Kindle Notes & Highlights
Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on. Thurgood Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court justice1
My first bias is that Christians must be Christians first, and citizens of their country second.
My second bias is my conviction that Christian citizens in the reign of God must have a global eye. God, the creator and redeemer of all things, is not interested in Americans only.
God created all people. God came into the world to save all sinners. God has a global vision of the kingdom and therefore so must Christian citizens. This means that it matters how we treat people who are not Americans. Christian citizens are obligated to care about how our government treats foreigners, our neighbors, and those who are citizens of every other nation.
Those who wish to rewrite history and make America’s narrative Christian in its telling make wild accusations, dismiss historical evidence, and jump through all kinds of rhetorical hoops so they can say, “They didn’t really mean that.”
Washington believed that religious “toleration” would create a nation of religious liberty. The government would not interfere with individuals in matters of conscience and belief. He then quoted 2 Kings 18:31: “Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” He went on to say that the best America would be one that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”35
Christianity that is bigoted, that supports unjust punishments, that persecutes, that is intolerant, that pays no attention to the least and lost has no parallel in our best national values.
As many as fifty million Native Americans died because of westward expansion that resulted in resettlement, war, and disease.41
Critics argued that the values of freedom and liberty in our Constitution did not give us the right to violate the rights of other people who held property, to expand slavery, or to continue the breaking of treaties that oppressed the freedom of others. In the end, moral integrity was sacrificed on the altar of the American vision of empire.
Meacham writes, “This victory over excessive religious influence and excessive secularism is often lost in the clatter of contemporary cultural and political strife.”
“I don’t think it means what you think it means.” American Christians are devoted to an American civil religion and not the Christian Gospel. They steward an American faith in a different god than the God of scripture.
Civic religion is the self-understanding of a nation manifested in word and deed.
There is a governing transcendence in American civil religion. A god who is beyond any specific denominational or ecclesial specificity stands above all else, judging the work of the nation and its people.
Reinhold Niebuhr has this to say of Lincoln: An analysis of the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional religion of his time and place and of its polemical use on the slavery issue, which corrupted religious life in the days before and during the Civil War, must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln’s religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era.13
The American civil religion and Christianity are not the same. Meacham writes, The Republic is not a church, but it is a Republic filled with churches. Let the religious speak but encourage them not to shout; let them argue, but encourage them not to brawl. The system the Founders built allows for religious considerations to play a role in politics in the same measure—no greater, no smaller—as any other consideration, whether geographical, economic, or cultural.14
President George Washington wrote, “The bosom of America,” was to be “open to receive the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and relations; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges. They may be [Muslims], Jews or Christians of any sect, or they may be atheists.” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our country has been the first to prove to the world two truths the most salutary to human society, that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effective anodyne against religious dissension: the maxims of civil government being reversed in that of
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Authority usurped, from God not given: He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but man over men He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.15
Laws that dehumanize and lift up some at the expense of others are out of step with the scripture.
Momentous ideas made the West what it is: human rights, the abolition of slavery, the equal worth of all, and justice based on the principle that right is sovereign over might. All ultimately derived from the statement in the first chapter of the Torah that we are made in God’s image and likeness. No other text has had a greater influence on moral thought, nor has any other civilization ever held a higher vision of what we are called on to be.19
Rabbi Sacks reminds us that our invitation to journey with God means confessing and rejecting the notion that “For there to be an ‘us’ there must be a ‘them,’ the people not like us. Humanity is divided into friends and strangers, brothers and others. The people not like us become the screen onto which we project our fears. They are seen as threatening, hostile, demonic. Identity involves exclusion which leads to violence.”
It isn’t that people support governments that won’t do them any good; it is that governments are not interested in doing the citizen any good unless it profits the power structure and people in charge. This is the lesson learned in Egypt.
