I am a citizen of this Republic and love her for her many virtues. She is my mother and for three hundred years both sides of my family have been buried in her soil. Her follies have been many, but she is my country and when I stand, as I hope to stand, before God as part of a tribe or nation then it will be as an American.
Yet on that great day, the political power of the nation will have passed away. Jesus, merciful, just Jesus will personally rule. He will maximize our liberty and allow each person to flourish, but until that day there will be no Utopia. We live in dangerous times and so today I reminded myself of three simple ideas that are the hard won product of centuries of Divine revelation, human attempts at understanding that revelation, and God given virtue and reason.
No Christian can be merely an American.
I have more in common in the order of Heaven with my Christian brothers and sisters I met in Mongolia than with my secular American fellow citizens. I am a global Christian and a local patriot. There are times to wave the flag and times to put the flag away.
Grifters like David Barton are not offensive just because they tell lies about American history, they are offensive when they divinize that history. The story of no nation is a “salvation history.”
Simultaneously, I do not trust any person too “other worldly” to love his city, state, and nation. We owe America much and have a duty to serve our neighbor and fellow citizens. We must speak as plainly as possible to those outside the Faith, reserving the language of Zion for the people of Zion.
I learned these ideas from my parents and grandparents. Friends like Hunter Baker or Matt Anderson have given these ideas deeper and fuller expression, but perhaps I can express the simple home truths that unite the mainstream of Christian thought. We can even disagree about details in how to apply them, but for the sake of our souls we must not get the big ides wrong.
First, I am a pilgrim and a citizen.
As I hope for Heaven, I am a pilgrim. I can never look for perfection on earth. No political leader can be trusted with the power needed to right all wrongs, because no man is good enough. Yet I am not just a pilgrim, I am also a citizen of this Republic (as I am also a member of a family or a neighborhood.) In that role, my home is here and my task is to do no harm and try to bring help.
If I only live as a pilgrim, I might forget to give practical help to my neighbor. If the good news of Jesus is consumed in good works for society, then I might forget that eternity trumps my short life. We must reject any notion of dominion by force in the name of God. Messiah will come, but our job is not His.
Second, there is no safe way to entangle the Kingdom of Heaven with the Republic except in the lives of individuals. Practically speaking this means that I am uncomfortable with the flag in the church sanctuary. Men or women in politics could share in the building, as neighbors or fellow believers. They could teach, but they must never use the pulpit for politicking.
Hillary Clinton in left-of-center churches and Ted Cruz in right-of-center churches are flouting the proper balance in dangerous ways. Clinton’s abuse does not justify Cruz. He knows better.
There is also no safe compartment to keep the basic ideals of a Christian person out of politics if the Christian person is in politics. Christianity shapes me in every way as it does millions of citizens. My faith informs my vote. It is the basis for my morality. When I act as a citizen, it is the Christian man who acts. Christians must always avoid being so precious that we will not support the best we can get.
A church leader dealing with the Middle East and his flock there once said to me: “I support those who will not kill even more.” This is reasonable. I don’t have to pretend such a man is godly, but I can prefer him to the worse man.
We can (and must) separate the institutional church and state, but individuals are much more complicated than organizations! I have many roles . . . and it is not just the church and state roles that sometimes conflict in a broken world. Sometimes my role as a teacher has conflicted with my role as a husband: there is only so much time.
In each soul there will always be a tension. When the Republic and the Church are in tension, then I am God’s man, but God’s man who knows that he may have misunderstood God. Nobody can get this entirely right and few get the tension entirely wrong, we pray, do our duty, and muddle along. This is one reason I support a small government role . . . the larger the role, the more the tensions.
What we must not do is act wickedly in obvious ways by either ignoring the truth of the Faith in our daily lives! We can use the tension to be creative . . . . as Augustine did. We need not “resolve” it, but must not ignore the dilemma.
God is a monarchist: He belongs to no party! I am, however, a citizen and so can be a member of a party if I recall that I am the King’s man first and forever. I will die a citizen, but be raised up a subject. Here I bow the knee to no man, on that great day I will bow to the God-Man.
In politics I must loyally work, not for the perfect, but for the best I can get. Compromise is a virtue in politics and a vice in religion. We must be careful to avoid making religion our politics or our politics our religion.
Finally, a Christian people will always be more important than money, programs, or power. If we err, we err on the side of humanity, mercy, and love. Christians should always side with the poor, the oppressed, or the powerless against the establishment, the elite, and the tyrant. Of course, this equally true of those who would oppress the rich because they are rich or institute mob rule. The injustice of the many killed millions in the twentieth century as did the injustices of the elite.
The American church just now, right and left, is plagued with grifters, sycophants, and those who would sell the church out for money. They do not say they are selling out . . .they simply do. The book of Jude was written for such men.
I am a conservative, because I want a government big enough to check business and external threats, but small enough to allow soul liberty. I am a Republican, because the Party has traditional stood for two pillars: liberty and virtue. We were born fighting slavery and polygamy. We also reject the cult of personality. Reagan was a great president, but he was imperfect.
All this year Jerry Falwell Jr. has transgressed these boundaries time and again. The problem is not a candidate speaking at a University, many candidates have gone to Liberty, but that Falwell has regressed from the hard lesson we learned from the failures of his father’s Moral Majority. Just as the Moral Majority amounted to a direct mail campaign that enriched a few and enraged many, so Falwell’s bombastic failure to honor any division between his role as leader of a university, religious leader, and citizen will harm the causes both of us value. He is flirting with the heresy of caesaropapism and is unfit for the role of pope and not great at finding Caesar. Of course, just as bad are the impotent, quietest churches that allow children to die, virtue to be crushed, and the global Church to suffer, because they cannot make the hard choices of politics.
Those that bow to the elite, the smart, the proper while allowing the plain people to suffer have become putrid. We don’t need those proclaiming they love the poor from their government limousine, but we also don’t need prophets of profit saying attacking our leaders from their private jets. A Clinton and a Falwell are the same just with different groups to bleed for cash.
I would rather be governed by a rough, and yes even secular. person of integrity than the pious hypocrisy of those who profit on the Gospel.
As a Christian, I make the prudential judgement to support the Party and play by her rules. If I lose, I support the winners. And yet . . . and yet. . . I know other global Christians have made different choices. I hear their voices and most of all if my Party demands obedience to something the Faith forbids. . . morality before Party.
The rest of us will make mistakes. We will have to decide between two flawed candidates (they are always flawed) this Fall or whether we can vote at all. We will disagree . . . and do so forcefully. What no Christian must ever forget is that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. No King, but King Jesus!
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