The Trump movement's most revealing and distinctive moments – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. During the period of multiple weeks, the nation's leader started showing the public his intentions for a gilded ballroom twice the size compared to the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the existing assessment of deaths from his cuts to international aid is 600,000 and increasing, and this week research projected his petroleum strategies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No former leader would have risked – truly, no other president would have imagined – solo demolishing major areas of the presidential residence in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of multiple America's wealthiest, the majority of whom have business with federal agencies.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the world' to 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the leader seek to颠覆 the traditional concept of democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there is one large group within America who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – within elder demographics close to half – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have witnessed over the years as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we were raised with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they transformed an image of compassion into a figure of hostility who endorses precisely the cruelties that he denounced in scripture; this transformation occurred more gradually, over decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting through similar means, a bewildering emotional blow for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Jesus from my upbringing, as conceptually Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and since the fastest-growing cadre among Americans may possess limited understanding regarding him as they consider themselves skeptics or doubters or nones. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that there are pearls of significant worth in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically not the story of a mighty king appearing; rather, a child comes into the world to displaced parents in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to a different country to escape covert authorities. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his doctrine is about love for fellow humans, particularly for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but practical compassion, shown by providing food and housing. Christ's response to aggression is to turn the other cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a means to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you ought to provide him your sweater too.
The obvious and clear truth that Christ of the gospels calls for a form of extreme compassion concentrated on the impoverished is what has always made Christian religion rather a provocative belief system: engaging for the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness demanding to be controlled. In the fifties it was controlled by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Highest of Us
Hence I have become encouraged to see the determined opposition to Trump arise during the previous year. It has been great solace to participate in developing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and likely has encouraged electorate to show up in large quantities during minor elections. We will need to continue it, and through comparable resolve, displaying national flags throughout each rally and requests to the best parts of American history.
We're going to be asked ... how did you receive the immigrant? Did you receive him and welcome him or reject?
The nation is most protected, essentially, by relationship to the highest about American history, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by relationship to that which renders it distinctive and magnificent, specifically the model of Christ. In both situations does it imply feigning the worst of both America and religious tradition was nonexistent; it means both modesty and belief, a combination that genuine US believers ought to accept.
