God and American Government: People Who May Exist Should Change Their Minds

Last updated on: July 6, 2015 at 6:27 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

God and American Government: People Who May Exist Should Change Their Minds 2015-07-06T18:27:50-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Evangelicals love to be told how terrible they are. If you lash them, they will pay to hear the message. When Frank Schaeffer was young enough to go by Frankie, he was a fringe player on the religious right who made his mark (as we noticed it) by telling us we had bad taste in art. I watched him get a standing ovation and sell a boat load of books to my friends for telling them that they were artistic philistines.

Sadly, once he got done telling us we could make art, he proved unable to make good art and so had to join a new group (the Orthodox) to straighten them out. He made a career of this as well, but that is beside the point which is this: Evangelicals will link any post telling them that they are unloving, ungodly, sold out, or compromised.

Generally, these posts have some truth, but one thing I have never heard anyone say is: Evangelicals love criticism. Now someone is going to point out that if you work at a dispensational school, you might risk your career to announce dispensationalism is wrong headed, but this strikes me as no different than someone at the Hoover Institute becoming a Marxist and trying to stay employed there.

Lately, after the Supreme Court belched forth a decision creating a “right to marry” that no framer, politico, or legal mind saw in the Constitution until sometime in the first Bush administration, I am reading that conservative Christians that love America will need to rethink their ideas about the relationship of church and state. I assume this is true if one had the stupid view that America was perfect prior to the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage or that America had not committed horrible sins against nature and Nature’s God prior to 2015.

Please don’t bother to point me to hot political rhetoric. After a big event, political rhetoric is hot by nature. You would think prior to gay marriage we lived in a theocracy or after gay marriage that nobody in America was a Christian. There has been a change in public opinion, it is a big deal, but it was not “the worst day in American history.” I assume Ted Cruz was using . . . hyperbole . . . not unknown in politicians as varied as Lincoln and Jimmy Carter.

On the most jaundiced reading of the religious right, surely Roe versus Wade (legalized murder) would rank as worse than a right to vice.

If one thought America was “special” in the sense that we are holier than other national “thous” or that God loved us more, then one was engaged in idol worship. I have heard people come close to this, but generally they trimmed their rhetoric pretty fast. Slavery, the treatment of First Peoples, and Japanese internment camps are just three examples of very bad things my nation has done.

A Worse Year for Christian America

And yet I remain an American exceptionalist and love my nation. I think America is a Christian nation (still!) in a meaningful sense of that phrase and always has been. I mean to go on voting and working for social justice, including but not limited to abolition, an end to abortion on demand, and support for real marriage. I don’t expect I will win on most issues: the family fight against racism has been going on since Free Soil and Fremont, but that’s fine.

I am an exceptionalist because I think (on the whole) that America has been the best imperial power the world has known. In the atomic age, when we could have crushed all our foes, we did not. We have extended justice to more people than any other nation and liberated more people than any other nation. We have done bad things and good things, but we are the best of a bad lot.

God isn’t our special friend, but God does love us. I will stand before the throne of God (with every other tribe and nation) as an American, because what else would I be? I am an American. I love my people because I love my neighbor! Never trust a man who loves the nation he doesn’t live in and hates the nation he knows.

I hate American failings, because I love America. In short, John Locke had it about right. We get our foundational moral principles from nature and Nature’s God. For all of American history, a super-majority of Americans has been grounded in the Jewish and Christian moral traditions. We might deviate from it or even react to it, but nobody can understand American history without reading the Bible, knowing Church history, or American religious history.

We are often bad Christians (as we are just now on sex ethics), but we are overwhelmingly informed by Christianity . . . even our atheists. If you doubt this, compare the beliefs and assumptions of American atheists with Asian atheists . . . it is an interesting study.

So people who had dumb beliefs about America should change. The Founders were not all (or even mostly) pious Evangelicals. Our Constitution is not a religious document, but was written to govern an overwhelmingly religious people. We have messed up mightily in living up to our Christian and republican ideals and we know this because we know our Christian moral and republican ideals.

So when I am asked to change my view of America after this Supreme Court decision, I ask: “Why?” My country was never pure or right and I always voted to protect her goods and right her wrongs. Evangelicals, who spend precious little actual time on any politics or social action, should not withdraw. Instead, we should build up our communities, new cities, and vote for the best candidates we can find. Utopia has never been in America and will never be.

We must muddle along doing the best we can. That is what conservatism and Christianity always taught me to do anyway. As for self-loathing, it is a form of pride: thinking that if we had just done the right things, the bad guys would not have won. We should have done better, but we are not that powerful. Constantine remained Roman when being Roman was hard, but built a new city, so we will stay American, republican, and loyal when it is hard. If you had dumb beliefs about America, change. If you were like most of us, nothing has changed.

Tough luck to our enemies: we insist on staying to love you and be the loyal opposition.

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