When I was a congregational minister, I looked forward to preaching on Fourth of July weekend whenever I could. I have always felt deep alignment with public Christians who are active in the political and civic spheres, people like Jimmy Carter or Jesse Jackson. I have been compelled to remind any congregated group of Christians that Jesus encourages us to engage the powers around us, to be wily and aware of the workings of the world, and to hold separate the desires of the world from having sway over our hearts.
I used to preach a call to renew what it might mean to be a Christian Nation, if just in principle. This is an excerpt from a sermon I preached at First Baptist Church of Denver, the Fourth of July weekend in 2015, which was immediately after the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision:
The community behavior that stands against the reign of God, the fruitful soil for sin here, is the notion that America is a Christian nation.
Oh, how I wish we acted as Christian nation in our civic policies. The U.S. Constitution states that we will have no establishment of a national religion. But what if we took that notion of Christian nationhood seriously as an ethical guide? What if we determined that for those of us who call ourselves Christians, we would behave as though this were a Christian nation?
We would have treated the Native peoples we found when we arrived with respect and honor, and we would continually be moving to honor treaties forged with tribal leaders. We would never have enslaved fellow human beings to fuel our national appetites and growth, and we would reconcile this horror in all ways possible. We would feed all of the hungry without exception. Prisons, if needed at all, would be places of reconciliation and healing.
No one would go without safety and shelter. All would be fed in the many ways that we are starving.
Clearly, we fall short of this Gospel call.
And of course in a way, I was right. Much of the reform and policy change in our national history has been brought about by people of faith. I myself work in the environmental justice sphere, and that is very much prompted and nurtured by my own relationship with God, what I hold sacred, and my responses of gratitude enacted through my faith in action.
But also the church was used to promote the Doctrine of Discovery, which asserted that pagan or native peoples were less than fully human and their lands were up for grabs. Scripture and church tradition have been used to uphold the enslavement of people stolen from Africa, the subjugation of women, the theft of land… all manner of awful things have been done here in the name of God, with the full backing of the church. We are discovering everyday more about the horrific legacies of harm, torture, and murder against the Native children taken and held within Residential Schools. Right now the revelations are at Canadian sites but I am absolutely sure we have dug similar graves.
Not all of this abuse of faith and blasphemy against God is in our past. Much of it continues right now, with new heresies like the Prosperity Gospel feeding greed and separation instead of true abundance and connection. Queer youth are still condemned, and sometimes tortured to remove the gay. Here in Colorado, Christian clergy traveled to the statehouse to argue for the continuation of Anti-Gay Conversion Therapy for minors, a practice that is now illegal. Thanks be to God.
I believe that I have been naïve about holding onto even a redeemed view of any faith-based nationalism, especially one aligned with Christianity. The more deeply I read the Gospels, the more carefully I read Paul’s letters, the more is revealed to me about the truly subversive and radical nature of Christianity, the ways in which the teachings of Jesus upend and transform our world and bring us back to the root of all things, God’s love and grace.
South African ArchBishop Desmond Tutu often says that the Bible is the last thing one should give enslaved peoples, as it is a story of liberation and the overturning of oppression. Over and over again, scripture is God calling us back into relationship and covenant, and away from the corrupting influence of rule and power. But of course we resist. “Give us a King! Give us a King!” we continue to cry.
At its heart, Christianity offers a new way of being, and one that is utterly incompatible with being of or aligned with any dominant power system or Empire. The previous bonds of kinship, societal expectations, and even law itself are broken in the Body of Christ and re-forged. “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?” Jesus asks when he is confronted by the powers that be, the elders and leaders of his hometown angered by his prophetic words and acts of healing. Jesus’ message has shaken the core of accepted authority, and quickly he becomes an enemy of the state.
Christianity has been aligned with its dominant power systems for far too long. I believe the corruption from this entanglement can be cleansed, and that ultimately, redemption is always possible. But I also know that we who adhere to the teachings of Jesus have to do that work ourselves. It is ours to dismantle.
As I’ve been praying and musing about all of this, I’ve had an important epiphany. And that is the reciprocity of this corruption -how toxic it has been for the United States of America to have named Christianity and its official-unofficial religion. We may espouse the freedoms of the First Amendment all we wish, but we must also own that at a functional level, being of any faith other than Christian is automatically suspicious, Other.
This alignment between faith and civics (between church and state) undermines a fundamental principle of this country, that we are free to exercise whatever faith or spiritual system we choose. It’s bad enough for the emergence and development of our democratic republic here that the system was built to shore up white landowning men. We’ve done a lot of work to fix that and have miles yet to go. But it’s nearly as much a betrayal of this foundational ethic to have ‘chosen’ Christianity. This necessarily strips us of too much potential, too many people automatically marginalized as other. This necessarily sets us up to undermine ourselves from the outset.
We must untangle these from each other, in real and authentic ways. Faith is often feigned for acceptability in the political sphere and politics is often used as a shield against having to make real change in the religious world. I am a Christian, an ordained minister of the Gospel, and can truly only speak from the damage this relationship does to the functioning of Christian community and discipleship and the damage we Christians have done to our country in the name of God.
We need repentance and metanoia, the transformation of our hearts. May it be so.
If you would like to read the entire sermon, I re-shared it here as a blog post in 2020.