Posted on 07/06/2004 12:55:39 PM PDT by sheltonmac
"I Always Thought Jesus Was an American"
"I know you're all going to think this is crazy, but I always thought Jesus was an American." This statement was uttered by a young woman in a seminar on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era at the University of California at San Diego. The seminar was taught by Mark Slouka, who reports the incident in an article entitled A Year Later: Notes on America's Intimations of Mortality. The main point of the article is that Americans think of themselves as separate from the rest of the world, that they imagine themselves living in a strange physical and metaphysical isolation so that even after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they have yet to come to grips with death. Americans only manage to absorb what Slouka calls (in a variation on the poem by Wordsworth) "intimations of mortality," subtle hints that history is not, as they often suppose, of their own making, under their own control. But such intimations are fleeting, he writes, passing quickly from the filth, the rotted flesh, and the smoldering bones of the world beyond American shores. Thus in the year following September 11, 2001, Americans dealt with the reality of death in their usual way: by denying it. "We erased it," Slouka observes, "carted it off in trucks. It had nothing to do with us. There was nothing to learn. We were still innocent, apart."
What makes Americans so resilient in their denial of death? This is where Slouka's article is most insightful. It is, in a phrase, American exceptionalism, the myth of "America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation." It is this myth that the young woman articulated in the seminar that day. And this same myth, Slouka points out, has been articulated by a host of better-known articulators. It was initially articulated by John Winthrop, who in 1630 sermonized that the people sailing aboard the Arbella had been chosen for a special covenant with God to be "as a City upon a hill." Then there was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the nineteenth-century best-selling author, who in 1854 wrote that "the whole world has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by God to advance a cause of liberty and justice." And later, there were the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, who envisioned an America "bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium." And more recently, there was Ronald Reagan, who drew on Winthrop's city-on-a-hill image for his first inaugural address in 1981. Slouka argues that "although the specifically Christian foundation of American exceptionalism had been largely buried by the years, the self-conception built upon it—however secularized and given over to Mammon—remained intact." America's national myth is, so to speak, still Christian after all these years.
An incident exhibiting the persistence of this Christian national myth arose in the summer of 2002, just in time for Slouka to be able to slip in a footnote reference to it. "Is all this talk of covenants and destiny merely a vestigial limb, a speechwriter's rhetorical trope?" he asks. "Hardly. We need only recall the recent reaction to the attempt by those godless liberals in the U.S. Court of Appeals to deprive us of our divine patrimony by excising the words 'under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance to understand the power of myth in America today." The incident to which he refers had to do with the ruling from the Ninth Circuit Federal Court that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge is unconstitutional on grounds of the First Amendment's establishment clause in that it compels some citizens to acknowledge a reality contrary to their belief, namely God. The connection Slouka made is an appropriate one. Given the state of the national psyche after 9/11, this ruling touched a raw nerve, and in light of the hue and cry that rose up in its wake, it reminded us how widespread is the notion that the United States of America was founded on religious principles, that it is "one nation under God."
But this and similar expressions of America's national myth came into public prominence well before the Pledge of Allegiance controversy in the summer of 2002. Claims that the United States is a Christian nation could be seen and heard everywhere in the wake of 9/11, on billboards and business signs, on talk shows and TV programs, on email chains and Internet websites. One of the most controversial claims along these lines was that of Jerry Falwell, a leading spokesman for the so-called religious right who, in a discussion with Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcast Network, suggested that the 9/11 attacks were a divine judgment visited upon this nation for what is being done by gays, lesbians, feminists, abortionists, the ACLU, the People for the American Way, and others who "have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded." The problem with such statements is that they are so outlandish that many moderates, including moderate Christians, dismiss them as the talk of a few wacky religious fanatics from some backwater town in the Deep South who want to bring back the Scopes Monkey Trial. But the basic claim also comes from quarters that are far removed from the regions of religious fanaticism, though under the guise of more polished prose and sophisticated arguments.
