The demon Screwtape explains
how to trick a Christian into entangling faith and politics during wartime:
“Whichever he adopts, your
main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the
Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of
partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and
gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part
of the 'Cause,' in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the
excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of
pacifism.”
~C.S.
Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
***
I write
today as a temporary resident of Switzerland, but one whose roots run to
another country far from where my family now live. Can I claim an insider’s perspective to my
country of origin? Perhaps not, since time
and distance have separated me enough to force a more detached
perspective. Indulge me, then, as I look
in from the outside:
My
forebears founded a Christian nation. That
nation became a global power, the global power, boasting the most
advanced culture in history. They felt
strongly that their nation should be a light in the darkness, a city set on a
hill, a land where government was led by faith and where faith enforced support
of the right kind of government. A
perfect place? No, not yet. The strangers among them, the immigrants, the
ones who couldn’t be trusted … those were the problem. They were unclean, dirty, disgusting
even. Their faith and their patriotism were
suspect. They either had to accept
Christianity – and, mind you, Christianity in its right form – or they
could just get out. Love it or leave
it. There’d be no separation of church
and state, and there’d be no doubting the path, the righteous destiny, that the
Holy Spirit had laid out for this great, patriotic experiment we called the
Empire of Spain.
In time,
England kicked Spain’s butt under the banner of yet another Christianity. The rest is history, apparently doomed to
repeat its cycles of one Christian nation causing the deaths of others. That said, I apologize on behalf of my 1490s Spanish
ancestors for all the Jews, Muslims, and fellow Christians we killed to make
our nationalist Christian point.
GOD AND THE NATIONS
How do
Christians develop the idea that God will select their nation of birth as His
preferred venue for the faith?
In my formative years, I regularly came across the
idea that my home, the United States, was the “New Israel,” God’s select nation
of chosen ones. Those promoting this
idea seemed to be either (A) end-times desperados anxious to find a starring
role for the U.S. in their apocalypse scenarios or (B) Christian nationalists, a
Dominionistic wave of budding theocrats.
The idea seemed odd to me in my early believing years. To my mind, these people had flipped Christ’s
great commission on its head. Instead of
going forth to make disciples of all nations, they wished to make a nation with
all disciples, no exceptions.
But I
can’t indict the U.S. for doing anything unique here. The love affair between Christendom and state
traverses time and geography. I opened above
with Spain’s church-state marriage as one example. England, too, has a long and bloody history
of conflict among Christian factions vying for control of the monarchy, and the
King of England remains the titular head of the Church of England to this day. During the French revolutions, the church was
made a department of state and all church lands became government property. In Iceland, citizenship in the year 1000 required
one to become a Christian, and the Evangelical Lutheran sect is its
state-funded national church today.
Lutherans also hold a national-church funding lock in Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, and other Nordic realms. The
Greek state pays the salaries of Orthodox clergy. Argentina does the same for Roman Catholic
bishops and subsidizes their schools, all while making it nearly impossible for
smaller religions to acquire government recognition.
DON’T I USUALLY WRITE ABOUT SCRIPTURE?
It’s
true, I use this blog space to reflect on Scripture and share a few linguistic
insights about the text. I’m trying to
do that today. I’m having trouble,
though, because of one big barrier: Scripture has nothing to say about
Christian states.
Jesus
had no sermons or parables about overthrowing non-believing governments.
Paul
didn’t urge the conquest of countries and the imposition of an official
religion.
Most
important: the word “nations” never occurs in the New Testament. At least not the word “nations” as you think
of it. More on the Greek-word stuff near
the end.
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION
When
Jerry Falwell, Jr. was fasting for forty days in the Judean desert before
beginning his messianic ministry … or maybe it was Franklin Graham, I
have trouble keeping track of the sons of godlike figures … Satan came to him
to offer three temptations: one of personal comfort (“Have some bread instead
of putting up with self-sacrifice!”), one of pride (“You’re at the tippy top of
your church, so no fall can hurt you!”), and one of power (“At the summit of this
highest mountain, all the world’s kingdoms are within your grasp!”)
