Trumpism's most revealing and distinctive instances – not its most significant, nor most brutal, nor most threatening, nor most foolish, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of multiple weeks, the American president commenced revealing all observers his designs for a gilded ballroom two times larger of the White House and subsequently started unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths due to his slashing to foreign assistance stands at 600,000 and growing, and this week an analysis forecast his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. But nothing as definitional. No previous president would have dared – truly, no previous leader would have imagined – unilaterally destroying significant portions of the presidential residence to build a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, the majority of whom have business with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the world' into 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to observe the chief executive try to upend the established notion about democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion among Americans who might not perceive it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – within elder demographics a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched throughout the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we learned about into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they converted a persona of love into an icon of hate who blesses exactly the harshness that he criticized in the Gospel; this transformation occurred more gradually, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Gains Ground
Hence I shall explain the Christ from my childhood, as conceptually the Savior is the core of any Christian faith, and since the quickly increasing segment within America might have little sense of him as they consider themselves skeptics or doubters or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; but I do think that contain precious wisdom of substantial value in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly absolutely not the account of a mighty king emerging; instead, an infant arrives to displaced parents in an automotive shelter, who need to rapidly escape to a different country to avoid undercover officers. The infant develops in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his teaching focuses on affection for others, especially for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but tangible care, demonstrated through nourishing and protecting. The Savior's reaction to violence is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a way to teach the attacker; his method regarding offenses is that if someone steals your jacket you must offer him your sweater too.
The evident and direct reality that the Jesus in biblical accounts calls for a type of radical love focused on the poor is what has always made the Christian faith something of a controversial faith: appealing to the populace, but due to its intrinsic extremism demanding to be restrained. In the fifties it was controlled through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so dominant that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Struggle for the Finest Within Us
Therefore I have felt heartened to observe the steadfast resistance regarding Trump arise in this past year. It has served as great solace to help build the movement that has demonstrated publicly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated citizens to turn out in significant amounts in interim political contests. We will need to maintain it, and with identical determination, with American flags throughout each rally and appeals to the highest qualities in US history.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the immigrant? Did you accept these individuals and embrace them or not?
America is best defended, in other words, by relationship to the finest about American history, just as Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to that which renders it unique and wonderful, particularly the pattern of Christ. In both situations does it imply feigning the worst about the nation and Christian faith was nonexistent; it means both modesty and belief, a mixture that serious American Christians should embrace.
