The Trump movement's most illuminating and characteristic instances – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. In the course of several weeks, the American president commenced revealing the public his plans for an ornate dance hall twice the size than the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to construct it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the current estimate of casualties from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study forecast his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No previous president would have dared – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the enthusiastic participation of numerous America's wealthiest, almost all of whom have business with public institutions.
We went from 'the humble will receive the world' into 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the chief executive try to upend the established notion regarding democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there is one large group within America who wouldn't consider it completely novel. This includes individuals like us – among senior generations a near majority – who were educated as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations converted the Savior we grew up with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they transformed an image of affection into a figure of animosity who blesses precisely the cruelties that he denounced in biblical teachings; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades instead of months, however it is still unsettling in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for many of us.
A Harmful Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Christ from my upbringing, because theoretically Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and since the quickly increasing segment among Americans could have minimal awareness about him as they consider themselves atheists or uncertain individuals or religiously unaffiliated. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; instead, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to avoid undercover officers. The child matures in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his teaching focuses on affection for others, specifically for the impoverished – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and protecting. Jesus' answer to violence is to offer the other cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a way to teach the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing states that when someone steals your jacket you ought to provide him your sweater too.
The evident and direct reality that Christ from scripture calls for a kind of profound affection concentrated on the needy is what has always made Christian religion somewhat of a scandalous religion: attractive to the masses, but because of its natural unconventionality demanding to be restrained. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestantism was so widespread that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Conflict for the Highest Within Us
Hence I have become encouraged to witness the persistent defiance to Trump arise in this past year. It has been substantial consolation to participate in developing the initiative that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated voters to turn out in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to continue it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags at every demonstration and calls to the best parts in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or refuse?
The country is optimally secured, in other words, through connection to the best in US heritage, just as Christianity is best defended through connection to elements that cause it to be special and beautiful, specifically the model of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest feigning the most negative about the nation and Christian faith did not happen; it signifies both humility and conviction, a mixture that committed American Christians ought to accept.
