Exhortation, January 23

It looked like such a good idea. Jeroboam has been given ten tribes of Israel to rule, and he wants to keep them together. If the people of Israel continue to worship in the Jerusalem, their loyalties of his people will be divided and they might even plot to assassinate Jeroboam. The obvious solution, the reasonable solution, is to provide a place of worship closer to home, binding together the ten northern tribes by throne and altar. After all, Jeroboam thinks, Yahweh wouldn?t have given me ten tribes if He wanted me to let them split apart.

It looks like such a good idea. So reasonable. So practical. Yet, in Yahweh?s view, it is an act of contempt, an idolatrous provocation to jealousy. Ahijah the prophet speaks the word of Yahweh about Jeroboam?s political-religious reforms: ?you have gone and made for yourself other gods and molten images to provoke me to anger, and have cast Me behind your back.?EWhat looks so reasonable and practical is in fact throwing Yahweh away like a used candy wrapper.

This passage condemns all forms of pragmatism, but most clearly challenges and condemns political pragmatism, and even more specifically the pragmatic use of religion for political ends. And so we come to George W. Bush, the newly inaugurated President of the United States, who spent the first day of his second term at an inter-religious worship service at the National Cathedral, worshiping alongside Jews, Muslims, and Billy Graham. No doubt, Bush, a Christian, sees his participation in a joint religious service as politically useful, a way to symbolize his commitment to tolerance and his desire to work for unity in a diverse nation. But that does not excuse him. His participation rests on an implicit theology, which says that alongside the particular religions that divide us, we can worship a single god that somehow includes or transcends Allah and the god of Jews along with the Father of Jesus and who knows what else. Alongside our particular religions, we can worship the god of American civil religion.

Ahijah would tell us that this is contempt for the God of heaven. For there is only on God, and He is jealous, a consuming fire.

Bush?s participation in the inter-religious service openly manifests the official polytheistic theology of the United States as a whole. As a people, we have established a religion of multiple religions, a Constitutionally-established attempt at religious neutrality that is nothing more than contempt for the one God of heaven and earth. At the same time that we call Bush to renounce his implicit polytheism, we must repent of our own. For righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.