Political pundits have long been in the habit of declaring that citizens are not patriotic if they do not believe that America was chosen by God to be a great country. This propaganda is often rooted in the Exodus story. The suggestion is that America is the new Israel. However, nothing could be further from the truth when one reviews our founding fathers’ debate and language. The God that is present in our American origin documents is not a god who shows favor to one nation and curses another. Thomas Jefferson simply wanted the founding Declaration to “assume among the powers of the earth the
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These commandments are not an ethical prescription to be filled by a loyal disciple; instead they evoke a community living into the blessings and grace of God.
to embrace the scripture as a list of individual moral imperatives—biblical laws that function for the person like natural laws function for Newtonian physics.10 Treating the commandments like this is a clever way of honoring them while evading their meaning. Our response to the commandments is not merely individual. As Christians, we read the biblical story in the context of a network of faithful people that stretches forwards and backwards across all of time. From this perspective, scripture becomes “revealed reality” instead of “revealed morality.”11 The next step is arriving at a series of
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Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
God had a social imaginary that ensured that all people were cared for even if they could not care for themselves. They were all kin. This was not social welfare; it was an expectation that the prosperity of society in general benefited every-one specifically. From the king to the pauper, from the land owner to the widow and the orphan, from the tribal member who inhabited the land to the stranger making their way in a foreign land, the Sinai tradition ensured people were cared and provided for at every level of the social structure. Moreover, when they were not, the prophets reminded those
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The whole society from individual to the government is responsible for the poor.
All societies are free to turn their backs on the needy, but such societies can never be worthy of the name of God. All societies are free to ignore the prophets’ invitations, but such societies bear no resemblance to the realm that Christians call their first home. God holds nations responsible for those who must rely upon the grace, mercy, justice, and hospitality of others. God judges nations based on how well they treat the most vulnerable within their borders, and how they treat the nations who are their neighbors.
The Gerasene demoniac, Legion, was the first evangelist in the Gospel account of Mark who was freed and went on to tell a different story of political engagement. But we have merely became evangelists for our opposing political parties. In our context we have not freed people from their zombified and colonized experience. We have demanded greater occupation of religious space by political parties with the hope that people would join our side. Instead of restoring people to each other to live together in harmonious relationship, as Jesus did, we shackled ourselves and each other, and condemned
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Nietzsche once warned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
However, “individualism” is not a strong enough shared value to help this country manage the challenges that face us in our next age. In fact, it may undermine our future if it remains the sole arbiter of truth.
In God’s social imaginary, we have described community in terms of relationship and responsibility. The stories of Jesus point us towards the virtue of interconnectedness.
God has also created us free. Our freedom is how mimetic desire and sibling rivalry enter our relationships. Desire and rivalry perpetuate scapegoating and violence, thereby fraying the fabric of our interconnectedness.
It was not individuals who withstood tyranny at America’s founding, but a new community who worked together and saw that their futures were intertwined. They each had to give a little to work together. In the end, their shared responsibility for each other—their cultivated interdependence—gave life to a new and unique republic.
A Manichaean view of our parable would take the side of the political and religious leaders who have nothing to do with the half-dead man and leave the Christ figure to die by the side of the road. Manichaeism rejected interdependence. Their worldview was dualistic; there were good and evil forces and you don’t mix the two. A number of years ago Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and author, coined the term “Manichean politics,” which, he said, pervades our political discourse.23 Greenwald argued that this dualism took root some time ago in American politics as it made the case for the defeat of
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Manichaean politics have now taken root internally as part of our civil religion in the midst of our own internal political debate. We are in a political season of extreme hivishness, where political powers and principalities use Manichaean philosophy to cast the world in threatening terms of good and evil. One political party is good, the other evil. Both parties and everyone in between now operate out of a hivish Manichaean political framework.
Faced with inadequate health care, a weakening birth rate, the dying off of the boomer generation, the increased need for skilled and unskilled labor, and failing systems of infrastructure and education, we will not be able to adapt if we cannot concede that we are intimately connected to each other, and are a part of each other’s narrative. The narrative of Christian citizenship turns on sacrifice for the other. It is rooted in the idea that we are at our best when we are willing to enter into another person’s loss and suffering and become sacrificially responsible.
The Christian citizen rests upon the power of cultivated interdependence for the sake of relieving the suffering of people within the system, by changing the system politically. Yes, we resist withdrawing into our hives by being a good neighbor. The Good Samaritan invites us to resist division when confronted with diversity. It invites us to resist our hives’ desire to support political theories, policies, and practices that demonize the other. It also challenges us to confront the powers and principalities of the world that gain power out of this division. Chapter
Jesus was not interested in a theocracy. All too aware of the abuse of the tenants in God’s garden, he warned his followers to be wary of those who would use them for political gain. Jesus, in one of his last teachings, warned his followers to avoid those who used their ministry as a means to power. He told them to watch out because those seeking political power (rebelling against the state in order to rule themselves) wanted to deceive them. Jesus told his followers that rebels and politicians just wanted power for themselves.