"A Nation under God"
Take, for example, the editorial published in the December 2001 issue of First Things, a "mainstream" publication edited by Richard John Neuhaus. Entitled In a Time of War, the editorial begins with a bald descriptive statement: "This is war. Call it a sustained battle or campaign, if you will, but the relevant moral term is war." With the passion of one who witnessed the effects of September 11 firsthand, Neuhaus insists that
The fact that Neuhaus and the neo-conservative crowd at First Things came out strongly in support of the invasion of Afghanistan is not very startling, given how the preponderance of commentators across a wide spectrum rushed to support this initial campaign in the war on terrorism. What is interesting, however, is Neuhaus's portrayal of the role of God in this war. This portrayal comes to the fore in his account of President Bush's televised speech to the nation on September 20, 2001. "In the coda of that historic speech," Neuhaus suggests, "boldness is touched by humility," and to illustrate he quotes from the president's speech itself: "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war. And we know that God is not neutral between them. We will meet violence with patient justice, assured of the Tightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may He watch over the United States of America".
Neuhaus offers a defense of this part of Bush's speech in the next section of his editorial, with the subheading "A Nation Under God." He notes that some critics find in the president's words "not humility but hubris, an uncritical identification of our purposes with the purposes of God." To these critics, he delivers a blunt challenge:
Neuhaus's argument here is problematic in several respects. For one thing, it casts the war on terrorism in the exaggerated terms of a struggle for freedom and justice against cruelty and fear, and thus fails to acknowledge the possibility that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear. Possibilities such as these do not appear when the world is viewed through the simplistic lens of Neuhaus (and Bush). For another thing, after identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice, it employs a flawed argument to align both of these causes to the purposes of God. The argument is flawed because, while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God's purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political entity or body or by the church itself.
And then, beyond these two problems, there is the more far-reaching problem of the vague, unspecified identity of the deity to which Neuhaus refers when he states that "America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are 'one nation under God.'" This vagueness is reflected in his wizened concept of faith as "confidence that we are under His protection," which falls far short of a more traditional definition of faith as the virtue or habit whereby the person gives intellectual assent to revealed truths regarding the identity and nature of God, including, for example, the truths about the Trinity. This vagueness is also evident in his truncated definition of humility as "awareness that we are under His judgment," which is true, but which must also be defined as the virtue whereby the person is restrained in his pursuit of great goods by subjecting himself to God, for whose sake he also humbles himself to others. Now both faith and humility are understood in Christian tradition to be theological or infused virtues—that is, virtues given by grace—and as such they cannot be realized apart from life in Christ and in the church. Therefore any definition of faith and humility must include an account of the concrete practices, specific virtues, and forms of life entailed in being Christian.
But Neuhaus fails to include such an account, probably because this would render his argument too ecclesially specific to qualify as public discourse in a pluralistic setting such as the United States. So, instead, he ventures the claim that "most Americans are Christians who understand the mercy and justice of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ". This is a deeply questionable claim, but useful for Neuhaus. It fortifies his notion of a "convergence of duties" to God and country while never acknowledging that Americans worship strikingly different gods, whether it be the god of New Age crystal users in Seattle, Buddhists in the Bay Area, Black Bumper Mennonites in Ohio, Mormons in Utah, and so on. As for those who do not believe in God at all, Neuhaus provides the assurance that "reality is not neutral in this war on terrorism" either, thereby offering a variation on the for-God-and-country theme: for reality and country. In either case, Americans can rest assured that as their nation goes to war, it does so under this all-purpose higher power that Neuhaus calls "God." All of which is to say that the god Neuhaus invokes is the god of American civil religion, a god of and for the United States.
Christians as "Alien Citizens"
Neuhaus commends the upsurge of patriotism following September 11, but he also attempts to clarify his position by drawing a distinction between rendering to God and rendering to Caesar (see Mark 12:13-17). Admitting that Jesus' reply to the Pharisees posits a distinction that Christians "will probably never get just exactly right," Neuhaus notes that nevertheless "it is agreed by all that the emphasis falls on the second injunction—do not render to Caesar what is God's. Whether with respect to patriotism, wealth, family, or anything else, it is always a matter of the right ordering of our loves and loyalties".
To elaborate on this point, Neuhaus directs our attention to the Letter to Diognetus, a second-century, anonymously authored text, from which he offers the following quotation:
According to Neuhaus, this passage shows that "these 'alien citizens', still far from their true home in the New Jerusalem that is history's consummation, have followed the course of Christian fidelity in accepting responsibility for the well-being of what is their home in time before the End Time." In other words, Christians have an ultimate love and loyalty toward God, yet a penultimate love and loyalty to their homeland; they have an ordered love both for God and country.
