On the occasion of the
Fourth of July, when Americans everywhere celebrate the foundation of
our nation, it's important for we as Christians to reflect on what a
nation is, what a nation can be, what roles a nation can play in the
plans of Almighty God. As Peter Leithart writes, “Empires may be
towers and cities raised in rebellion against God, rods that crush,
or sanctuaries and saviors for the faithful.” I'd like to suggest
that, between the Bible and Christian history, we're given six
general models – not even counting Israel – for what a nation or
empire can be like. Now, throughout the writings of the biblical
prophets, the great Gentile empires are always compared to wild
animals, sometimes monsters. For instance, Daniel prophetically sees
Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome as “four great beasts” who rose
up “out of the sea,” the Gentile world (Daniel 7:3). But in his
vision, all of them are finally trumped by “one like a son of man,
coming with the clouds of heaven” to receive an everlasting rule
from the hands of God the Father so that “all peoples, nations, and
languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:13-14). This human figure
represents Jesus as the Messiah, standing for all of faithful Israel,
the real humanity following Adam's vocation to exercise righteous
dominion over the beasts of the earth – including the nations. And
kings and nations are judged by how they treat the true humanity, the
offspring of faithful Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you,
and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families
of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).
So the first model, at
one extreme, is that of a vicious beast. That's the sort of
portrayal we get in Revelation: a beast “allowed to make war
against the saints and conquer them” (Revelation 13:7). A nation
who's a vicious beast is an active persecutor of God's people, using
violence and bloodshed against them. In at least that respect, and
probably more, a Beast-Nation does not respect human rights or
liberties. If God's people live within the borders of a
Beast-Nation, we will personally know martyrs who died for the faith
we share. Look at Christian villagers in the regions ISIS has
captured. And it was Babylon being beastly that “burned the house
of God, broke down the wall of Jerusalem, burned all its palaces with
fire, and destroyed all its precious vessels” (2 Chronicles 36:19),
killing even in the sanctuary with “no compassion” (2 Chronicles 36:17). But never lose hope: the Last Adam is a beast-tamer
extraordinaire.
I think a second model
can be found in Genesis 10-11, the story of Nimrod's city-building
leading up to the Tower of Babel. In that story, all the people of
the land were united in one common project, a city and a tower,
having one common confession of faith or unfaith – and it was not
faith in God's promises. A Babel-Nation may not use violence against
God's people, but even if it doesn't, it suppresses any dissent from
the core ideas by which it operates. Many Muslim-majority nations
would be Babel-Nations – God's people are on the social fringes,
and if there isn't outright physical violence against us, still we're
marginalized from having much of a public Christian presence because
it doesn't fit with the totalizing consensus of society that brooks
no rivals.
A third model is shown in
Babylon under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar, or Persia under the rule of
Xerxes. These nations are very conflicted as to how they want to
treat God's people. Sometimes, truly vocal believers – people who
are genuine disciples, committed to being disciples in every area of
their lives, including public life – can rise to high positions and
wield some influence. Think of Daniel as one of Nebuchadnezzar's
lead advisors (Daniel 2:48-49). Think of Esther as the unwitting
queen of Xerxes “for just such a time as this” (Esther 4:14), and
Mordecai later raised to second-in-command (Esther 10:3). But
serious believers are still the exception among the elite
power-brokers and culture-makers, and even the lives of a Daniel or
an Esther are fraught with danger. Because that kind of rule can
take an abrupt turn toward Babel or even beastly traits.
Nebuchadnezzar went from honoring Daniel and his three friends to
ordering Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be thrown into a furnace
for not worshipping his idol (Daniel 3:8-23). Xerxes was all too
ready to listen to Haman's Hitler-esque schemes (Esther 3:6-11).
