly all of which maintain dealings with the government.
We went from 'the humble will receive the planet' into 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to witness the chief executive attempt to overturn the established notion regarding democracy and exchange it with its direct contrary, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics close to half – who were brought up within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have observed across decades as rightwing evangelical churches converted the Savior we grew up with into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into an icon of hostility who approves specifically the brutality that he criticized in scripture; this has happened at a slower pace, over decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Gains Ground
Therefore allow me to outline the Christ from my upbringing, since in theory Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and given that the fastest-growing cadre among Americans could have minimal awareness of him since they are non-believers or agnostics or spiritual independents. I take no issue with any of these traditions, nor with any other faith; yet I maintain that there are pearls of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is emphatically not the account of an authoritative monarch emerging; instead, a baby is born to homeless parents in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to a different country to escape secret police. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, an employed craftsman; his message concerns compassion for fellow humans, especially for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and housing. The Savior's reaction to hostility is to present the other cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a method to teach the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing is that if an individual takes your jacket you must offer them your pullover as well.
The obvious and straightforward reality that Christ in biblical accounts advocates for a type of extreme compassion focused on the poor is what has always made Christianity somewhat of a scandalous religion: appealing to the masses, but because of its intrinsic extremism requiring to be contained. In the fifties it was restrained by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Highest of Us
Hence I have become encouraged to witness the steadfast resistance regarding Trump emerge in this past year. It has been substantial consolation to help build the initiative that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and seems to have inspired voters to turn out in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to maintain it, and in the same spirit, with American flags at every demonstration and appeals to the finest aspects in US history.
We're going to be asked ... about how you treated the stranger? Did you receive him and welcome him or refuse?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by relationship to the highest within national tradition, just as Christianity is most protected by reference to that which renders it special and beautiful, specifically the model of Christ. In neither case does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and Christian faith did not happen; it signifies both meekness and faith, a blend that committed American Christians ought to accept.
