The Trump movement's most revealing and distinctive moments – not its most significant, nor most harsh, nor most dangerous, nor most foolish, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the US president started showing the public his plans for a lavish reception room double the dimensions of the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to erect it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID stands at 600,000 and growing, and recently a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths 1.3 million more. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have dared – really, no other president would have contemplated – solo demolishing large sections of the White House to construct a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, the majority of whom conduct transactions with federal agencies.
We went from 'the gentle will obtain the world' toward 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'
As confusing as it is to observe the chief executive seek to颠覆 the traditional concept about democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment of Americans who should not find it entirely new. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were brought up as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have observed over the years as politically conservative religious groups turned the Jesus we grew up with into the total contrary of our understanding of him. At its most basic, they transformed an image of love into a symbol of hate who endorses exactly the harshness that he criticized in scripture; this has happened at a slower pace, over decades rather than months, but it is nonetheless unsettling through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.
A Toxic Christianity Gains Ground
Hence I shall explain the Savior that I grew up with, because theoretically the Savior is the core of Christian religion, and because the fastest-growing cadre among Americans might have little sense regarding him since they are skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I raise no objection with any of these traditions, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of significant worth in biblical accounts.
It is emphatically not the story of a powerful ruler arising; rather, an infant arrives to parents without shelter in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to evade secret police. The baby grows up in simple surroundings, an employed craftsman; his teaching is about love for other people, particularly for the disadvantaged – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Jesus' answer to aggression is to turn the other cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to teach the attacker; his approach to wrongdoing is that if an individual takes your outer garment you must offer the person your additional clothing also.
The apparent and direct reality that the Jesus in biblical accounts advocates for a type of radical love centered on the needy has perpetually caused Christian religion somewhat of a scandalous religion: appealing to the general public, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be contained. During the 1950s it was controlled through watering down – Protestantism was so widespread that it practically baptized the status quo.
A Battle for the Finest of Us
So I have been encouraged to witness the determined opposition regarding Trump arise during the previous year. It has been significant comfort to assist in constructing the movement that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated citizens to show up in large quantities in the off-year elections. We must have to persist with it, and in the same spirit, with American flags throughout each rally and calls to the best parts of American history.
We're going to be asked ... how did you receive the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and receive them or not?
America is best defended, essentially, by relationship to the best within national tradition, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended by relationship to elements that cause it to be unique and magnificent, which is the example of Jesus. In both situations does it mean pretending the worst about the nation and religious tradition was nonexistent; it means both meekness and belief, a mixture that committed national faithful ought to accept.