A fourth model, I think,
is suggested by Persia under the rule of Xerxes' grandfather Cyrus
the Great. Now this is finally a different sort of kingdom! As
Cyrus was committed to practicing it, the Persian style of rule was
based on a healthy kind of pluralism. When he conquered Babylon,
even the Babylonians celebrated him as a liberator. Cyrus
intentionally showed respect to every kind of people who lived under
his rule, restoring temples and sanctuaries all through his domain;
and even though Isaiah made clear in advance that Cyrus was a pagan
rather than a believer, still he's presented as a “messiah,”
chosen by God to be a protector of his people (Isaiah 45:1-5),
allowing them to return to their land and supporting them in their
good endeavors (Ezra 1:3-5). A Daniel can survive a Nebuchadnezzar,
but Daniel “prospered during … the reign of Cyrus” (Daniel 6:28). The American pastor John Murray, in a sermon given in
November 1779, observed:
Sometimes the great Deliverer chooses a pebble from their own brook
to prostrate their most gigantic oppressors, and sometimes he moves
the heart of an alien to restore them the liberty which their own
kings overthrew. Thus Cyrus a pagan prince, unconnected by nation,
and by religion an enemy, monarch of the empire that had persecuted
their fathers, that had razed their cities, abolished their
ordinances and levelled their temple to the ground. – Cyrus,
stirred up by the Lord alone, unsolicited by men, and incapable of
detriment from any plot of his prisoners, proclaims the remains of
oppressed Israel, free and independent in their greatest privileges,
those of the religion of the God of their fathers, he rouses every
dormant principle of patriotism among them to exert itself on the
occasion for the re-establishment of their invaluable liberties, and
freely furnishes the undertakers of the work with treasures and all
things necessary for the full accomplishment of the purpose.
For the last two models,
we have to jump out of the Bible and into the first centuries of the
church. After living through some rather beastly emperors, the
church was thrilled and relieved when Constantine came to power and
became the first Roman ruler to bow the knee to Jesus. Constantine
was far, far from perfect, but he made it legal to be a Christian,
and because he was personally also a believer, he showered the church
with newfound privileges, and some Christian values did impact the
laws he made. He didn't initially ban or outright persecute those
who weren't part of the church, though he valued religious unity, so
he meddled at times in the church's affairs to make sure of it. And
by the end of his rule, he was giving orders to tear down pagan
temples. Think of him as veering toward a role-reversed Babel style,
where it's professing Christians who seek to exclude and marginalize
others from acting according to their convictions.
And finally, several
decades after Constantine ruled, the emperor Theodosius came to
power. Where Constantine just made the church tolerated and then
privileged, Theodosius made orthodox Christianity the only
legal religion. Visiting the surviving pagan temples became a
criminal offense, so did pagan sacrifices, pagan holidays became
mandatory workdays, and he refused to give legal protection to pagans
or their shrines from mob attacks. If Constantine was working toward
a role-reversed Babel, Theodosius waded toward the waters of a
role-reversed Beast.
So what was America
founded to be? The colonists often took the imagery of Israel and
applied it to themselves. They were the new Hebrews, fleeing a new
Pharaoh. They were a nation of Davids, pitted against the Goliath of
the British Empire. And there are some legitimate parallels there,
but also problems. America is not a new Israel, founded by God on
God's law and chosen among all peoples of the earth to be the light
of the nations. The reason is, there's already a New Israel in town.
You've probably heard of it: It's called the church. And from
Puritan New England to today, sometimes we've let America get away
with pretending to be what only the church is, putting a
star-spangled banner where only Christ crucified belongs.
Was America founded to be
a “Christian nation,” in the style of Constantine or Theodosius?
No, not in that way. The founding fathers of the United
States were dead-set against that idea. Their ancestors had run away
from exactly that background. For hundreds and hundreds of years,
European civilization had been rooted in variations of the Theodosian
idea. And when the apparent unity of a Christian Europe was
shattered in the Reformation, it was this Theodosian approach that
led to massive religious wars – as James Madison called them, “vain
attempts of the secular arm to extinguish religious discord by
proscribing all difference in religious opinion.” Fleeing from
Theodosian nations, plenty of religious refugees made their way to
the New World, setting up colonies that kept the Theodosianism to a
smaller scale.
By the time of the
Revolution, it was clear that no national Theodosianism would work,
and many people were just sick and tired of it. So the First
Amendment was passed, prohibiting any federal law either creating or
removing any establishment of an official church; and in time, our
distaste for the Theodosian experiment did away with what few state
churches there still were. Many of the Founding Fathers weren't
orthodox Christians themselves, though plenty others certainly were.
And they had plenty of differences about the proper role of religion
in governing America. But these deists, Unitarians, mainliners, and
evangelicals all did finally agree on a form of pluralism that would
shelter liberty, allow people to practice their religion in public
and private as they saw fit, and recognize that this new social
project was built on the bedrock of recognizing God as a Creator who
gives “unalienable rights” that no government has a right to
alter or abolish, knowing that “the Most High rules in the kingdom
of men” (Daniel 4:25).
