Trumpism's most illuminating and characteristic moments – not its most important, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of several weeks, the American president began displaying the public his plans for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions of the White House and then commenced independently demolishing the East Wing portion to build it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths resulting from his reductions to USAID amounts to 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his energy policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have dared – genuinely, no other president would have contemplated – solo demolishing significant portions of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of multiple the nation's most affluent, nearly all of which have business with public institutions.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the world' to 'the humble will perish of cholera'
As disorienting as it is to witness the leader attempt to overturn the old idea about democracy and replace it with its direct contrary, there exists a significant segment within America who should not find it entirely new. This includes individuals like us – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were educated as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched across decades as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we grew up with into the total contrary of our perception of his character. Essentially, they transformed an image of compassion into a symbol of hate who endorses specifically the brutality that he condemned in scripture; this change developed at a slower pace, across decades rather than months, yet it remains unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Christ from my upbringing, since in theory Christ is the focus within Christian belief, and because the quickly increasing segment within America could have minimal awareness of him since they are skeptics or doubters or spiritual independents. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that contain precious wisdom of great price in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the story of a mighty king arising; conversely, an infant arrives to displaced parents in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to avoid secret police. The baby grows up in simple surroundings, a laboring woodworker; his teaching concerns compassion for others, specifically for the poor – not simply tender feelings, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and protecting. Christ's response to violence is to present the other cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a way to educate the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing indicates that whenever a person pilfers your coat you must offer them your pullover also.
The obvious and straightforward reality that the Jesus from scripture requests a type of radical love centered on the impoverished is what has always made Christian religion somewhat of a provocative belief system: attractive to the general public, but owing to its natural unconventionality needing to be controlled. In the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it practically sanctified existing conditions.
A Battle for the Finest Among Us
So I have been heartened to see the persistent defiance regarding Trump emerge over the last twelve months. It has provided substantial consolation to participate in developing the initiative that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated electorate to participate in numbers in the off-year elections. We must have to persist with it, and with identical determination, featuring US banners at every demonstration and appeals to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or not?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by relationship to the highest in US heritage, just as Christianity is most protected through connection to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, particularly the pattern of the Savior. In neither case does it imply feigning the worst about the nation and religious tradition was nonexistent; it represents both humility and faith, a combination that genuine national faithful should be comfortable with.