What is noteworthy, and troubling, about this quotation is that in several instances it deletes significant portions with no acknowledgement of having done so, not even ellipses. In this important and admittedly delicate matter, only a display of the deleted portions of the text will suffice. There are three such deletions from the original text, each of which I want to present and then comment on.
The first deleted section reads as follows:
In this passage, Christian teaching is described as distinct from conventional wisdom and as not based on outstanding human learning. And Christians themselves are portrayed as both similar and different—similar in respect to their dress, food, and way of life; different in respect to "the culture they reveal," which is described as "marvelous" and "unusual." It is not clear what their being simultaneously similar and different means concretely in this passage, but some hints can be found in the two other deleted passages.
The second deleted passage reads this way:
Here we see that Christians, unlike others of their day, do not "abandon," that is to say, abort their children (or as another translation has it, they do not commit infanticide by exposing their children). And while they share a common board, they do not share a "common bed" (or as it is put in another translation, "they share their meals, but not their wives"). Avoiding these practices is seen as part of "not living according to the flesh," as part of their being "citizens of heaven." Thus Christians do not accommodate themselves to the country they live in; they are different from others in important ways, such as the way they marry and have children.
In other words, there is a sharp and costly tension between Christians and others, as can be seen in the third deleted passage:
In this passage, the identity of Christians as "alien citizens" involves being condemned, put to death, impoverished, dishonored, maligned, reviled, insulted, punished, attacked, and persecuted. This is not their fault, the author makes clear, using a rhetorical pattern taken from the apostle Paul (2 Cor. 4:12; 6:9-10). Though mistreatment is often their lot, they respond to persecution by loving, enriching, blessing, and paying respect to others.
Each of these three passages quoted above, then, reveals that for the second-century author of the Letter to Diognetus, Christians are significantly different from others in both their beliefs and their practices. So much are Christians different that they are often at odds with people around them to the point of being regularly hated and sometimes killed. But when Neuhaus omits these passages, a strikingly different impression is created, the impression that ancient Christian teaching calls for the kind of love of God and country that is commended in his editorial. And this impression is put to the service of Neuhaus's more specific message that love of God and country is especially fitting for Christians in the United States because it is "a nation under God," or "an overwhelmingly Christian nation rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition."
The Story of "Christian America"
This notion of a "Christian America" is usually presented in the form of a story of how the nation was founded. More often than not, the story features the role played by members of a particular denomination, usually the same denomination as the one telling the story. When Congregationalists tell the story of America's founding, for example, the setting is in Massachusetts and the main characters come over on the Mayflower. When Baptists tell the story, the action occurs in Rhode Island with Roger Williams playing the lead role. Methodists tend to emphasize the Second Great Awakening in the formation of the nation. As for Catholics, they underscore the contribution of the colony of Maryland in the U.S. founding. Thus each Christian denomination tells the story of the founding of the nation with its own unique setting and characters, but they all make the same basic point that America is a Christian nation.
Neuhaus's story of America is of this vintage, but with a peculiar twist, reflecting his own journey from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism. His story goes like this:
Once upon a time in America, British colonists banded together to throw off the tyrannical rule of their king and founded a form of government designed to protect the rights of its citizens with respect to freedom of speech, assembly, the press, and religion. This last freedom listed was in fact "the first freedom," the most important one, for it prohibited the establishment of any one particular religion as the official religion of the land and instead guaranteed the free exercise of religion for all. This warded off the possibility that the nation would plunge itself into a New-World version of Europe's "wars of religion" while at the same time ensuring that its public life would be guided by the moral and intellectual principles to which its Christian citizens (or the vast majority of them at any rate) subscribed. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, this ingenious combination of "ordered liberty," unprecedented in world history, proved to be a formula that brought the nation through the crisis of civil war, enabled it to welcome waves of European and other immigrants to its shores, and allowed it to afford greater measures of freedom to its citizens, particularly women and African Americans. It also provided the nation with the fortitude needed to fight political tyranny abroad in the First World War, the Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, all of which were waged on the strength of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, a moral and intellectual consensus that now included greater numbers of Catholics, Jews, and (some) secularists.
