But here is what gives me pause:\u00a0 I was raised in \u201cChristendom.\u201d\u00a0 I grew up going to church and being immersed in the teachings of the Church.\u00a0 I did hear the Gospel and I realized, thankfully, that this Gospel of Christ makes a claim on me.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say that the reason for going to Church was motivated by parental concern for the salvation of my soul.\u00a0 But this is just what white, middle-class Americans did, so this is what we did.\u00a0 And because this is what we did, it\u2019s fair to assume, is one of the main reasons why I claim a\u00a0 Christian identity today.<\/p>\n
I do think the concept of \u201cChristendom\u201d has created an identity crisis for Christians in the United States that has undermined and subverted our primary identity as followers of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 Ogbu Kalu writes in his chapter, \u201cGlobalization and Mission in the Twenty-First Century:\u201d \u201cAs cultures are pressed together, the problem of identity looms large.\u00a0 Religion is manipulated as a marker of identity and ultimacy, invested with the symbol of prideful heritage, deployed as a tool for boundary maintenance, and promoted as the mooring for scapegoating the Other\u201d (pp. 26-27).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Christian civil religion is used in this way:\u00a0 it creates an identity crisis in the Church as it attempts to construct an identity for us <\/em>based on \u201cprideful heritage.\u201d Civil Christian religion is used as a weapon against \u201cthose\u201d different from us.\u00a0 And many of \u201cthose\u201d against whom we use our civil religion in the form of flags, gold crosses, material wealth, economic expansion, and military coercion, are those whose primary identities may actually be as followers of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n
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