Trumpism's most telling and distinctive instances – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but possibly its most revealing – occurred earlier this fall. In the course of several weeks, the nation's leader started showing the public his designs for a gilded ballroom twice the size compared to the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to construct it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of casualties from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and increasing, and this week an analysis predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have risked – genuinely, no previous leader would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the executive mansion to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with public institutions.
We went from 'the gentle will obtain the Earth' into 'the humble will perish from cholera'
As confusing as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the old idea about democracy and substitute it with its complete opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it entirely new. That is those of us – within elder demographics almost a majority – who were educated as conventional Protestant believers.
We have witnessed over the years while conservative evangelical congregations turned the Jesus we learned about into exactly the opposite of our understanding of him. Essentially, they converted a persona of love into an icon of animosity who approves precisely the cruelties that he criticized in biblical teachings; this has happened more slowly, over decades rather than months, yet it remains unsettling through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold
So let me first describe the Jesus from my childhood, as conceptually Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and because the quickly increasing segment within America could have minimal awareness of him since they are skeptics or agnostics or nones. I take no issue with any of these traditions, nor with different religions; but I do think that contain precious wisdom of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is emphatically not the story of an authoritative monarch appearing; instead, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a storage space, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to evade covert authorities. The child matures in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his doctrine focuses on affection for fellow humans, particularly for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but tangible care, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. Jesus' answer to hostility is to turn the opposite cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a method to educate the aggressor; his crime policy is that if someone steals your jacket you ought to provide him your sweater as well.
The evident and direct reality that the Jesus in biblical accounts advocates for a type of profound affection concentrated on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christianity rather a provocative belief system: appealing to the general public, but due to its intrinsic extremism requiring to be restrained. In the 1950s it was restrained via weakening – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Finest of Us
Hence I have become heartened to witness the steadfast resistance to Trump emerge over the last twelve months. It has provided significant comfort to help build the initiative that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to show up in numbers during minor elections. We will need to persist with it, and with identical determination, displaying national flags throughout each rally and calls to the best parts in US history.
We will be questioned ... how did you receive the foreigner? Did you welcome them and welcome him or not?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the highest about American history, exactly as the Christian faith is most protected by relationship to that which renders it distinctive and magnificent, specifically the model of Christ. In both situations does it suggest feigning the most negative about the nation and Christian faith was nonexistent; it means both humility and conviction, a combination that committed national faithful should embrace.