Christian citizenship has an agenda and it is not the same as the agenda of the state, even though our dual citizenship requires that we be a part of the wider community. Jesus reminded his disciples that their loyalty should not be to the empire or to the rebels. They were to be loyal to God’s garden social imaginary of compassion and expansive familial faithfulness.
Christian citizens take up their crosses and follow. We do this by declaring peace in a world of violence; members of Christ’s community of peace lose their lives. The community of shalom is a community that is willing to lose. This is most clearly articulated in the three sayings of Jesus about “the way.” Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it” (Mark 8:35); “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35); and, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark10:43). The victory of the Cross is no worldly victory; it
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Hauerwas challenges us, and calls Americans out on their blatant misuse of Romans 12 and 13. He says we read Romans 13 as an unchallenged support of the government while we read Romans 12 as a private rule of life. Americans forget that they are Christians before they are American citizens. Recovering our own place in God’s narrative means that we can no longer sacralize our own American democratic presuppositions about government. Romans 12 does not only apply to the Christian citizen, it is the measure by which we understand the kind of just government we can support. We cannot read Romans
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We are called to see the importance of all people and their gifts for the good of the whole. Governments are called to see all citizens as having a role in the society. Everyone is a member of the garden society by virtue of their creation. As the state embodies the garden social imaginary, it can see that (Rom. 12:3–6). The state is to build its government on love and to reject evil. The country is to focus and work towards the good, honoring all people inside and outside of its boundaries.
Governments are to bring all people close, work on behalf of and with the poor, and be hospitable to the stranger. We are to care for the suffering as a nation, and reject persecution in all forms. The state is to bless instead of curse, seek peace within and beyond its borders, and reject violence and consumption as the first course of action (Rom. 12:13–18).
King James was adamant that no matter how the rest was translated he didn’t want his people to get the idea that there was a godly admonition towards kings or an empowerment of the people to take corrective action when monarchs misbehaved. In James’s eyes, previous versions were fraught with “seditious . . . dangerous, and trayterous” translation. I imagine you were not even allowed to bring up the Geneva Bible in his presence because it was so radical. It included the suggestion that it was okay to overthrow a despotic ruler if they were unjust. King James wanted to make sure that the people
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Jesus is inviting his followers to define their secular politics by their citizenship in the reign of God. The powers of this world cannot tell us what the Christian story is and we needn’t accept the secularist maxim that we have no story until we choose theirs. Jesus invites us to transcend the narrative of this world with a different narrative. We are to engage the world by rising above passive submission or violence. We are invited to find a third way.
Walking the extra mile had a direct connection between the ochlos and the military. The military could require the occupied to carry their pack, but only for a certain distance. To go an extra mile was to flip the burden to the soldier because the person was breaking the law. Walking the extra mile was an engagement of the colonial powers
It is the church’s responsibility as a whole to engage in biblical interpretation. Despite people believing they have a right to do this and that, individuals do not interpret scripture for themselves. The Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, combined with the powers and principalities’ ability to affect translation and the Western secular frame, and our insistent deferral to the common person’s common sense is challenged by God’s narrative as understood by the church. Following Stanley Hauerwas, I believe in a community that is under authority; such authorities within the ecclesiastical
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Jesus invites the Christian citizen to reject politics as usual. Our deepened understanding of scripture enables us to see the difference between America’s version of God and the God we receive through the narrative of the garden. Acknowledging that our political systems of so-called natural laws and pragmatic philosophies contain no divine revelation and that we have been duped into believing they do through the shuffles and slights of hand of modern theologies like “Christian realism,” gives us the necessary distance to engage the public square afresh.
it is easy for church to become a kind of “echo chamber” for one-sided political half-truths.15 Christian citizens need to view their conversations with each other as conversation with peers, rather than an exercise in clumsy solidarity, or an overworked talking past each other. If local churches can engage the Bible with the church’s witness at hand, and have conversations in smaller groups about our political participation, the result will be a more coherent articulation of Christian citizenship and a better engagement by Christian citizens in the public square.
