Trumpism's most illuminating and defining moments – not its most important, nor most harsh, nor most threatening, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. Over the span of a few weeks, the US president started showing the public his designs for a lavish reception room double the dimensions of the White House and then began solo dismantling the East Wing to construct it.
He has committed acts 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of fatalities resulting from his reductions to international aid amounts to 600,000 and growing, and recently a study predicted his petroleum strategies would cause deaths an additional 1.3 million. Yet nothing as characteristic. No previous president would have risked – truly, no former commander would have conceived – independently wrecking major areas of the presidential residence to construct a Versailles-style party room, with the direct cooperation of multiple the nation's most affluent, the majority of whom maintain dealings with federal agencies.
We transitioned from 'the meek shall inherit the world' to 'the meek shall die to cholera'
As bewildering as it is to witness the president try to upend the established notion about democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group within America who should not find it completely novel. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts almost a majority – who were raised within mainstream Protestant traditions.
We have witnessed across decades as politically conservative religious groups turned the Jesus we were raised with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. Fundamentally, they converted a persona of compassion into a figure of hate who approves precisely the cruelties that he condemned in scripture; this has happened more slowly, through multiple decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless disturbing in the same ways, a confusing personal impact for many of us.
A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself
So let me first describe the Savior from my childhood, because theoretically Christ is the focus of Christian religion, and since the fastest-growing cadre of Americans may possess limited understanding regarding him because they identify as atheists or agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. I take no issue with these various perspectives, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that contain precious wisdom of great price in biblical accounts.
It is decidedly not the account of a mighty king arising; instead, a baby is born to homeless parents in a storage space, who are forced to hastily depart to another nation to escape secret police. The child matures in modest conditions, an employed craftsman; his message focuses on affection for other people, especially for the impoverished – not merely emotional affection, but practical compassion, demonstrated through nourishing and housing. Jesus' answer to violence is to present the opposite cheek – not as a gesture of passive acceptance, but as a way to teach the attacker; his method regarding offenses states that when someone steals your coat you ought to provide him your sweater as well.
The obvious and clear reality that the Jesus from scripture requests a kind of extreme compassion centered on the poor has consistently rendered Christian religion rather a provocative belief system: attractive to the masses, but owing to its natural unconventionality demanding to be contained. During the 1950s it was contained by dilution – The Protestant faith was so dominant that it basically sanctified existing conditions.
A Struggle for the Highest of Us
Therefore I have felt encouraged to see the determined opposition against Trump emerge during the previous year. It has been substantial consolation to help build the campaign that has demonstrated publicly in rally after rally, and seems to have inspired citizens to turn out in significant amounts in the off-year elections. We will need to continue it, and with identical determination, with American flags during all protests and calls to the finest aspects within national heritage.
We will be questioned ... regarding how you welcomed the foreigner? Did you receive him and embrace them or refuse?
America is best defended, to put it differently, through connection to the highest within national tradition, just as Christianity is best defended by reference to elements that cause it to be distinctive and wonderful, specifically the model of Jesus. In neither case does it mean pretending the most negative of both America and religious tradition was nonexistent; it signifies both modesty and belief, a blend that serious national faithful should embrace.
