Trumpism's most telling and characteristic occasions – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most senseless, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of a few weeks, the American president started showing the public his designs for a gilded ballroom twice the size than the White House and then commenced solo dismantling the East Wing portion to build it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths due to his slashing to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and presently research projected his energy policies would kill 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have dared – really, no previous leader would have imagined – solo demolishing large sections of the executive mansion in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the enthusiastic participation of multiple the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with public institutions.
We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' to 'the humble will perish from cholera'
As confusing as it is to witness the leader attempt to overturn the traditional concept about democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who wouldn't consider it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were educated as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we grew up with into the total contrary of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they turned a figure of affection into a symbol of hostility who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in biblical teachings; this has happened more slowly, across decades rather than months, yet it remains disconcerting via comparable methods, a bewildering emotional blow for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Jesus from my childhood, since in theory the Savior is the core of any Christian faith, and given that the quickly increasing segment of Americans may possess limited understanding regarding him since they are non-believers or agnostics or spiritual independents. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the story of a mighty king arising; conversely, an infant arrives to displaced parents in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to avoid secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching focuses on affection for fellow humans, particularly for the disadvantaged – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Jesus' answer to aggression is to offer the additional cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a means to instruct the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing states that when someone steals your outer garment you must offer the person your additional clothing too.
The obvious and clear truth that the Jesus in biblical accounts calls for a type of extreme compassion concentrated on the needy is what has always made the Christian faith somewhat of a scandalous religion: attractive to the populace, but owing to its natural unconventionality needing to be controlled. In the 1950s it was controlled via weakening – Protestantism was so prevalent that it essentially sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Highest Within Us
So I have been heartened to witness the determined opposition against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has provided significant comfort to participate in developing the initiative that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and likely has encouraged citizens to participate in numbers in interim political contests. We must have to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags during all protests and appeals to the finest aspects of American history.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or refuse?
The nation is most protected, essentially, by reference to the highest in US heritage, similar to Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to what makes it special and wonderful, particularly the pattern of Jesus. In all circumstances does it suggest feigning the most damaging about the nation and Christian faith never occurred; it represents both meekness and belief, a combination that committed American Christians ought to accept.