If by “Christian
nation,” we mean a Theodosian or even a really Constantinian
nation, then we neither are one nor were meant to be one – nor were
we meant to be a secularist Babel, either. The nation's first Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, while he wrote that “it is the duty,
as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to
select and prefer Christians for their rulers” – and by
'Christian nation', he just meant the desirable social fact that most
Americans claimed to be Christians – he also stressed in the same
letter that “real
Christians will abstain from violating the rights of others.” And
James Madison famously denounced the idea that “the civil
magistrate is a competent judge of religious truth, or that he may
employ religion as an engine of civil policy.” Madison declared
that “the religion, then, of every man must be left to the
conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every
man to exercise it as these may dictate,” since our
responsibilities before God are older and more important than our
duties to any civil society. “As servants of God, live as free
people, yet don't use your freedom as a pretext for evil” (1 Peter 2:16), including forcing the gospel on those who can yet be won with
winsome and gentle witness to Jesus Christ.
So what is the United
States supposed to be? What are our ideals? Over thirty years ago,
Richard John Neuhaus, wrote his book The Naked Public Square,
challenging both Christians who wanted a Theodosius-like dominance
over the state and secularists who wanted a Babel-style removal of
religious voices from public life. He offered these as
“characteristics of the project we would call America”:
...a
devotion to liberal democracy, a near obsession with civil liberties,
a relatively open market economy, the aspiration toward equality of
opportunity, a commitment to an institutionalized balancing of powers
and countervailing forces, and a readiness to defend this kind of
social experiment, if necessary, by military force.
To
me, that doesn't sound like Theodosius or even Constantine, and it
doesn't sound like a Beast or even a Babel. But it might make Cyrus
nod in approval. It's no surprise: many of the Founding Fathers,
especially Jefferson, considered Cyrus to be a personal hero. And
from my reading of what the Bible says about governments, that's a
good thing. The sweet spot is somewhere between Constantine and
Cyrus, and probably closer to the latter – especially a Cyrus who's
heard and believed the gospel of God's kingdom. But I think the
Christian voter would better to mark a ballot next to even a pagan
Cyrus than next to either a theocratic Theodosius or a secularist
Nimrod – and heaven knows we've elected our fair share of them in
recent decades, haven't we?
Knowing
that the Old Testament carefully balanced the governing institutions
of Israel – making sure that the monarchy, the judges, the
priesthood, and the prophets could in principle keep one another in
balance under the rule of law – so the Founding Fathers recognized
the need to keep federal, state, local governments, executive,
legislative, and judicial branches, all in balance. Imbalanced power
of any of them was one of their greatest concerns. And above all,
they recognized from the start that natural rights are “endowed”
by God and only “secured” by government, which has no rightful
authority either to grant them or abridge them – so said the
Continental Congress 239 years ago.
As we all have seen, the
United States of today is not really a Cyrus-Nation, neither the sort
it was founded to be nor an improved version. No surprise – good
leadership needs constant upkeep, and even Cyrus's own son Cambyses
was somewhat of a tyrant. No, America is probably now more of a
Nebuchadnezzar-Nation, and the past several years have seen more and
more of a tilt toward Babel. On some select issues, America has
improved over the last half-century, but in its relationship to
religious liberty and to a healthy moral culture, not so much. In
the face of a very post-Christian state of affairs, it's easy for us
to complain. It's easy to condemn. But on the twenty-third
anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, a
pastor named Cyprian Strong preached:
As
long as the people of the United States are well-informed and
virtuous, so long they will be free, and their government
uncorrupted. It is in their power, to remedy the evils, arising from
having wicked and designing men at the head of government – they
can lift up and pull down at pleasure. If government be not wisely
administered, the fault must be in the people; for the frequent
election of every branch of the national legislature, if wisely
executed, is a sufficient remedy to all the mischiefs arising from a
corrupt administration. … Our rulers, or those who stand at the
head of our national government, will be just such men as we are
pleased to elect. … Our danger arises from sloth and inattention on
one hand, and from prejudices and lusts on the other. It is in the
power of the people, to have just such men and just such an
administration as they please. If electors are without information,
and will give in their suffrages at random – if they will suffer
themselves to be wheedled by designing men and artful demagogues,
they may forge their own chains and rivet them.
