Trumpism's most revealing and defining occasions – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – occurred earlier this fall. During the period of a few weeks, the US president started showing all observers his intentions for an ornate dance hall twice the size of the White House and subsequently started solo dismantling the eastern section to construct it.
He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of deaths from his cuts to international aid stands at 600,000 and growing, and presently an analysis forecast his energy policies would kill an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No other president would have risked – really, no former commander would have contemplated – solo demolishing large sections of the White House to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom conduct transactions with public institutions.
We went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' into 'the gentle will succumb of cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the leader try to upend the established notion about democracy and substitute it with its complete opposite, there exists a significant segment within America who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – among senior generations almost a majority – who were brought up as conventional Protestant believers.
We have observed across decades as politically conservative religious groups turned the Jesus we grew up with into the complete reverse of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of love into a figure of hate who approves precisely the cruelties that he denounced in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more gradually, through multiple decades as opposed to months, however it is still unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Harmful Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Christ from my upbringing, because theoretically Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and since the fastest-growing cadre within America may possess limited understanding regarding him since they are non-believers or doubters or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that there are pearls of substantial value within Christian narrative.
It is unquestionably not the narrative of an authoritative monarch arising; conversely, a child comes into the world to homeless parents in a garage, who need to rapidly escape to another nation to avoid secret police. The baby grows up in modest conditions, a laboring woodworker; his teaching focuses on affection for other people, particularly for the impoverished – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and protecting. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the other cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a way to educate the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing states that when a person pilfers your jacket you ought to provide the person your additional clothing as well.
The apparent and straightforward reality that Christ from scripture calls for a kind of radical love centered on the impoverished has perpetually caused the Christian faith something of a provocative belief system: engaging for the masses, but owing to its intrinsic extremism needing to be restrained. During the 1950s it was controlled by dilution – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Highest of Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to witness the persistent defiance to Trump develop during the previous year. It has been substantial consolation to participate in developing the campaign that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated citizens to show up in significant amounts during minor elections. We shall require to persist with it, and in the same spirit, with American flags at every demonstration and calls to the highest qualities in US history.
We will be questioned ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you welcome them and embrace them or refuse?
The nation is most protected, essentially, by relationship to the finest within national tradition, just as Christianity is best defended by relationship to what makes it special and magnificent, which is the example of Christ. In neither case does it suggest acting as if the most damaging of both America and religious tradition did not happen; it represents both modesty and conviction, a mixture that committed US believers should be comfortable with.
