Trumpism's most illuminating and distinctive moments – not its most significant, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. Over the span of multiple weeks, the American president began displaying the public his designs for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began independently demolishing the eastern section to erect it.
He has done things countless times more severe – the existing assessment of fatalities resulting from his reductions to international aid is 600,000 and growing, and presently a study projected his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have dared – really, no previous leader would have imagined – solo demolishing major areas of the presidential residence in order to erect a palace-inspired entertainment space, with the active collaboration of some of America's wealthiest, nearly all of which have business with the government.
We went from 'the humble will receive the Earth' to 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As disorienting as it is to watch the leader attempt to overturn the old idea regarding democracy and substitute it with its polar opposite, there exists a significant segment among Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were educated within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have watched over the years as politically conservative religious groups converted the Savior we were raised with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they turned a figure of affection into a symbol of hostility who endorses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, through multiple decades as opposed to months, yet it remains disturbing in the same ways, a bewildering emotional blow for countless people.
A Harmful Christianity Takes Hold
Hence I shall explain the Jesus from my upbringing, because theoretically the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and since the rapidly expanding group within America might have little sense regarding him because they identify as skeptics or agnostics or spiritual independents. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that exist valuable insights of significant worth in the Christian story.
It is emphatically definitely not the story of a powerful ruler arising; rather, a baby is born to homeless parents in a storage space, who need to rapidly escape to a foreign land to evade covert authorities. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a laboring woodworker; his message focuses on affection for others, specifically for the disadvantaged – not simply tender feelings, but tangible care, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the additional cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a method to instruct the assailant; his method regarding offenses states that when someone steals your jacket you must offer the person your additional clothing too.
The evident and clear reality that the Savior of the gospels calls for a type of extreme compassion concentrated on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christianity rather a scandalous religion: engaging for the masses, but owing to its natural unconventionality demanding to be contained. During the 1950s it was contained through watering down – Protestant Christianity was so widespread that it practically blessed current circumstances.
A Struggle for the Best of Us
So I have been encouraged to see the steadfast resistance to Trump arise during the previous year. It has served as significant comfort to participate in developing the campaign that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated electorate to participate in numbers in interim political contests. We will need to continue it, and in the same spirit, displaying national flags throughout each rally and requests to the highest qualities of American history.
We shall be interrogated ... about how you treated the foreigner? Did you welcome them and welcome him or refuse?
The nation is most protected, essentially, by reference to the best about American history, exactly as the Christian faith is best defended through connection to what makes it distinctive and wonderful, which is the example of the Savior. In neither case does it suggest acting as if the most damaging about the nation and Christianity did not happen; it represents both meekness and conviction, a mixture that committed American Christians ought to accept.
