The Difference Christ Makes: Country

The Difference Christ Makes: Country

By David Gushee, McAfee School of Theology,Atlanta, GA

Note: This article is adapted from the third of three lectures delivered at Missouri Baptist University, October 20-22, 2009.

            For those of you who were not able to be here yesterday or the day before, I promised an approach to these three talks that each time would have three movements. I begin with a really honest description of what I think is going on in American culture in relation to some subject—today our topic is country, or national loyalty. Then I will try to review with you the basics of what the Bible and the Christian tradition have said about that subject. Each time we will see an obvious gap between contemporary culture and historic faith. Finally I will offer some practical suggestions about “The Difference Christ Makes” or ought to make, for you in this area of life. In every case I will try to be totally honest and realistic and not hide behind any safe Christian platitudes or religious talk.

National Loyalty and American Culture

            I am interested in exploring with you today the question of national loyalty, or the relationship of the citizen to the country in which he or she lives. In this context, I am going to explore what national loyalty looks like in the contemporary United States. If you are not a U.S. citizen, please think about your loyalty to your own nation.

            I want to propose that deep cultural forces have changed the way most Americans think about their own country. The results are complicated; in general this talk will raise issues that are more complicated than the ones raised by our earlier discussions of sex and marriage. You’re going to have to think harder!

            At one level, America seems to be a highly patriotic nation. People put their hands over their hearts for the national anthem. We see numerous flags flown from public buildings, but also from homes and even sometimes from cars. You see people wearing those fairly hideous American flag shirts and blouses. There are many occasions on which we are called upon to “honor the troops,” and most of us are not reluctant to do that. Where I live, in Atlanta, it seems like anytime there is a service member in attendance at a Braves game or walking through the airport, everyone just starts clapping spontaneously for them.

            July 4^th remains a big day in most communities. Fireworks light up the night all over the country. Many churches host patriotic celebrations on the Sunday nearest to Independence Day. These are sometimes quite elaborate, with the presentation of colors, the military service anthems, recognition of veterans and active duty military, and sometimes paratroopers rappelling down the walls.

            National loyalty was obviously quite evident after 9/11. It showed up in songs, car stickers, retail signs, and everywhere one happened to look. My favorite was a political candidate sign that said, “United We’ll Stand; United I’ll Stand.” This post 9/11 loyalty quickly funneled into a passion to avenge the deaths of that terrible day and to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again. This reminds us that very often national loyalty is linked in our country to the military and to national defense.

            So one might be forgiven for thinking that America is a very patriotic nation brimming with national loyalty, and the issue would be whether Christians should participate in that. This is often how this issue is framed in American Christian ethics, but I think it is not quite that simple. Instead I want to propose that our apparent patriotism is actually rather shallow. Often it seems like a thin veneer of sentimentality lacquered over a general indifference to life beyond myself and my dreams.

            If we define national loyalty, for example, to include serious interest in the history and government, and serious commitment to the founding values of a nation, I suggest to you that this kind of national loyalty has been fading for quite a while among us. This is not a nation in which average people know very much about our history or much about the details of how our governing structures work. Nor is it a nation in which many people could name the core founding principles that helped motivate the birth of this country or speak intelligently about the development or alteration of those principles in succeeding generations or the major challenges facing them now.

            If we define national loyalty in terms of a high level of motivation to act for the well-being of the nation as a whole, it is hard to see us right now as a people who can be described as loving our country in this way. Few wake up in the morning asking what they can do to make America a better place. Few business leaders make their decisions with any apparent drive to act on behalf of the nation’s well being rather than profit for the firm. This helps explain hard-eyed business decisions that improve the bottom line by shipping jobs overseas. Most of us are living our private lives and pursuing our personal interests. We don’t have a great passion for the well-being of America as a whole.

