They're Repeating to America What They Did with Christianity

Trumpism's most telling and defining occasions – not its most crucial, nor most harsh, nor most dangerous, nor most senseless, but potentially its most enlightening – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of a few weeks, the nation's leader started showing the public his plans for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions of the White House and subsequently started solo dismantling the eastern section to build it.

He has done things countless times more severe – the present calculation of fatalities resulting from his reductions to foreign assistance is 600,000 and increasing, and this week an analysis predicted his fossil fuel policies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have attempted – truly, no previous leader would have conceived – solo demolishing significant portions of the executive mansion to build a royal-themed celebration hall, with the direct cooperation of multiple the richest Americans, the majority of whom conduct transactions with the government.

We went from 'the meek shall inherit the planet' to 'the meek shall die of cholera'

As bewildering as it is to witness the chief executive try to upend the traditional concept of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who might not perceive it completely novel. That is those of us – within elder demographics almost a majority – who were raised as conventional Protestant believers.

We have witnessed over the years as politically conservative religious groups transformed the Christ we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they transformed an image of love into a symbol of hostility who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this change developed at a slower pace, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disturbing in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.

A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold

So let me first describe the Christ that I grew up with, since in theory Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and because the fastest-growing cadre among Americans may possess limited understanding of him as they consider themselves atheists or uncertain individuals or spiritual independents. I have no problem with these different approaches, nor with alternative spiritual paths; yet I maintain that there are pearls of substantial value in the Christian story.

It is emphatically definitely not the narrative of an authoritative monarch appearing; rather, a baby is born to homeless parents in a garage, who are forced to hastily depart to a foreign land to avoid undercover officers. The infant develops in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his message concerns compassion for other people, especially for the poor – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, demonstrated through nourishing and sheltering. The Savior's reaction to hostility is to offer the additional cheek – not as an act of submissive tolerance, but as a method to instruct the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing is that if an individual takes your outer garment you should give him your sweater also.

The apparent and direct reality that the Savior of the gospels requests a kind of profound affection concentrated on the impoverished has perpetually caused Christianity something of a controversial faith: attractive to the populace, but due to its natural unconventionality demanding to be controlled. In the fifties it was contained via weakening – Protestantism was so widespread that it essentially baptized the status quo.

A Battle for the Best Among Us

Therefore I have felt encouraged to witness the determined opposition against Trump arise in this past year. It has served as great solace to participate in developing the campaign that has protested openly via continuous gatherings, and appears to have motivated voters to turn out in significant amounts during minor elections. We must have to persist with it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags during all protests and requests to the finest aspects in US history.

We shall be interrogated ... how did you receive the immigrant? Did you receive him and welcome him or not?

America is best defended, to put it differently, through connection to the highest about American history, exactly as the Christian faith is optimally secured by reference to elements that cause it to be special and magnificent, specifically the model of the Savior. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the worst about the nation and Christianity never occurred; it means both humility and faith, a mixture that committed US believers should be comfortable with.