Trumpism's most telling and characteristic moments β not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing β occurred earlier this fall. In the course of multiple weeks, the American president commenced revealing the public his intentions for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the eastern section to construct it.
He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad β the current estimate of fatalities resulting from his reductions to USAID stands at 600,000 and increasing, and presently a study predicted his petroleum strategies would result in fatalities another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have attempted β truly, no other president would have imagined β independently wrecking large sections of the White House to build a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the direct cooperation of numerous America's wealthiest, nearly all of which conduct transactions with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' to 'the humble will perish to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the leader seek toι’ θ¦ the established notion regarding democracy and substitute it with its complete opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it entirely new. This includes individuals like us β within elder demographics a near majority β who were educated as conventional Protestant believers.
We have watched over the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we learned about into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they turned a figure of affection into a symbol of hostility who blesses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this change developed at a slower pace, across decades instead of months, yet it remains unsettling through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.
A Toxic Christianity Gains Ground
Hence I shall explain the Jesus from my childhood, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and given that the rapidly expanding group among Americans may possess limited understanding about him because they identify as skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; however I believe that contain precious wisdom of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the account of a mighty king arising; conversely, an infant arrives to homeless parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to escape secret police. The child matures in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his message is about love for fellow humans, specifically for the impoverished β and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, shown by providing food and sheltering. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the opposite cheek β not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a method to instruct the attacker; his crime policy indicates that whenever someone steals your coat you must offer the person your additional clothing as well.
The apparent and straightforward fact that the Jesus in biblical accounts calls for a type of profound affection concentrated on the impoverished is what has always made the Christian faith somewhat of a provocative belief system: appealing to the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality requiring to be controlled. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down β Protestantism was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Best of Us
So I have been heartened to observe the persistent defiance to Trump develop during the previous year. It has been great solace to assist in constructing the campaign that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated voters to turn out in numbers during minor elections. We shall require to persist with it, and with identical determination, with American flags during all protests and requests to the highest qualities of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you welcome them and welcome him or reject?
The nation is most protected, in other words, by reference to the best within national tradition, similar to Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to that which renders it special and wonderful, specifically the model of the Savior. In neither case does it imply acting as if the worst of both America and Christianity never occurred; it means both modesty and belief, a combination that committed national faithful should be comfortable with.