            If we define national loyalty in terms of a shared public commitment to shape citizens with a certain set of values and a certain kind of character that can advance the national interest, it doesn’t seem to me as if there is really anyone who is trying very hard to do that right now, at least not outside the military. I have yet to encounter a public school with a clear sense of mission to shape citizens for service to the United States. Graduation speeches emphasize the personal dreams and ambitions of the individual graduates, not the way in which they could or should use their gifts and education to serve the nation as a whole.

            I have to say that even our politicians often seem so caught up in personal ambition or partisan interest—and bickering—that it is often hard to see their love of the nation itself and their willingness to sacrifice for it. Increasingly it seems that they would prefer for their side to win, or the other side to fail, regardless of what happens to the nation as a whole. This seems like a recipe for gridlock and disaster.

            Finally, if we define national loyalty as it has often been defined, as a willingness to fight, kill, and die for one’s country, no one could argue that this is where the majority of American young people are. We have an all-volunteer (which means all paid) military force. Less than 2% of our population serves currently in the military, and less than 10% has ever served in the military. Seventy percent oppose reinstatement of the draft, which would require people to serve in the military from every sector of American society, as happened with our wars through Vietnam. We appear willing to honor our troops, and to fund our troops, but not to join our troops. I think our residual national guilt about laying all this war fighting responsibility on such a small percentage of the population—and making them go back to Iraq and Afghanistan so many times—helps explain why we make such a fuss about them when we happen to see them at ballgames or the airport.

            If we define national loyalty simply as straightforward, openly expressed love of country, I think we see less and less of that as well. It feels, well, old-fashioned. Who do you know who sits around the dorm and talks about how much they love this country? Maybe, just maybe, an immigrant friend or two. As for native-born Americans, it can hardly be described as a common kind of conversation to run into.

Historic Christian Faith on National Loyalty

            As I turn to the question of what the historic Christian faith has said about love of country or national loyalty, the complexity of this issue is once again reinforced. The church has given a lot of different answers as to the place of national loyalty in the Christian’s life.

            One factor is that the Bible actually offers us glimpses of at least two very different kinds of faith communities—Israel and the church. We implicitly and sometimes explicitly learn very different lessons about national loyalty as we read the Old Testament and then the New Testament.

            Israel, of course, was a nation that was also a faith community. The Old Testament—over 2/3 of our Bible—tells the story of a nation created, chosen, and called by God. In the case of the Jewish people as depicted in most of the OT, loyalty to nation was also loyalty to God. To obey the laws of Israel was to obey the God of Israel who had given the laws. To love Israel was to love the God who gave birth to Israel. To fight and kill and die for Israel was to fight and kill and die for God.

            Many American Christians make what might seem a rather straightforward move of transferring these categories of thought to the United States. Israel becomes the U.S.; the U.S. becomes God’s new chosen people. To love America is to love God. To be loyal to the United States is to be loyal to God; the enemies of the U.S. are the enemies of God; to fight and kill and die for the U.S. is to fight and kill and die for God. After 9/11, many Christians who already read the Bible that way were reinforced in this pattern as they interpreted the attack on the U.S. as a Muslim Arab attack on Christian America. So the war on terror became a holy war, an American Christian defensive jihad. Some conservative Christian leaders and even military people spoke that way, and still do.

            There are very many huge problems with doing this, but one place to start is to say that there is no biblical grounds for believing that any earthly nation should ever have been viewed as replacing Israel as God’s chosen nation. The idea has always been wrong and historically has always worked out rather badly.

            Biblically, neither the O.T. nor the N.T. justifies this. Only Israel was God’s chosen people. Further, there are plenty of O.T. instances in which both Israel and Judah have been destroyed as nations and yet God continues to relate to the Jewish people as a people of covenant relationship with him. And when the church comes along, the theme is only intensified. For the New Testament, the church is the new Israel, which is not a new political nation. Revelation 5:9 puts it this way:

            You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals,
            For you [Jesus] were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God
            Saints from every tribe and language and people and nation;

            You have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God,
            And they will reign on earth.