I dunno, maybe that Falwell tale’s apocryphal. It’s telling, nonetheless. Personal comfort, pride, and power-grabs are
the ingredients for cooking up just enough rebellion to make some Christian groups
decide Jesus was mistaken when he claimed His kingdom was not of this world. Consider the musings of this U.S. citizen
below, whom I’ve entirely made up:
PERSONAL
COMFORT: “They’re building a mosque just five miles from my apartment! How am I supposed live with that, and how can
the government allow it?! It’s even
worse than when they went ahead and rented an apartment to that gay couple in
the building right up the street from mine.
I can barely tolerate this after going through a whole shopping season
of hearing ‘Happy Holidays!’ when all I should be hearing is ‘Merry Christmas’!” I’m living in persecution all the time! I got grievances! Somebody needs to do something.”
PRIDE:
“This is a Christian nation, so I’m gonna get one of those American flags with
a cross emblazoned on it. And then I’ll
get a cross with a flag draped on it.
Then I’ll slap identical decals of those on my gas-powered vehicle to
let those Socialist God-haters in electric cars know just how much the Bible
promotes capitalism. My first trip will
be down to the school board meeting to protest how they don’t preach the Bible
in public schools. Never read the book much
myself, but I stand up for it in this Christian nation of mine!”
POWER:
“I’m running for office because our nation was founded on the Bible. My political party needs to be a party of
nationalists, and I’m a Christian, so I say it proudly: We should be Christian
nationalists. Then our persecution will
end.”
A LITTLE DECONSTRUCTION
It’s odd to see personal discomfort cast as “persecution” by American Christendom. There’s more than a slight disconnect between the Jesus who said, “If anyone sues you for your shirt, give him your cloak, too” (Matthew 5:40) and the Jesus follower who complains that being required to mask up at the supermarket during an epidemic is a violation of his religious liberty. “If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two,” says Jesus in the very next verse. “Never give an inch!” American Christendom retorts.
I know, it’s not all
of America’s Christians. But have you
scrolled through any social media lately?
It’s certainly the louder ones.
As for the tired “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” grouse: The English word “holidays” derives etymologically from the words “holy days.” Store greeters are literally wishing someone joy during the holy days. Meanwhile, “Merry Christmas” means “I want you to be happy at the Roman Catholic mass being celebrated for the Christ.” I suppose that works well for the one in five Americans who actually are Roman Catholic. But even upping it to one in four by tossing in the Episcopalians with their Christmas mass doesn’t change the irony of Protestant anger and their feelings of retail-store persecution.
As for
the likelihood of power garnered by Christian nationalist politicians being able to end all this alleged persecution?
History reports that it’s just the opposite. When Christians take government power, the real Christian
persecution begins.
THE BIGGEST PERSECUTORS OF CHRISTIANS
The
Roman Empire persecuted Christians for 300 years.
Christians
with government power persecuted Christians for the next 1,700 years.
We
forget our history. It’s more convenient
to forget. It pains me to reflect on the
endless examples of Christian-on-Christian violence that used state power to
flex temporal church muscles. There are
too many examples. The turbulent Council
of Chalcedon led to thousands of deaths over dozens of decades, all thanks to
disagreements over the true nature of Christ and the Trinity. Several of the early Crusades were not fought
solely against Muslims, but also against Christians of the Eastern
empires. The gloves came off after the
Reformation: the German Peasant’s War, the Thirty Years War, the Hessian War,
the Eighty Years War, the Nine Years War, the Savoyard-Waldensian War … there’s
far too long a list of Calvinists killing Armenians killing Catholics killing
Reformed Church members killing Orthodox and so on.
Some
historical apologists reason that religion was often used as an excuse to go to
war, not as the main driver of conflict.
Maybe. Maybe not. From my point of view, the argument is
moot. Once religion and secular politics
have been so interwoven as to become indistinguishable, it doesn’t matter which
one is the engine and which is the gas.
Government is the faith and the faith is the government, and all who
disagree with either are committing treason against both.
Other
apologists argue that all those ancient (to us) sects of Christianity were the
wrong kinds of Christians – CINOs, Christians in Name Only. “Their national faith was the wrong faith,
fake faith. Mine is the right Christian faith,
and would actually work without persecuting others if we controlled the state.”
Again,
maybe. Maybe not. A test of that would be to have U.S. public
schools required to begin their days with a Christian prayer in a hypothetical U.S.
now declared to be a Christian state.
How long would I last in Alabama if I chose to open with a “Hail Mary”
Christian prayer, followed by a round of the Christian rosary with all my
Alabama public school kiddies?
