The Trump movement's most telling and characteristic moments – not its most crucial, nor cruelest, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – came earlier this autumn. During the period of a few weeks, the US president began displaying all observers his plans for a gilded ballroom two times larger compared to the White House and subsequently started independently demolishing the East Wing to construct it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the current estimate of deaths resulting from his reductions to USAID stands at 600,000 and increasing, and this week a study forecast his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No former leader would have risked – really, no other president would have conceived – solo demolishing significant portions of the White House to build a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of some of America's wealthiest, almost all of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' into 'the gentle will succumb from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to observe the president attempt to overturn the traditional concept regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – among senior generations close to half – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have witnessed throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we grew up with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they transformed an image of compassion into a symbol of hostility who endorses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, across decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
Hence I shall explain the Jesus that I grew up with, since in theory Christ is the focus within Christian belief, and because the rapidly expanding group among Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him because they identify as atheists or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is unquestionably absolutely not the story of an authoritative monarch arising; conversely, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who must quickly flee to a different country to escape covert authorities. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his message focuses on affection for fellow humans, specifically for the disadvantaged – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Jesus' answer to violence is to turn the additional cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a way to instruct the assailant; his method regarding offenses is that if someone steals your coat you ought to provide him your sweater also.
The apparent and direct truth that the Jesus of the gospels requests a type of extreme compassion centered on the impoverished has consistently rendered the Christian faith rather a provocative belief system: appealing to the masses, but due to its inherent radicalness demanding to be restrained. In the fifties it was controlled through watering down – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Highest Within Us
Therefore I have felt inspired to witness the steadfast resistance regarding Trump emerge during the previous year. It has provided great solace to assist in constructing the movement that has taken to the streets in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired citizens to participate in numbers in interim political contests. We will need to maintain it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags during all protests and appeals to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the stranger? Did you welcome them and receive them or reject?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, through connection to the finest about American history, similar to Christianity is most protected through connection to elements that cause it to be unique and magnificent, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In all circumstances does it imply acting as if the worst about the nation and Christianity was nonexistent; it represents both modesty and conviction, a combination that serious US believers ought to accept.
