{"id":61489,"date":"2020-07-23T05:20:09","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T09:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=61489"},"modified":"2020-07-10T17:22:59","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T21:22:59","slug":"os-guinness-eric-metaxas-and-their-dangerous-myths-of-american-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2020\/07\/os-guinness-eric-metaxas-and-their-dangerous-myths-of-american-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Os Guinness, Eric Metaxas, and Their Dangerous Myths of American History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Today we welcome Abram Van Engen to the Anxious Bench. Abram\u00a0is Associate Professor of English and holds a courtesy appointment in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the recently published and critically acclaimed\u00a0<\/em>City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

On June 1, President Trump cleared peaceful protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets in order to pose with a bible by a church. This act spoke directly to his base, which includes a large number of white evangelical Christians, and it validated false Christian histories of America that many of them accept. For too many people today, America can be great only if it is Christian, and it can be Christian only if it was founded by evangelical figures on the basis of biblical principles.<\/p>\n

This view of a biblical nation is widespread and seems to be rising, partly in reaction to protests and undertakings like\u00a0The 1619 Project<\/a>. Not long before Donald Trump\u2019s awkward pose, for example, the prominent evangelical Os Guinness gave a\u00a0lecture<\/a>\u00a0stereotyping the American Revolution as \u201cbiblical\u201d and the French Revolution as secular. Such an account cannot make sense of the actual actors and factors that went into each, as\u00a0John Fea<\/a>\u2014a Christian historian\u2014explains. But Os Guinness is only a part-time partaker in these mythic histories. David Barton is the most full-time falsifier of the American founding, but\u00a0Eric Metaxas<\/a>\u00a0remains the most popular. According to\u00a0Metaxas<\/a>, for example, John Adams was \u201ca committed and theologically orthodox Christian,\u201d though in reality Adams denied the Trinity and the deity of Christ.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Eric Metaxas at the National Prayer Breakfast, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza). Wikipedia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The histories of America posited by Metaxas and others like him contain a multitude of errors, as plenty of historians have pointed out. But where the historical problems are obvious, the theological dangers in their methods can often be harder to spot. So let me identify three.<\/p>\n

First, these histories of America represent a failure of love. For far too long, accounts of the American founding touted by too many white evangelicals have tended to erase, ignore, or downplay slavery, injustice, and oppression. As a result, the story of racial minorities in America\u2014including faithful non-white Christians, many of whom are keeping Christianity alive in America\u2014get written out of our nation\u2019s past. It is hard to love others while refusing to listen to them, and Christian nationalist histories are, in large measure, a refusal to listen\u2014an unwillingness to reckon with the hard truths that haunt the past and present of so many in America today. When Os Guinness calls the American Constitution \u201cbiblical,\u201d for example, he fails to acknowledge that the Constitution officially recognized the legality of slavery and ensured its survival for another seven decades.<\/p>\n

American history is not a tale only of failure and oppression and abuse; but it is also not a tale only of freedom, achievement, and success. Only when we begin to see the multiplicity and complexity of history can we begin to understand how God moves in it and through it, and how we, in the present, can and should respond\u2014righting wrongs and attempting to shine a light in dark places. The gospel depends not on the power of the government or our ability to claim political influence at any cost. It depends on the grace of God, which calls on the church to act as the Body of Christ. And a church divided by false histories of our country cannot be the force of healing this world needs.<\/p>\n

Second, the histories that undergird Christian nationalism position the United States as the savior of the world. On this telling, government institutions and political parties are more significant actors than the church. Taking political power or retaining it becomes the highest priority. Politicians become the guardians of the gospel. The president violently disperses peaceful protestors to wield a bible above his head.<\/p>\n

This replacement of the church with the nation has a long history. Its favorite expression is the idea of America as a \u201ccity on a hill,\u201d a biblical phrase (Matthew 5:14) that referred almost exclusively to the church throughout most of American history\u2014until, during the Cold War, scholars like Perry Miller and politicians like Ronald Reagan coopted it for the country.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If \u201ccity on a hill\u201d is the latest version of this idolatry, its purest form comes in a 1909\u00a0sermon<\/a>\u00a0by the social gospel minister Washington Gladden. Preaching to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Gladden explained that God\u2019s promises \u201care made to the nation and not to the church.\u201d Identifying the United States as the New Israel, he claimed that the truest evangelists were American politicians. \u201cThere have been great preachers of the gospel, great missionaries of the cross,\u201d he preached, \u201cbut few, I believe, who have presented the principles of our religion to the non-Christian world more convincingly than William McKinley and John Hay and John W. Foster and Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root and William H. Taft.\u201d Whenever the nation becomes blended as one with the church, politicians become the priests of God\u2019s kingdom. Those who believe in Christian nationalism seem to think that the gospel hinges on the government.<\/p>\n

Finally, beyond a lack of love and a dangerous idolatry, Christian nationalists ultimately undercut their own faith by failing to trust in the sovereignty of God. Essentially, their histories of America tell God how he\u00a0should\u00a0<\/em>have acted, rather than examining how he did. David Barton and Eric Metaxas seem to think that evangelicals should<\/em> have founded the United States. And so, in their telling, they did, regardless of historical records. Their histories, in other words, treat God as an incapable sovereign. Since God couldn\u2019t be trusted to get things right, Barton and Metaxas will take matters into their own hands, rewriting history to mop up God\u2019s mistakes. Theirs is a clean version of the American founding, unblemished by all that still marks and mars society today.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of good historians at work today, including many Christians historians, and what they have in common is a desire to know God and God\u2019s world better by trying to understand what has actually occurred and why. The Conference on Faith and History<\/a> does not have a popular following (like Metaxas), but it nonetheless gathers faithful Christians, many of whom study the nation. None of these scholars feel their faith threatened by facts. All of them feel compelled to follow historical records where they lead.<\/p>\n

The dangers of Christian nationalism for both Christianity and the nation mount with each rewriting of the American past. If Christians are to be committed to both truth and love, then we must commit to as true and full a history of the nation as we can tell, loving our fellow citizens, refusing to worship a false image of the nation, and trusting, finally, in a sovereign God.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we welcome Abram Van Engen to the Anxious Bench. Abram\u00a0is Associate Professor of English and holds a courtesy appointment in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the recently published and critically acclaimed\u00a0City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2797,"featured_media":61496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,693,30,43,70,3043,1],"tags":[2808,2287,6468,3184,2801],"class_list":["post-61489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-nation","category-culture-wars","category-david-barton","category-evangelicalism","category-founding-fathers","category-guest-post","category-uncategorized","tag-christian-nation","tag-christian-nationalism","tag-city-on-a-hill","tag-eric-metaxas","tag-john-fea"],"yoast_head":"\nOs Guinness, Eric Metaxas, and Their Dangerous Myths of American History<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The dangers of Christian nationalism for both Christianity and the nation mount with each rewriting of the American past.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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