            From its early days, the church has transcended national boundaries. It has been defined by the fact that it was multitribal, multinational, multiethnic, and multilinguistic. The church has long understood itself as a “catholic” entity, meaning that it is universal, encompassing people from all over the world and just about every tribe, people, and nation.

            It is also true that the earliest Christians were embedded in the vast Roman Empire. They exhibited strikingly little national loyalty to that Empire. That was undoubtedly in part because they were regularly finding themselves being thrown to the lions in Roman coliseums. This does not engender much loyalty. But more deeply, this lack of what we might call patriotism was because they were loyal to Jesus and to his international body, the church.

            So Christians were among the very first people who transcended kin, family, tribe, and nation to envision themselves as part of a global community. Christians were among the first internationalists. They were aware that all over the world at any given moment were fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. They were taught a loyalty to these religious kin that at least balanced and more often far transcended their loyalty to their city, region, or nation.

            This has also laid the foundation for a broader global concern in Christianity. Christians learned to care not just about their religious kin all over the world, but about the world itself. This was God’s world, God is the creator of all, God loves every human being, and the church is charged with “going into all the world to preach the gospel to every nation.”

            Christians have often been seen as suspect because of this international loyalty. The more intensely a nation was focused on itself, the more Christian internationalism and concern for people all over the world has been seen as a threat. A great and terrible example occurred in Nazi Germany, which was an ultranationalistic community. Anyone who expressed any concern about what happened to people outside the nation was seen as potentially traitorous. But Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood that Christians cannot bend the knee before a nation that would demand that kind of loyalty.

The Difference Christ Makes

            So here we have the last of our three great clashes that we will consider in these three lectures:

a. To the extent that Americans are overly focused on national loyalty and its symbols, Christian faith stands in tension with this tendency because of our primary loyalty to Christ, his global church, and the whole world. Our Christian internationalism and global concern should be stronger than our patriotism and national concern. This is my controversial claim.

b. To the extent that some Christians have simply identified the United States with biblical Israel and transfer all that holy loyalty onto America, they are guilty of a significant and damaging theological error that totally misses the New Testament and undermines any kind of healthy theology of the church.

c. To the extent that Americans are overly focused just on personal dreams, goals, and ambitions so that they have no interest in any transcendent loyalty, Christian faith also stands in tension with this pattern. Our loyalty to Jesus Christ, his church, and the whole world makes us care about issues far transcending our personal lives, dreams, worries, and ambitions. The constraints on our patriotism or national loyalty do not arise because we care so little about the world beyond the self, but because we care so much about that world—all of it. We fit our national loyalty into a broader Christian framework which refines and disciplines it. That’s the difference Christ makes.

            I promised that each time I would try to offer some specific practical suggestions. So let me conclude with such an effort one last time:

1. Check your heart to be sure that your interests extend far beyond your personal dreams and interests to include both what happens in the United States and what happens in the world beyond.
2. Visit and serve alongside Christians in other parts of the world. Many mission experiences give this opportunity. Stay in touch with these new friends and with events in their part of the world. Pray for them and with them just like you would friends here. Stay in dialogue with them about events both in their nation and yours.
3. Never identify biblical Israel with the United States. Recognize that this is the nation God has given you to live in and serve in Christ’s name, but avoid making that nation any kind of idolatry.
4. Think hard about whether fighting and killing and dying for your nation fits with your primary loyalty to Jesus Christ.
5. Read world news, especially about the world’s most impoverished areas, and ask God to grow your heart to pray for, care about, give to, and serve in, one or another of those areas.
6. Care about this particular nation too, not by uncritically embracing everything that happens here, but by being the kind of Christian citizen who exemplifies our nation’s best values, such as freedom, equality, the rule of law, and hospitality to the needy stranger.

            I am challenging you to be both more and less patriotic than almost everyone you may have ever met. More patriotic—because you love this nation in the name of Christ and want everyone here to flourish. Less patriotic—because your horizon of vision extends far beyond this nation to every nation, and to the church in every nation.

            This will be the way our culture will come to believe in the difference Christ makes.