Trumpism's most illuminating and defining occasions – not its most crucial, nor most brutal, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but possibly its most revealing – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the US president began displaying the public his plans for a lavish reception room double the dimensions of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to erect it.
He has committed acts ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of casualties due to his slashing to USAID is 600,000 and increasing, and recently research predicted his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have dared – really, no previous leader would have contemplated – unilaterally destroying major areas of the White House to construct a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of some of the nation's most affluent, the majority of whom maintain dealings with the government.
We transitioned from 'the gentle will obtain the planet' toward 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to watch the president try to upend the traditional concept of democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – among senior generations a near majority – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.
We have observed throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into an icon of hostility who approves specifically the brutality that he criticized in the Gospel; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, through multiple decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disturbing through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Damaging Christianity Gains Ground
So let me first describe the Christ from my upbringing, since in theory Jesus is the center of Christian religion, and since the fastest-growing cadre among Americans might have little sense of him since they are skeptics or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; but I do think that there are pearls of substantial value within Christian narrative.
It is unquestionably absolutely not the narrative of a mighty king emerging; instead, a baby is born to parents without shelter in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to escape undercover officers. The child matures in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching focuses on affection for fellow humans, especially for the disadvantaged – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and housing. Jesus' answer to aggression is to offer the other cheek – not as a gesture of submissive tolerance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy states that when an individual takes your jacket you ought to provide him your sweater also.
The apparent and straightforward reality that Christ of the gospels calls for a type of radical love concentrated on the needy has consistently rendered the Christian faith something of a provocative belief system: attractive to the masses, but because of its inherent radicalness demanding to be controlled. In the 1950s it was restrained through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it essentially baptized the status quo.
A Conflict for the Finest Among Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to see the determined opposition against Trump develop over the last twelve months. It has been significant comfort to participate in developing the campaign that has taken to the streets in rally after rally, and appears to have motivated citizens to turn out in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We will need to continue it, and with identical determination, with American flags throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities within national heritage.
We're going to be asked ... about how you treated the immigrant? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or reject?
The country is optimally secured, to put it differently, by reference to the best about American history, just as Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to what makes it special and beautiful, specifically the model of Christ. In neither case does it imply feigning the most negative regarding America and religious tradition never occurred; it means both meekness and belief, a combination that genuine American Christians ought to accept.