“Aha!”
I pretend to hear someone say. “Those
are Catholic prayers. We’re talking
about Christians. Catholics aren’t
really Christians.”
Ay,
there’s the rub, as Hamlet might have soliloquized. For all the talk we as Christians hear of the
U.S. being a Christian nation, the counting of actual Christians gets pretty
flexible depending on context. Pew
Research’s 2022 comprehensive surveys on U.S. religion came up with 63% of
Americans identifying as Christian. That
was down from 75% ten years earlier.
“See?” it’s tempting to say.
“That’s still practically a super-majority! We’re a Christian country!”
Now
start asking questions. Are Mormons
considered Christian? If your faith says
no, we’re down to 61%. How about those salvation-by-works
Catholics? Shall we discount them as
American Christians? That would drop us
down to 42%. And what about those
mainstream Christian churches, the ecumenical people who don’t even mind
praying with imams and Buddhist monks?
Out they go, and we’re now tickling 30%.
There are also those fringe groups, though, the ones with weird ideas
like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and Christadelphians and
Christian Scientists, and … Well, that nudges us down to 23%, mostly evangelicals. About 16% of the nation is White
Evangelicals. About 7% is Black
Evangelicals. But the Black ones tend to
vote differently from the White ones, so …
As
Americans (including me, as a temporarily displaced one), we believe our nation
was founded on religious freedom, first populated by those fleeing persecution. We embrace that as an identifying principle
of being American. However, we need to
remember that the persecution being fled was Christian-on-Christian
oppression. It wasn’t oppression by atheists. It wasn’t attacks by Islam. It was flight from a Christian sect that
didn’t appreciate the Reformed ideologies of our Puritan forebears.
That
was step one in the New World’s taming of the Christian-on-Christian violence
that had run rampant for centuries. After
failed attempts by Puritans at some New World oppression of their own, the age
of Christian auto-persecution began to wane.
How did it wane? Not, to our shame,
by the force of Christian faith, hope, and love, but by the power of secular democracy. Our government’s First Amendment, which (when
read carefully) stands in stark contrast to our faith’s First Commandment, shut
down all possibility of Christian sects using state power to kill each other. We were the world’s first nation of
Christians that didn’t feel the need to launch a Christian state.
I SAID NATIONS AREN’T IN THE BIBLE, RIGHT?
Nope. I said nations aren’t in the New
Testament. Yes, the word “nation”
appears in many of our New Testament translations, and I even quoted one
earlier when I referenced Matthew 28:19 and the great commission. But our modern idea of a nation – a multi-city
group of citizens within a protected border with their own army and leadership
– has nothing to do with the Greek word ethnos that is so often rendered
as “nation” in the New Testament. There
was a word for a bunch of citizens behind a border with leaders and an army: basileia,
a kingdom, the sort of thing Satan was offering Jesus in the desert (See? I really did know it wasn’t Jerry Falwell,
Jr.)
The
Greek ethnos and its variants are most often translated as “the
Gentiles” in the New Testament, despite popping up as “the nations” in a few
dozen spots. Like our word “ethnic,” is
refers to a group with shared customs and cultures, and in its plural form it’s
better seen in the New Testament as a reference to all the diverse, widespread,
and non-Jewish peoples of the world. Not
the governments; rather, the cultures and the people. Not the nation states; rather, the humans,
the lost and hurting ones.
***
Our job
is not to conquer states to Christianize them.
There will never be a Christian politician who arises to honestly declare
in place of Christ, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John
16:33). The great commission does not
send us to the basileias, the worldly kingdoms, but to the ethnesin,
the people and cultures within the kingdoms of this world. How do we engage that world? Jesus promoted a holy life by means of
persuasion and stories and parables and discourse. Whenever anyone around Him tried to enforce
morality through the wielding of law and punishment, he stepped in to redirect
the legalistic minds among his own people.
And when they demanded He be a worldly king
and that he shed the blood of Israel’s enemies, He sidestepped the political
role. Yes, there’d be bloodshed, but it
wouldn’t be the blood of His enemies. It
would be blood for His enemies, in service to the only kingdom He’d
sponsor, the one that is not of this world.
So why
are we still so tempted to take Satan up on his offer of power over worldly
kingdoms?
Maran Atha,
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