It's almost hard to
believe that Rev. Strong said that in 1799 and not 2014, isn't it?
But who do we have to blame, if not a divided visible church that
can't even agree on the authority of Scripture? Who do we have to
blame, if not a church that's bought into the idea that religion is
private, or a church that oversteps its bounds by endorsing countless
policy recommendations on issues where Christians can fairly differ?
Who do we have to blame, if not a church that cares more for the
party affiliation of a politician and less for Christian virtues of
love, kindness, and Christ-like truth-telling to dominate the style
of political discourse itself? And yet still we, even as Christians,
so often choose to reflect the same partisan hostilities of a
perpetually outraged world.
America was a
Cyrus-Nation – at least in theory, not always in practice. But one
function of the Fourth of July is to call us back, not to
America-the-Nation, but America-the-Notion – to judge
the law and culture in light of the idea (for they've always fallen
short), and the idea in light of the gospel (for America-the-Notion,
too, falls short of God's kingdom). America is now a
Nebuchadnezzar-Nation at best. What is the church's job in a
Nebuchadnezzar-Nation? Exactly what God told the exiles through
Jeremiah: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat
what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take
wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they
may bear sons and daughters; multiply there,
and do not decrease. But seek the peace of the city
where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the
LORD on its behalf,
for in its peace you will find your peace”
(Jeremiah 29:5-7).
We
live out our lives as witnesses to another way of living, a way
Babylon has forgotten. We stay strong, we remain committed, we do
not assimilate, we do not consign ourselves to shrinking away to
oblivion. We “obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29), but still
we “honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2:17). We work for peace and for
the benefit of everyone, and we pray without ceasing. Don't you
think Daniel prayed for Nebuchadnezzar? Don't you think Zerubbabel
prayed for Cyrus? Don't you think Paul prayed for Nero? When the
opportunity comes to have a hand in how the nation is governed, we
work to make it more beneficial for all – not defending our own
individual rights (though Paul wasn't shy about asserting his, if he
thought it would be useful to his ministry [Acts 16:35-39;
22:25-30]), but standing up for our brothers and sisters and
neighbors for the sake of all, knowing that a nation is blessed in
blessing Abraham's children (Genesis 12:3) – and Abraham is the
father of those whose faith is anchored in Jesus Christ, who died and
rose again and has an eternal kingship (Romans 4:16-17; Daniel 7:14).
So
with allegiance to Christ and love for America under God, we act by
votes, prayer, and Christian witness to put Cyrus in the White House,
Cyrus in the governor's mansion, Cyrus in the legislature, Cyrus in
the courts – not just for our sake, but to “seek the peace of the
city” on behalf of all races, all generations, all creeds, and to
support a framework where the gospel can fairly meet and fairly woo
in the public square. But our labors in America can never be allowed
to obscure our loyalty to God's kingdom above all else. And if time
should come that we have little clout in American law and culture,
then may our faith remain in the God who raised up Cyrus at just the
right time, the God seen with hands and feet nailed to
government-issue wood to appease the bloodlust of a mob, the God who
promises to make his power abundantly clear precisely in our
weakness. In our strength or in our weakness, from the mainstream or
from the margins, may God use us to bless America – and all the
world – by preaching in word, in deed, and in attitude the gospel
of a crucified and risen Savior. For, in the words of
Revolutionary-era minister Levi Hart:
What is English liberty, what is American freedom, when compared with
the glorious liberty of the sons of God? And what is slavery under
the galling yoke of oppression, to the hard bondage of sin and Satan?
Let the hitherto willing slaves of sin and Satan then rouse up –
there is now an opportunity to escape from bondage; there is one come
to preach deliverance to the captives, and the opening the prison to
them who are bound. Jesus Christ, the mighty King and Savior, the
scourge of tyrants, and destroyer of sin and Satan, the assertor, the
giver and supporter of original, perfect freedom: he sets open your
prison doors, knocks off your chains, and calls you to come forth.
Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for “the liberty
wherewith Christ hath made us free. … You have been called to
liberty,” writes Paul, “Only, don't use your liberty as an
opportunity for self-indulgence, but by love serve one another, for
the whole law is summed up in a single commandment: 'You shall love
your neighbor as yourself'” (Galatians 5:1, 13-14).
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