They're Doing across America What They Did within Christianity

The Trump phenomenon's most telling and defining instances – not its most important, nor most harsh, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – emerged earlier this harvest season. During the period of several weeks, the nation's leader commenced revealing all observers his intentions for a gilded ballroom two times larger compared to the White House and then commenced solo dismantling the East Wing to erect it.

He has performed deeds 10,000 times as bad – the present calculation of fatalities from his cuts to foreign assistance is 600,000 and rising, and this week research projected his petroleum strategies would cause deaths another 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No former leader would have attempted – truly, no former commander would have imagined – solo demolishing major areas of the presidential residence to construct a royal-themed celebration hall, with the active collaboration of numerous the richest Americans, the majority of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.

We transitioned from 'the gentle will obtain the world' toward 'the humble will perish to cholera'

As disorienting as it is to observe the leader attempt to overturn the established notion of democracy and exchange it with its polar opposite, there is one large group within America who should not find it entirely new. That is those of us – within elder demographics a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.

We have watched over the years while conservative evangelical congregations transformed the Christ we were raised with into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. Essentially, they turned a figure of love into a symbol of hate who approves precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this transformation occurred more slowly, through multiple decades instead of months, however it is still disconcerting through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.

A Damaging Christianity Establishes Itself

So let me first describe the Savior that I grew up with, since in theory Christ is the focus of any Christian faith, and because the fastest-growing cadre among Americans could have minimal awareness regarding him because they identify as non-believers or agnostics or spiritual independents. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with any other faith; however I believe that there are pearls of great price in biblical accounts.

It is emphatically absolutely not the narrative of a mighty king emerging; instead, a baby is born to displaced parents in an automotive shelter, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to escape secret police. The baby grows up in simple surroundings, a laboring woodworker; his message concerns compassion for fellow humans, particularly for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ's response to hostility is to present the opposite cheek – not as an act of compliant endurance, but as a way to teach the aggressor; his approach to wrongdoing states that when someone steals your jacket you should give him your sweater as well.

The obvious and clear fact that the Jesus of the gospels advocates for a kind of radical love concentrated on the poor is what has always made the Christian faith rather a provocative belief system: engaging for the populace, but because of its intrinsic extremism demanding to be restrained. During the 1950s it was contained through watering down – Protestantism was so widespread that it basically sanctified existing conditions.

A Conflict for the Best Within Us

So I have been heartened to observe the steadfast resistance to Trump develop during the previous year. It has served as great solace to help build the movement that has demonstrated publicly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to show up in numbers in the off-year elections. We will need to maintain it, and through comparable resolve, with American flags throughout each rally and requests to the finest aspects of American history.

We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the stranger? Did you accept these individuals and welcome him or reject?

America is best defended, in other words, through connection to the best within national tradition, just as Christianity is optimally secured by relationship to what makes it distinctive and wonderful, specifically the model of Jesus. In both situations does it suggest acting as if the most negative about the nation and Christian faith never occurred; it means both meekness and conviction, a blend that serious national faithful ought to accept.