The Trump movement's most revealing and characteristic occasions – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of several weeks, the US president commenced revealing the public his designs for a gilded ballroom two times larger than the White House and then began independently demolishing the eastern section to construct it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths resulting from his reductions to international aid amounts to 600,000 and growing, and presently an analysis projected his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have risked – genuinely, no former commander would have imagined – independently wrecking significant portions of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, nearly all of which have business with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the gentle will obtain the world' toward 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the traditional concept regarding democracy and exchange it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment within America who might not perceive it entirely new. That is those of us – within elder demographics almost a majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched throughout the years as politically conservative religious groups converted the Savior we learned about into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they converted a persona of love into an icon of animosity who approves specifically the brutality that he denounced in the Gospel; this change developed more slowly, through multiple decades rather than months, however it is still disconcerting in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
Therefore allow me to outline the Jesus that I grew up with, since in theory Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and because the quickly increasing segment among Americans could have minimal awareness about him because they identify as skeptics or uncertain individuals or religiously unaffiliated. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that contain precious wisdom of significant worth within Christian narrative.
It is decidedly absolutely not the story of an authoritative monarch appearing; instead, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in an automotive shelter, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade secret police. The infant develops in simple surroundings, a laboring woodworker; his message is about love for others, specifically for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and protecting. Jesus' answer to aggression is to present the other cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a way to instruct the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing is that if someone steals your jacket you must offer him your sweater also.
The apparent and clear reality that Christ of the gospels requests a kind of profound affection concentrated on the poor has perpetually caused Christianity somewhat of a scandalous religion: engaging for the populace, but owing to its intrinsic extremism demanding to be restrained. In the 1950s it was controlled by dilution – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it basically baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Highest Among Us
Therefore I have felt encouraged to see the persistent defiance to Trump emerge during the previous year. It has provided great solace to participate in developing the movement that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated voters to turn out in large quantities in the off-year elections. We will need to persist with it, and in the same spirit, featuring US banners throughout each rally and calls to the best parts within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... how did you receive the immigrant? Did you welcome them and receive them or not?
The nation is most protected, in other words, by reference to the best in US heritage, exactly as the Christian faith is most protected by relationship to that which renders it unique and wonderful, specifically the model of Christ. In neither case does it mean pretending the most damaging about the nation and Christian faith was nonexistent; it means both modesty and belief, a combination that serious American Christians should be comfortable with.
