They're Applying to America What They Did to Christianity

The Trump phenomenon's most illuminating and defining moments – not its most significant, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor most foolish, but possibly its most revealing – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the American president commenced revealing all observers his intentions for an ornate dance hall two times larger of the White House and then commenced unilaterally ripping down the East Wing portion to construct it.

He has committed acts ten thousand times worse – the existing assessment of casualties resulting from his reductions to USAID is 600,000 and growing, and this week a study projected his energy policies would kill 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No former leader would have dared – truly, no other president would have imagined – independently wrecking major areas of the White House to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of numerous the richest Americans, nearly all of which maintain dealings with the government.

We moved from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the humble will perish from cholera'

As bewildering as it is to watch the leader try to upend the old idea regarding democracy and substitute it with its direct contrary, there remains a substantial portion of Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. This includes individuals like us – among senior generations a near majority – who were brought up within mainstream Protestant traditions.

We have watched throughout the years as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we were raised with into the total contrary of who we understood him to be. Essentially, they transformed an image of love into an icon of animosity who blesses precisely the cruelties that he criticized in biblical teachings; this transformation occurred at a slower pace, over decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless unsettling through similar means, a disorienting gut punch for numerous individuals.

A Damaging Christianity Takes Hold

So let me first describe the Savior that I grew up with, as conceptually the Savior is the core within Christian belief, and since the rapidly expanding group of Americans could have minimal awareness of him as they consider themselves skeptics or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I have no problem with these various perspectives, nor with alternative spiritual paths; however I believe that there are pearls of substantial value within Christian narrative.

It is emphatically not the account of an authoritative monarch arising; conversely, an infant arrives to displaced parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to evade secret police. The baby grows up in simple surroundings, an employed craftsman; his doctrine concerns compassion for fellow humans, particularly for the impoverished – not merely emotional affection, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and protecting. Christ's response to aggression is to offer the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of submissive tolerance, but as a method to educate the assailant; his approach to wrongdoing is that if someone steals your outer garment you must offer him your sweater as well.

The evident and clear truth that the Savior in biblical accounts requests a kind of extreme compassion concentrated on the poor is what has always made the Christian faith something of a controversial faith: appealing to the general public, but because of its inherent radicalness requiring to be contained. During the 1950s it was controlled by dilution – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it essentially blessed current circumstances.

A Battle for the Best Within Us

Therefore I have felt encouraged to see the persistent defiance regarding Trump arise during the previous year. It has served as significant comfort to participate in developing the campaign that has taken to the streets through repeated demonstrations, and appears to have motivated voters to turn out in large quantities in the off-year elections. We must have to persist with it, and with identical determination, displaying national flags at every demonstration and appeals to the highest qualities in US history.

We shall be interrogated ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you receive him and receive them or refuse?

America is best defended, to put it differently, through connection to the finest within national tradition, just as Christianity is optimally secured by reference to what makes it special and beautiful, which is the example of Jesus. In both situations does it imply acting as if the most negative about the nation and religious tradition was nonexistent; it means both humility and faith, a combination that committed national faithful should be comfortable with.