a word before we begin

We are exiles here, My Friend, you and I, pilgrims passing through a great and busy empire that was never our home and never will be. And the whole burden of what follows is to help us live faithfully inside that empire without being swallowed by it, unafraid of its fears, unmoved by its idols, and free to use its good gifts for the glory of God. But before any of that, we have to deal with one idol in particular, and it is the hardest of all for the American believer to see, because he was taught from the cradle to bow to it and to call the bowing devotion.

It is the idol of the nation itself: the belief that America is a Christian nation, a new Israel, God’s specially chosen land, the shining city set on a hill. I am going to argue, with the plain facts of history, that this is not true, that it was never true, and that a great part of the church has been handed a lie, kept alive by politicians who found the lie useful and by a church that was glad to believe it.

This is not an attack on the country. God has used America, and used it greatly, as He has used many nations before it. To love the land of your birth, to be grateful for it, to pray for it, is right and good, and I will not say a word against any of it. What I am after is not the country. It is the idol, the thing that has crept up into the country’s place and asked of the Christian a loyalty and a hope that belong to God alone. My aim is to break the idol and leave the gratitude standing. For I am patriotic to the land of my birth, in the same plain way the apostle Paul was patriotic to his; he loved his own people and his own nation with a real and aching love, and never once confused that nation with the kingdom of God. America is no worse than any nation, kingdom, or empire that has ever existed, and it is no better than one either. We are not special. God has used America, truly and greatly, but He has used every nation and tribe and tongue and people on the earth, each in its turn, and America takes its place in that long line as one more nation He has been pleased to use, not as a second Israel set above the rest. Hold that, and the rest of this will not wound your love of country; it will only rescue it from becoming worship.

And one thing more, which I will repeat at the end, because it matters and because I will not have it mistaken for something it is not: the views here about politics and engagement are my own, offered as conviction and not as command. I will tell you plainly where I stand. I will not tell you that you sin if you stand somewhere else. On this, as on so much, the Christian is free.

chapter one

the lie we have been told

The American church has been told a story about itself, and it has believed the story so long and so deeply that to question it now feels almost like questioning the faith itself. The story goes like this: that America was founded as a Christian nation, by Christian men, upon Christian principles; that it is a new Israel, a people in special covenant with God; that it is the shining city set upon a hill, the light of the world, God’s appointed instrument to carry truth and freedom to the nations.

It is a stirring story. It has been preached from ten thousand pulpits, printed on banners, woven into the hymns of the civil religion, and pressed upon children until they could not tell where love of God ended and love of country began. There is only one trouble with it. It is not true. And I do not mean that it is partly overstated, or true in spirit if not in fact. I mean that when you go to the actual history, the documents, the dates, the words the founders actually wrote and the things they actually did, the story comes apart in your hands.

And someone has profited from the story being believed. The politician finds it useful to wrap himself in a holiness the facts will not support, for a people who believe their nation is God’s nation will follow the man who claims to defend it almost anywhere. And the church, for its part, was glad to believe it, because it is a flattering thing to be told that your country is the chosen one and you are its keepers. So the lie was useful to the one and pleasant to the other, and between them it has been kept alive for generations.

The lie was useful to the politician and pleasant to the church, and between them it has been kept alive for generations.

Now I want to be very careful here, for I am about to say hard things about a country I am thankful for, and I do not want to be misheard. God has used America. He has used it as a refuge for the persecuted, as a wellspring of missions, as a guardian of certain liberties that much of the world has never known. To be grateful for the land of your birth is right; to pray for it is commanded; to love it is no sin. I am not asking you to despise your country. I am asking you to stop worshiping it. For somewhere along the way, in the heart of the American church, the country crept up into a place that was never meant for it, and began to receive a kind of devotion that belongs to God alone. It became an idol, and an idol is simply a good thing, or a neutral thing, set in the place of God. The flag beside the cross, and then, slowly, in front of it. The hope of the kingdom quietly transferred to the hope of the nation. The shining city of God relocated, in the imagination, to a particular stretch of real estate between two oceans.

