Are We Really a Christian Nation? 5-2010

 A break from the confessional stuff - there are other things I want off my chest and out of my head. You probably want the same break, too. (If not, there will be more to come).

I say this to the Tea Party crowd and all you others claiming we are a Christian nation - we are not. I do not think we ever were, but more on that in a moment. Furthermore, I am quite certain we are not now.

I was raised a Baptist, specifically an American Baptist, My mother taught Sunday School. I have called myself the family Calvinist - although one disputing predestination. Now, I am quite the famous sinner. As I grew older, the more I separated from the church and from thinking in black and white terms. I read more and more history and became less enchanted with the Church.

What really broke things for me occurred back in the Eighties, I thoroughly disagreed with the doctrine that a person could pray for worldly benefits for themselves. Sorry, but that smacks more of Mammon than Christ. (I suggest here reading Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ, which critiques Christianity but does so from a great understanding of Christianity. I always thought Nietzsche's attitude towards Christianity was that of a spurned lover towards the object of his affections.) One prays for the good of others - and for forgiveness of one's sins.

That we could pray for own enrichment, that we deserved good things here on Earth, poisoned our culture. You can run a line from that kind of thinking to the Wall Street bonuses. The rich were blessed and the poor were cast down. Yes, we justified a lot of behaviors and caused others by this kind of thinking.

Then those praying for the death of mothers at abortion clinics, those threatening and practicing violence at abortion clinics, sickens me as a Christian. If this is Christianity, then I do not recognize it.

We allowed our own religious terrorists a free hand. Who condemned the assassins of abortion doctors? The right wing politicians used abortion for their own purposes seems very clear to me. When Bush had majorities in the House and the Senate, did any Republican propose constitutional amendments to overturn Roe v. Wade? No. To overturn Roe by constitutional amendment would cut off the funds raised to fight those liberal activist judges.

[What was unforeseen was conservative activist judges reversing Roe, as they did this year. So much for me being a prophet. What should have been seen in 2010 was the Republicans' mania for court-packing. sch 11/1/22.]

Our forefathers did not come here to establish religious freedom for all, but religious liberty for their own sects. Quakers and Baptists and Anabaptists and Catholics were as persecuted in some colonies as they were in England under the Anglican Church. I suggest reading Anthony Burgess' novel on Christopher Marlowe. Until I read it, I just did not grasp the idea that any religious dissent (Roman Catholic, Puritan, atheism) was treason against the Crown. The Puritans of Massachusetts treated other Christian sects as heretic, punishing their heresy as a crime. Rhode Island with its Baptists and Pennsylvania with its Quaker s had a far more ecumenical treatment of other Protestants. Roman Catholics never really got away from suspicion of Vatican control until the arrival of JFK.

[Of all the criticisms leveled at the United States Supreme Court, I have not heard anyone raise the issue that Catholics now dominate the Court. sch 11/1/22]

Yes, the differences between trespasser and debtor once had serious, even fatal, consequences. I doubt if there has been any real change in the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics, as much as the differences have been ignored.

I am not having a jailhouse conversion. Doesn't everyone find these trite and superficial? Such a thing is to be done for worldly advantage. 

No, I took to re-reading The Bible because of The Brothers Karamazov. Some thrological points needed refreshing, and I needed relief from the novel's overwrought prose. Which is why I found this in I Peter 3, 10 - 11 and 17.

For he that love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile;

Let him eschew evil and do good; let him see peace and ensue it.

###

For it is, if the will of God be so that ye suffer for well doings, than for evil doing.

This came from The Bible given me by mother's mother on May 6, 1967. It is the King James Version. 

How does this sound to American Christians in 2010? Does this sound like our current public dialog? I think not.

No, we are not a Christian nation. We are too proud, too violent, too angry, too worldly for us to be a Christian nation. We practice retribution instead of promoting redemption. We fear instead of love. We value goods above souls. I know I am a sinner, but I cannot conceive of ever having the overweening vanity to think that Americans are God's chosen people. Christians whose lives imitate Christ are God's chosen people.

sch

[Reading An Ordinary Exile: Fr. Bulgakov’s Spiritual Diary by Andrew Kuiper I thought it needed to be noted in this post, including the following:

But while his dear friend Pavel Florensky attempted to find those “sacral coordinates” for a future society from inside the currently existing government, Bulgakov was forced to wander further and further away from home. He saw in Christ the exemplary exile. Christ longed for Jerusalem yet had no place to rest his head. In a sense, we must all learn to make our natural loves strange and avoid that subtle form of self-worship that masquerades as patriotism. Bulgakov wondered if the apostles also felt that mixture of sadness and the intoxicating newness as they were scattered to the ends of the earth. “Thanks be to God that He grants us to know both the anguish and the sweetness of this separation and this freedom. We would not be citizens of His world and His land if we remained merely citizens of our own land.” It is even possible to glimpse, in this deeply Eastern Orthodox reflection on wandering, a theological bridge leading to the practices of Western mendicant orders. Stability and exile can both be apostolic. That is as much a political as it is a spiritual meditation: Bulgakov’s reflections on this are as relevant for us now as it was for Europe and Russia in the 1920’s.

sch 11/5/22.]