They're Repeating to America What They Did to Christianity

The Trump movement's most telling and characteristic occasions – not its most crucial, nor cruelest, nor most hazardous, nor stupidest, but potentially its most enlightening – emerged earlier this harvest season. In the course of multiple weeks, the American president commenced revealing the public his plans for an ornate dance hall double the dimensions of the White House and then commenced independently demolishing the eastern section to erect it.

He has performed deeds ten thousand times worse – the present calculation of fatalities from his cuts to foreign assistance amounts to 600,000 and growing, and recently an analysis predicted his petroleum strategies would kill 1.3 million more. However nothing as distinctive. No other president would have dared – truly, no former commander would have imagined – solo demolishing major areas of the presidential residence in order to erect a royal-themed celebration hall, with the direct cooperation of some of America's wealthiest, almost all of whom have business with public institutions.

We transitioned from 'the humble will receive the planet' into 'the gentle will succumb to cholera'

As confusing as it is to witness the president try to upend the established notion about democracy and replace it with its complete opposite, there is one large group among Americans who should not find it totally unfamiliar. That encompasses people such as ourselves – in older age cohorts close to half – who were brought up within mainstream Protestant traditions.

We have watched across decades as rightwing evangelical churches transformed the Christ we learned about into exactly the opposite of our perception of his character. At its most basic, they transformed an image of compassion into a symbol of animosity who endorses precisely the cruelties that he denounced in scripture; this change developed more slowly, across decades as opposed to months, but it is nonetheless disconcerting in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for countless people.

A Toxic Christianity Establishes Itself

Hence I shall explain the Christ that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center within Christian belief, and since the fastest-growing cadre of Americans could have minimal awareness about him as they consider themselves atheists or doubters or nones. I raise no objection with these different approaches, nor with different religions; yet I maintain that there are pearls of significant worth within Christian narrative.

It is decidedly not the story of a mighty king appearing; instead, a child comes into the world to parents without shelter in an automotive shelter, who must quickly flee to a foreign land to evade secret police. The infant develops in modest conditions, a working carpenter; his teaching concerns compassion for other people, particularly for the impoverished – and not a sentimental love, but practical compassion, expressed by feeding and protecting. Christ's response to hostility is to offer the additional cheek – not as a gesture of compliant endurance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his method regarding offenses is that if a person pilfers your jacket you should give him your sweater as well.

The apparent and clear truth that the Savior from scripture requests a form of radical love focused on the needy has consistently rendered Christian religion something of a provocative belief system: appealing to the populace, but because of its natural unconventionality demanding to be controlled. During the 1950s it was restrained through watering down – The Protestant faith was so widespread that it basically baptized the status quo.

A Conflict for the Highest Among Us

So I have been heartened to witness the steadfast resistance to Trump arise in this past year. It has been significant comfort to participate in developing the campaign that has protested openly through repeated demonstrations, and seems to have inspired voters to show up in large quantities in interim political contests. We will need to persist with it, and with identical determination, displaying national flags at every demonstration and calls to the finest aspects in US history.

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

America is best defended, in other words, through connection to the best within national tradition, just as Christianity is best defended through connection to that which renders it distinctive and beautiful, particularly the pattern of Christ. In all circumstances does it mean acting as if the most damaging about the nation and Christianity did not happen; it represents both modesty and belief, a combination that genuine American Christians ought to accept.