The Trump phenomenon's most telling and characteristic occasions – not its most important, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – came earlier this autumn. In the course of several weeks, the American president commenced revealing all observers his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size than the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the present calculation of casualties due to his slashing to international aid amounts to 600,000 and increasing, and this week an analysis forecast his energy policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have attempted – genuinely, no previous leader would have conceived – solo demolishing large sections of the presidential residence in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of multiple the richest Americans, nearly all of which have business with the government.
We went from 'the gentle will obtain the world' to 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the president seek to颠覆 the old idea about democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there is one large group of Americans who might not perceive it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – among senior generations almost a majority – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have witnessed throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches converted the Savior we learned about into exactly the opposite of our understanding of him. Essentially, they converted a persona of compassion into a figure of hostility who endorses exactly the harshness that he condemned in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more gradually, through multiple decades as opposed to months, however it is still unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Hence I shall explain the Savior from my childhood, because theoretically the Savior is the core of Christian religion, and given that the rapidly expanding group of Americans may possess limited understanding about him since they are atheists or doubters or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that exist valuable insights of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; instead, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to avoid covert authorities. The infant develops in simple surroundings, an employed craftsman; his teaching is about love for others, especially for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, shown by providing food and housing. Jesus' answer to hostility is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a method to instruct the aggressor; his crime policy is that if someone steals your jacket you must offer the person your additional clothing too.
The apparent and clear truth that the Jesus from scripture requests a form of radical love concentrated on the impoverished is what has always made Christianity somewhat of a scandalous religion: attractive to the general public, but because of its natural unconventionality requiring to be contained. In the fifties it was restrained via weakening – Protestantism was so dominant that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Battle for the Finest Within Us
Therefore I have felt encouraged to see the steadfast resistance against Trump emerge in this past year. It has served as significant comfort to help build the movement that has protested openly in rally after rally, and appears to have motivated electorate to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We will need to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, featuring US banners throughout each rally and appeals to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or reject?
The country is optimally secured, in other words, through connection to the best within national tradition, similar to Christianity is best defended by reference to elements that cause it to be special and magnificent, which is the example of Christ. In all circumstances does it suggest feigning the most negative of both America and Christianity was nonexistent; it represents both meekness and conviction, a combination that committed American Christians should embrace.