What follows means to break that idol, and to break it the way idols are best broken, not with rage but with the truth. So we will walk through the real history, plainly and without flinching: what America actually was at its founding, what the Puritans actually tried to build, what the founders actually believed, and where the famous phrases actually came from. And when the idol lies in pieces, I think you will find that your gratitude for the country is still standing, and that your hope has been set free to rest where it always belonged.

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sources & notes

  1. Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 1994), on the founders’ Roman models: the Senate (Latin senatus), the Capitol (after Rome’s Capitoline Hill), the Federalist essays signed “Publius” (after Publius Valerius Publicola), and the Great Seal mottoes e pluribus unum and novus ordo seclorum (the latter adapted from Virgil, Eclogue IV).
  2. Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Doubleday, 1984), on Washington hailed as “the American Cincinnatus” and on the Society of the Cincinnati (founded 1783), named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman who laid down dictatorial power to return to his farm.
  3. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), the lay sermon in which the Massachusetts Bay colony is called “as a city upon a hill,” echoing Matthew 5:14. Winthrop was the colony’s governor. On the Puritan self-understanding as a covenanted “new Israel,” see Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard University Press, 1956).
  4. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare (Knopf, 2002), on the Salem witch trials (1692–1693) in Massachusetts Bay, in which roughly twenty people were executed. Cited here as the bitter fruit of a “holy commonwealth” policing its own purity, not as the whole of Puritan life.
  5. Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (compiled c. 1820, commonly called the “Jefferson Bible”), from which Jefferson excised the miracles, divinity, and resurrection of Christ, retaining the moral teaching; the original is held by the Smithsonian. On the Deism and heterodoxy of several leading founders, see Gregg L. Frazer, The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders (University Press of Kansas, 2012).
  6. Exodus 19:5–6; Deuteronomy 4–6; and 1 Samuel 8:7 (where Israel’s demand for a human king is called a rejection of God’s own kingship), on Israel established as a theocracy under the direct kingship of God, contrasted with the American arrangement of religious liberty and non-establishment (First Amendment, ratified 1791). The argument, that a nation founded by God for Himself took the form of a theocracy rather than a liberty of religions, is the author’s. On every knee bowing at the end of the age, Philippians 2:10–11 and Isaiah 45:23.
  7. Mason Locke (“Parson”) Weems, The Life of Washington (from 1800), the source of the “Washington praying at Valley Forge” story and of the cherry-tree tale, both later legend rather than documented history. On Washington’s reticent, unorthodox private faith, see Paul F. Boller, George Washington and Religion (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), and Gregg L. Frazer, The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders (University Press of Kansas, 2012).
  8. The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy; “under God” was added by Act of Congress in 1954. “In God We Trust,” on some coinage since 1864, was made the official national motto in 1956 (P.L. 84-140), replacing the de facto e pluribus unum. Both additions belong to the Cold War era; see the U.S. Treasury’s history of the motto and standard reference accounts.
  9. Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (Oxford University Press, 1991), on Lincoln’s wartime suspension of habeas corpus and the arrest of civilians and journalists during the Civil War, and the constitutional controversy it provoked (cf. Ex parte Merryman, 1861; Ex parte Milligan, 1866). Cited to illustrate that constitutional checks yield under sufficient pressure, not to render a verdict on Lincoln.
  10. Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor... and Yourself (Moody Publishers, 2009), on well-meant help that harms through a posture of superiority and dependency. Cited as the author directs the reader to it.
  11. The Crusades (beginning 1095) and the Inquisitions, predominantly acts of the medieval and early-modern Roman Catholic order, predate the Protestant Reformation (conventionally dated to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, 1517), a plain matter of chronology. The point is not Protestant innocence, since the Salem trials and other Protestant sins are granted, but that coercive, sword-bearing “Christendom” fails wherever it grasps for power, in either branch.
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