But at some point in this more recent phase of the nation's history, another moral and intellectual perspective emerged, one that regarded any public profession of religious belief or a religion-based morality as constituting a threat to the rights of individuals whose religious or moral beliefs stand outside this supposed nationwide consensus. The emergence of this new perspective can be traced back to any number of cultural trends earlier in the twentieth century, but it gained political and cultural ascendancy in the 1960s, when it became anathema to invoke religious and moral principles in public discourse. This constituted a threat to the very foundations on which the nation was founded. The main culprits were left-leaning politicians, journalists, intellectuals, church leaders, and other members of the so-called cultural elite, who also have been derisively labeled "Bobos in paradise" (in a recent book that Neuhaus has touted—that is, baby-boomers who sported a bohemian lifestyle and radical politics when coming of age in the 1960s and then, in the ensuing decades, made their way into the higher echelons of U.S. society where they exercise an alarming degree of influence over the central institutions of the nation: the government, the press, universities, and the mainstream churches. This created what Neuhaus called "the naked public square," and in a book under this title published in 1984 he called for a reinfusion of religious and moral principles into American public discourse, a re-clothing, so to speak, of this naked public square. This re-clothing became possible during the 1980s, first through the resurgence of conservative-minded evangelical Christians and then of Catholics. Neuhaus called the latter "the Catholic moment."
In light of this storyline, the significance of Neuhaus's claim that America is a Christian nation comes into fuller view. It simultaneously does two things. First, it harks back to the founding of the nation and decries the recent betrayal of that founding by those who deny the nation's religious and moral roots. Second, it calls for a religious and moral renewal of America that rescues the nation from its present malaise, a renewal to be led by the Catholics. Witness a twelve-part series of columns in First Things on the idea of "Christian America," the last of which came out in May 2001 coyly titled "Something Like, Just Maybe, A Catholic Moment."
"An Overwhelmingly Christian Nation"?
How accurate is Neuhaus's post-9/11 claim that America is "rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition"? The statement's subordinate clause—"albeit sometimes tenuously"—acknowledges that the nation's Judeo-Christian tradition at times has been obscured or attacked. But this caveat is clearly outweighed by the overriding claim that America is "overwhelmingly Christian." As a way of backing up this claim, Neuhaus notes "that following the [September 11] attack, the first gathering of national leadership and the first extended, and eloquent, address by the President was in a cathedral. And that Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America' is getting equal time, at least, with the less religiously explicit national anthem. And that children in public schools gather in the classroom for prayer. And that the fallen beams of the World Trade Center, forming a cross, are blessed as the semi-official memorial to the victims. Intellectuals are forever in search of 'the real America.' The weeks following the attack of September 11 provided one answer to that search. It is an America that Tocqueville would recognize, even if it surprised, and no doubt offended, many intellectuals"
The claims Neuhaus makes here are again problematic on several scores. First, he cites the national prayer service and prayers being said in schools as evidence that the United States is a Christian nation. But the national prayer service, although it was held in a cathedral, included prayers recited by a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam. Would they agree that they live in a Christian nation? And would this be the view of Irving Berlin, the Jewish composer of "God Bless America"? And is it really true that the fallen beams arranged in the form of a cross made fitting, semi-official memorial for those who died? Including those who were Jewish? or Hindu? or atheist?
Moreover, Neuhaus suggests that the America that emerged in the weeks after the attacks is "an America that Tocqueville would recognize," but what he does not mention is that the "god" that emerged during those weeks is likewise one that Tocqueville would recognize. This is because Tocqueville's god, as scholars of his work have pointed out, is a peculiarly modern god, one that serves to keep society and the state intact in this disenchanted, post-Christian world. It is thus a different god from the God who is named and praised in traditional Christian belief and practice. In Neuhaus's enthusiasm for "the new patriotism," which he judges to be "all in all, a very good thing," he does not address the contested aspects of Tocqueville's "America" and "god."
But the most obvious problem in Neuhaus's claim that America is a Christian nation is that it does not account for the fact that Americans in large numbers engage in practices that run clearly counter to the Christian way of life, practices related to marrying and having children, to cite the two that are emphasized in the Letter to Diognetus. If America is a Christian nation, what are we to make of the fact that roughly 50 percent of all marriages in America end in divorce? Further, if America is a Christian nation, what are we to do with the fact that each year in America there occur more than one million abortions?
