Trumpism's most revealing and defining moments – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most hazardous, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the US president started showing all observers his plans for a gilded ballroom double the dimensions compared to the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing portion to construct it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance amounts to 600,000 and increasing, and presently an analysis forecast his fossil fuel policies would kill 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have attempted – really, no other president would have imagined – unilaterally destroying significant portions of the executive mansion to build a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which maintain dealings with public institutions.
We transitioned from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the meek shall die from cholera'
As disorienting as it is to witness the president attempt to overturn the established notion regarding democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we grew up with into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of love into a symbol of animosity who endorses specifically the brutality that he criticized in the Gospel; this has happened at a slower pace, across decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, as conceptually Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment of Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him since they are atheists or doubters or spiritual independents. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that contain precious wisdom of great price in the Christian story.
It is decidedly not the story of a powerful ruler appearing; conversely, a baby is born to homeless parents in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to escape covert authorities. The infant develops in humble circumstances, an employed craftsman; his teaching focuses on affection for other people, particularly for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and housing. The Savior's reaction to hostility is to offer the other cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a means to educate the aggressor; his method regarding offenses states that when a person pilfers your outer garment you ought to provide the person your additional clothing too.
The apparent and straightforward reality that the Savior of the gospels requests a type of profound affection focused on the poor is what has always made Christian religion something of a controversial faith: appealing to the general public, but because of its natural unconventionality requiring to be controlled. In the fifties it was contained by dilution – Protestantism was so prevalent that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Battle for the Best of Us
So I have been inspired to observe the persistent defiance regarding Trump emerge over the last twelve months. It has served as significant comfort to participate in developing the initiative that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and likely has encouraged voters to participate in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We shall require to continue it, and in the same spirit, displaying national flags at every demonstration and calls to the finest aspects in US history.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the immigrant? Did you welcome them and receive them or not?
The country is optimally secured, in other words, by relationship to the highest about American history, similar to Christianity is best defended through connection to that which renders it distinctive and beautiful, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In neither case does it imply feigning the most negative regarding America and Christianity never occurred; it signifies both meekness and faith, a blend that serious American Christians should be comfortable with.
