REGARDLESS of what you think of the state of Israel, or my take on it (see below), I do think Avineri’s “Zionism as a National Liberation Movement” brings some intriguing and hopeful possibilities to the table in discussions of whether and how America is a “Christian nation.”

Father Neuhaus (more on him below too) has defended the “Christian nation” idea against critics, including Jews who are threatened by that kind of talk and Christians who see a “Christian nation” as a way of assimilating and taming Christians, putting Christ to service for Caesar. For example, Father Neuhaus writes, “It [his analysis of the ‘Christian nation’ idea] further assumes, with Irving Kristol and many other Jewish thinkers, that ‘Christian nation’ is shorthand for saying that it is a nation in which the Judeo–Christian moral tradition is accorded normative status. As the immigrant Muslim community matures, it seems likely there will be Muslim Irving Kristols who will similarly affirm the shorthand of ‘Christian nation.’ To say that America is a Christian nation is like saying it’s an English–speaking nation. There are not many people who speak the language well, but when they are speaking a language poorly, it is the English language they are speaking. There is, finally, no alternative to the English language, as there is no alternative to Christian America in a country where nearly 90 percent of the people think they are Christians. Goodness knows, alternative religions have been proposed by some intellectuals, but they have had few takers. Such alternatives purport to be universal, but they are universal in much the same way that Esperanto is a universal language. Like speakers of Esperanto, the adherents of these alternative religio–moral creeds are an elite sect, a cult without a culture.

“…We can have endlessly interesting conversations about what a Christian society might look like, only to have our speculation rudely interrupted by the reminder that one of the largest and certainly the most influential of Christian societies looks like the United States of America at the beginning of the third millennium. Admittedly, it is not an entirely edifying sight. ‘Christian America’ signifies a description under the judgment of an aspiration.”

Many of Father Neuhaus’s points about America are fine as far as they go (although the “Christian is a shorthand for Jewish and Christian and maybe soon Muslim” thing is very weird and very Christ-for-Caesar-sounding), but I think Avineri points to a better self-understanding for American Jews and Christians alike–a self-understanding that links the two groups rather than separating them.

Both Jews and Christians are spiritual exiles. Avineri writes, “At the root of Zionism lies a paradox. On the one hand, there is no doubt about the depth and intensity of the link between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: there has always been a Jewish community, albeit small, living in Palestine, and there has always been a trickle of Jews coming to live and die in the Holy Land; much more important is the fact that during eighteen centuries of exile, the link to the Land of Israel figured always very centrally in the value-system of the Jewish communities all over the world and in their self-consciousness as a group. Had this link been severed and had the Jews not regarded the Land of Israel as the land of both their past and their future, then Judaism would have become a mere religious community, losing its ethnic and national elements. Not only their distinct religious beliefs singled out the Jews from the Christian and the Muslim majority communities in whose midst they have resided for two millennia, but also their link–tenuous and dubious as it might have been–with the distant land of their forefathers. It was because of this that Jews were considered by others–and considered themselves–not only a minority, but a minority in exile.

“On the other hand, the fact remains that for all of its emotional, cultural and religious intensity, this link with Palestine did not change the praxis of Jewish life in the Diaspora: Jews might pray three times a day for the deliverance which would transform the world and transport them to Jerusalem–but they did not immigrate there; they could mourn the destruction of the Temple on Tish’ah be-Av and leave a brick over their door panel bare, as a constant reminder of the desolation of Zion–but they did not move there. Here and there individuals did go to Jerusalem; occasionally messianic movements swept individuals or even whole communities in a fervour of a redemptive Return–but they fizzled out sooner or later. The belief in the Return to Zion never disappeared, but in terms of historical praxis one can safely say that on the whole, Jews did not relate to the vision of the Return in a more active way than most Christians viewed the Second Coming: as a symbol of belief, integration and group identity it was a potent component of the value system; as an activating element of historical praxis, changing reality, it was almost wholly quietistic. Jewihs religious thought even evolved a theoretical construct aimed at legitimizing this quietism by a very strong skepticism about any active intervention in the divine scheme of things. Divine Providence, not human praxis, should determine when and how the Jews will be redeemed from exile and return to Zion.”

My goal is not to champion that hands-off understanding of the return to Zion over an understanding that allows for human intervention. That’s really not my business; it’s for Jews to decide. My goal is simply to point out that for Jews living in America, this exilic and spiritual understanding of Israel is necessarily going to persist, even among Jews who also support those other Jews who live in and fight for the state of Israel.

And this self-understanding as a people in exile is native to Christianity as well. One of the more famous expressions of it occurs in the Letter to Diognetus, in this section: “To sum up all in one word–what the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world.” The description Mathetes gives to Diognetus, of Christians in exile in the world, often scorned by the world, yet acting as “the preservers of the world,” actually sounds a lot like the way many Jews understand the role of the Jewish people.

Exile, longing, love of the stranger–these are common to Christianity and Judaism, and they are better bases for our understandings of ourselves and one another than the idea of America as Christian nation, which too easily slides into Christianity as American civic religion.