In spite of all this, Neuhaus clearly thinks that it is a Christian nation. But if challenged on this point, his argument does not refer us to America in the present, but rather to an America of the past and of the future—of a glorious past, when America was founded and developed as a Christian nation, and of a promising future, when America will reclaim its legacy and return to its founding religious and moral principles. When it comes to the present, his argument only refers us to the struggle to bring the nation out of its current crisis and calls us to join traditional Christians and other religiously and morally conservative Americans in this struggle.
And a monumental struggle it is, for in the final section of the editorial, we learn that America is engaged in a "war of centuries," indeed "a war of religion." This is not to say that America wishes to engage in such a war. "We of the West," Neuhaus assures us, "definitively put wars of religion behind us with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But that was a piece of the story of the West of which Islam was not part and for which Islam has no counterpart". As a result, a war of religion has been thrust upon America by the adherents of Islam who have stored up for decades, if not centuries, a burning hatred for the West and who have not integrated into their worldview the values of Western democracy. To those who insist that Americans should embrace the otherness of Islam in the name of diversity, Neuhaus gives this rejoinder: "With respect to freedom, human rights, and the dignity of the person, their difference is not a diversity to be celebrated but a threat to be opposed. The terrorists have now unmistakably underscored their otherness, and with it the otherness of Islam". To those who insist that Islam is not antithetical to democratic values, he declares that it is up to Muslims to demonstrate this themselves. For the time being, however, what the 9/11 attacks indicate is that, as he puts it with remarkable bluntness: "They are other" . Not mentioning that Christ died for these others, he goes on to cite an article by Bernard Lewis in the Atlantic that underscores what is at stake in this two-sided struggle. "When Muslims speak of the West," he explains, they mean the Christian West. They mean Christendom. Many in the West want to believe that ours is a secularized culture, but Lewis reminds us that most Muslims view secularization itself as a form of specifically Christian decadence. Today many in the West are asking, Who are they? We cannot ask Who are they? without also asking Who are we? More and more, as this war continues, we may come to recognize that we are, however ambiguously, who they think we are, namely, the Christian West.
As Neuhaus tells the story, America has now been drawn into a monumental struggle between Islam and the Christian West, a struggle that is spurring Americans to reclaim their identity as citizens of a Christian nation. In this sense, the post-September 11 display of patriotism can be taken as a hopeful development. The flags, the patriotic songs on the radio, the teachers and students praying at school, the upsurge in church attendance—all these are signs of America undergoing its restoration as a Christian nation.
What is ironic about this depiction of the nation is that in the fall of 1996 Neuhaus & Company were raising fundamental questions about the tenuous state of American democracy—calling America a "regime" and "the tyrant state"—and even suggesting the need for civil disobedience. Yet in the fall of 2001 democracy in America is the beacon of freedom, human rights, and human dignity for the rest of the world. How are we to explain this remarkable shift in thematics? Surely it has something to do with the election of President Bush in the intervening years, which, in the worldview of the neo-conservatives, buoyed the condition of the nation. But this points to a deeper reason that strikes closer to the heart of the issue. The reason is that Neuhaus has linked the destiny of Christianity to the future of liberal democratic nations in the Christian West, in particular to the future of what he considers to be the leader among these nations, the United States of America. As a result, the struggle to reclaim America as a Christian nation gets transmuted into a struggle over the terrestrial future of Christianity itself, a struggle of almost ultimate significance. In this context, reservations about America quickly move into the background for the sake of prevailing in the broader struggle for the survival of America and the Christian West.
To be fair, we should note that Neuhaus reminds us that Christians place their ultimate loyalty in no earthly city but in the city that is their final destination, the heavenly Jerusalem—an eschatological proviso, so to speak, meant to safeguard against an idolatrous allegiance to country. But no safeguard is effective without an accompanying ecclesiological proviso, without a positive and substantive account of the church.
Interestingly, there is no such account in Neuhaus's editorial. There are plenty of references to God, to Christians, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to America as a Christian nation, but no clear references to the church. This is not surprising, of course, for to focus on ecclesiology would bring up a host of theological issues over which Christians in the United States have deep differences. It could generate division when what is needed in a time of national crisis, "in a time of war," is unity. Neuhaus would object to this characterization, of course, by pointing out that time and again he has not hesitated to tackle important ecclesiological issues in First Things and in his other published writings. Nevertheless, he does not do so when it comes to the nation going to war. This is because he conceives of political community in terms of the politics of nation-states, one nation-state in particular, the United States. In doing so, his terms must be tailored to the exigencies of a religiously pluralistic society, the primary exigency being that ecclesially specific terms must be separated from politics. As a result, when he moves into the political sphere to take up political issues such as going to war, his references to God are cast in the general terms of civil theology, such as "religion, "Christianity," and the "Judeo-Christian tradition." In spite of his insistence that America is "under God," any and all reference to the church—that is, the community of those baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit—recedes into the background.
On this score, it is no wonder that Neuhaus favors the description in the Letter to Diognetus of the church as the soul of the world. As he quotes it, the passage reads: "In a word: what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body; just so Christians live in the world, but are not of the world". The impression created with this quotation is that the relation between body and soul is peaceful and harmonious. Just as the soul is an incorporeal reality that gives unity and coherence to the body, so the church is an incorporeal reality that gives unity and coherence to the world. But here again, Neuhaus's citation of the Letter to Diognetus is misleading, for as we read on in the text itself, we learn that the relationship between body and soul is neither peaceful nor harmonious. From where the quotation leaves off, the Letter continues by drawing a parallel between the conflict of the soul and the flesh and the conflict between Christians and the world. The Letter reads:
This passage depicts Christians, as often as not, coming into conflict with the world, with whatever "city" they reside in. As the soul orders the unruly, pleasure-seeking passions of the body by revealing to it the love that emanates from God, so Christians order the unruly, pleasure-seeking cities of the world by revealing to them the peace that likewise emanates from God.
On this (properly contextualized) reading of the Letter to Diognetus, the church is the one community in which the obligations of Christians to the cities of this world are properly ordered to the love of God. For this reason, the cities of this world are never "under God" in such a way that Christians may pledge their allegiance to them. Such an allegiance is proper only to Christ and the church. Indeed, in view of the entire Letter to Diognetus, it becomes apparent that the primary concern of its second-century author is to enjoin Christians to avoid worshiping the false gods of the world's cities, gods whose patronage is presented in the city's myths as essential to their security and flourishing. But this is always accomplished by shedding blood, the blood of those who protect the city from its enemies. Beyond the danger of worshiping the gods of various cities, there was also the danger of worshiping the gods of Rome, a particular concern in the Letter to Diognetus. These gods plausibly promised a peace that would reign throughout the entire empire, the Pax Romana, and yet, like the many forms of civil peace in the ancient world, it was a "peace" founded on imperial violence and was, as the Christians saw it, not true peace at all, not the peace of Christ.
One Church under God
All this talk of Christians worshiping the false gods of ancient cities and empires would seem quaint were it not for the fact that this danger has its modern counterparts. In modernity, of course, the many "cities" have been replaced by nations, and Christians find themselves very much at home in them. Indeed, a disturbingly familiar feature of Christianity in modernity is that the churches have divided into national churches with Christians fighting other Christians on behalf of their particular nation. During World War I, Christians in Germany and Austria fought against Christians in France, England, and the United States. The same was true during World War II and numerous other wars besides: the war over the Falkland Islands, the war in the former Yugoslavia, the war in Kosovo, the two wars with Iraq (inasmuch as Iraq is the home for about 1,000,000 Christians).
This early phase in the war on terrorism is different, according to Neuhaus and others, because it is not a war among Christians but between Islam and the Christian West. But this war is sure to expand as the United States pursues a foreign policy that, like that of ancient Rome, promises a new comprehensive peace for all the nations of the world, a Pax Americana. And as it does expand, Christians—those in the United States and those who are scattered in rather large numbers throughout the Middle East—will again face the temptation of pledging their allegiance to their nation. But Christians in the United States face the most challenging temptation, for they live in an imperium that itself claims to be Christian. This makes it more difficult to resist the ideology embedded in the notion "one nation under God," and all the more urgent to develop an ecclesiology centering on the principle of "one church under God."
Developing such an ecclesiology could take as its starting point the image in the Letter to Diognetus of the church as a soul that gives the world a unity that it would otherwise not have, thus overcoming the division of the body of the world into nations and empires. But this body/soul analogy brings with it some serious shortcomings, as analogies always do. For if the church is a soul, then it must be invisible, whereas in fact the church is visible; indeed, it is itself a body with Christ as the head and Christians as the members (see Col. 1:18; 1 Cor. 12:12-31; Rom. 12:4-6). The church is more appropriately understood as a body whose members are united to Christ and each other through the invisible power of the Holy Spirit but whose communal life is marked by a charity that is visible, embodied. This is why the apostle Paul describes baptism as being engrafted into Christ's body. This is also why he emphasized the intrinsic relation between the Lord's Supper and the unity that is a mark of the Christian community (1 Cor. 11:17-34). United as such, the members of the church are able to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God (Rom. 12:1-3). The image here is of the priesthood of the Levites, the tribe designated by God to make animal or cereal offerings for the sake of the reconciliation of all Israel; but now Christians unite themselves with the offering of the Son to the Father, so that through the power of the Holy Spirit they become "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people" (1 Peter 2:9). Here too, it is important to notice how this imagery indicates that the church extends the mission of Israel. While no longer defined by its claims on the land and on its physical descent from Abraham, the church is nevertheless the community that has fallen heir to the gift and the call of Israel. Hence the appellation that appears toward the end of Paul's Letter to the Galatians: "the Israel of God" (Gal. 6:16).
The importance of bestowing the name "Israel" on the church is that it precludes any use of that name in reference to a nation, as in the national mythos where America is understood as "the New Israel." In so doing, it also rejects the idea that a nation-state is peculiarly "a nation under God." Rather the church itself, like Israel in the Bible, is a nation, that is, a people with a common history and destiny, identity and mission; and yet at the same time, the church is, again like Israel, set apart as a light to the nations. In a time of war, therefore, the challenge of Christians, scattered among the nations of the world, is to live as the one body of Christ and to pledge their allegiance not to one nation under God, but to one church under God.
This article has been adapted from the book God Is Not . . ., Edited by Brent Laythem.
*Ping* for an interesting read.
a bondslave to the Christ
chuck
I often ask myself why should God Bless America? I get the same answer “from me to me” every time - "God constrains His wrath because He can find, so far, 10 righteous ( an imputed righteousness) men in America
While I found parts of this offensive, this was a very interesting read. I am anxious to see the responses of others here to this.
Out of curiosity, which parts did you find offensive?
"...fails to acknowledge the possibility that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood)..."
I assume the author is the only one who 'properly understands' what freedom and justice is.
This is a long and thought provoking read. The author goes outside of scripture, because the material he is commenting on goes outside of scripture, still, on a day that I read a post from one freeper/pastor that he would rather vote pro-choice Republican than pro-life Democrat it will be interesting to see where the battle lines are drawn.
I have always believed in equality under the law, and Christ as the fulfillment of the law, which makes all professing Christians my brother or sister in Christ. In the South, this is a big deal.
What do you think?
This statement is just one of them that I didn't like.
I like it a lot. No one can refuse the call to repentence and conversion and still call himself Christian. One can still love his country and defend its legitimate interests without making a idol of it. Consider the conflicted position of the Orthodox Russians under communism, who loved their country but knew their government to be evil and dangerous.
In light of the fact that over a million children are murdered in this country every year before they even take their first breath, would you still take issue with that particular statement?
Any nation which enshrines in law as a protected right the bloody murder of the unborn, and in which that murder is committed more than one million times annually, is not on the side of "freedom and justice".
Thank you for posting this. He raises a point whose impact I have yet to consider: How many Christians and Jews were so insistently eager to believe and to prove that Muslims did not worship the same God as they, yet have also quoted approvingly Jefferson's words "all men are endowed by their creator..." fully knowing that Jefferson in no way believed in nor worshipped the God of Abraham?
Interesting read. I just recently suggested at Sunday School that the United States is not a Christian nation and I'm skeptical that it ever was. I was just about tarred and feathered.
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