This time of year, many of us will likely hear from our Christian pulpits pseudo-patriotic sermons about how important it is that we get back to being a Christian Nation, as we were when we were founded. Many of us have grown accustomed to hearing a similar statement from the prayers of those who open our services. Especially in this part of the country, where Christianity has oddly become connected to conservative politics, we have heard more and more often prayers that we will "return to the Christian principles upon which we were founded." I am always uncomfortable when I hear such prayers for many reasons. Furthermore, and this is what I will address here, anytime I hear this prayer, I wonder if the person speaking the prayer really understands what he is asking for. When he asks that we "return" to the Christian principles upon which we were founded, does he have a good understanding of what those principles were?
I suspect that he assumes that the Christianity of his founding fathers was similar to his own, and what he is asking for is that his particular understanding of Christianity would influence and in fact guide the policy of our government. But of course, it is usually not the case. Though it is indeed the case that our founding documents professed to be founded upon Christian principles (a claim worth critiquing in it's own right, though this is not the purpose here), what these principles were are not necessarily consistent with the modern Christian principles of many of the people I hear making these prayers. The fact is, the Christianity of our nation's founders looked quite a bit different than our own. Here, I am using these differences in order to challenge this contemporary desire to "restore" Christianity to our government, in order to question whether or not this really is what we want.
I wish to foreground this discussion by pointing out that, whether for right or wrong, our concepts of Christianity are intimately connected to our own cultural milieu. Here is an example. In our Sunday morning class, we are currently studying the letters of John. In his first letter, John seems to address a specific popular early heresy that held that Jesus could not have actually been human, but had been spirit all along. He, according to this teaching, only appeared to be human. In order to understand how such an heresy is possible, it is helpful to understand the cosmology of ancient Greek philosophy, which was dominant in the Hellenized first century Roman world. The Greek view divides existence into three planes. An Ideal plane exists in which the perfect version of everything lives. This plane is a bit of an abstraction, but think of it as heaven, where everything we know is present, but in its perfect form. There is then the physical plane, where we and everything we experience exists. Finally, there is artifice--things that humans make. These are copies of the physical world, which is itself a copy of the Ideal. The important thing to know here is that things degenerate as they move down the level of existence. Physical things are imperfect versions of the Ideal. Built things (art in particular, according to Plato) are the lowest form of existence, because these things are copies of copies. The heresy John addresses is made possible because, for people enmeshed in this cosmology, it is unthinkable that God (who exists in a perfect plane) could possibly be manifested in the physical (imperfect) realm. Since God is perfect, he cannot exist in imperfection, therefore, he could have only appeared to be physical.
The point here is to show that we extrinsically link our understandings of scripture with our understanding of the world. Most of the time, we do not even know that this is what we are doing. After explaining this concept in class, I drew parallels between this and Christian thought in the modern western world, which borrows much of our thinking from the Greeks. We still imagine a similar separation between a spiritual realm and a physical one--a spiritual existence and a physical one. For this reason, we see our spirit and our physical bodies as being somehow distinct. We don't recognize, and most of the time we don't even know, that this view of things comes as much from Plato as it does from the Bible (much of the Old Testament defies such a separation of spirit and body, and sees the separation of the spirit from the body at death a decidedly bad thing [Ecc 9:10]), but we nevertheless infuse our interpretations of scripture with this way of viewing the world. This view of things influences, to some extent, our understanding of spiritual warfare, and baptism (which is either a necessary outward expression of an inward change or an unnecessary work), and is evident in phrases like "heart issue" (as if the heart can feel one way while the body behaves in another).
The purpose here is to show how our view of the way things work, views which often come from places other than the Bible, influences how we interpret the Bible and, thus, what it means to be a Christian. So now I intend to turn my attention to how our founding fathers saw the world, how that seems to have influenced their Christianity, and whether or not this type of Christianity is what we want to return to (By the way, it is in no way settled what it means to call the founders "Christian" at all. Some of them clearly were; some of them clearly were not. For most, such discussions rely on arguments of definition).
The drafters of our founding documents were incredibly educated (and fabulously wealthy) men, steeped in the European philosophies of Enlightenment. Just as the Platonic philosophies discussed above assumed a particular cosmology which influenced the early Christians' understanding of the gospel, so did the Enlightenment philosophies that influenced our founders. The Enlightenment view of created order is often explained as a Chain of Being (a concept that actually comes from the Middle Ages), in which created things exist in a chain from most complex to least. Things low on the chain were the least complex and least meaningful. Things high on the chain were the most complex, the most intelligent, and held the most agency--that is control over their own lives and destinies. Human beings, who are created in the image of God, are of course the highest thing in the physical realm of the chain of being. They are the pinnacle of creation, little gods in their own right, since they were, of course, created to rule over the earth. The have more agency, in other words, than anything except God himself.
This understanding of created order existing on a chain is and was metaphorical. The actual implication of this cosmology was that, to the thinking of educated men in the eighteenth century, things were very carefully created in order to function in a certain way. This philosophy assumes a value laden creation in which things work in an orderly fashion, unbroken by the "fallen" condition of man. The eighteenth century colonial view of God was a far cry from the one presented in Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The logical outcrop of such understanding is that God can be, and was, lasses faire in his involvement with creation. The optimistic eighteenth-century view of God was as a benign but mostly uninvolved creator. He certainly intervened in human affairs in important moments (and, of course, our Revolution would often be presented as just such a moment), but he mostly stayed out of the way. This is because he had created man to be innately logical. He was endowed with Reason (capital R). Man could, therefore, take care of himself. For political thinkers, social problems like crime and poverty were caused by intrusions from a corrupt and oppressive governments. A man stripped of his "God given" ability to take care of himself would naturally rebel in order to restore his proper position on the Chain, where God created him to be. If the government would just get out of the way, man would use Reason to deliver himself.
This thinking is all over our founding documents. Indeed, the founding documents of the United States are perhaps the pinnacle of Enlightenment philosophy in action. They are works of genius, to be sure. They are not, however, particularly sound pieces of Christian doctrine. The supposedly divine rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (likely a purposeful misquote of Locke's "life, liberty, and estate") are in no way guaranteed in the New Testament. In fact, the Declaration's assertion that it is a natural right of man to "alter and abolish" any government destructive to these natural rights and "to institute a new government" seems a remarkable departure from the teaching of Paul in Romans 13 that we are to "to be subject to governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted from God." Jefferson was able to make such claims because his culture had, just as the hellenized church of the first century to whom John wrote, and just as we do today, inserted the philosophies of his own cultural context into his understanding of the nature of God. His ideas that these rights are natural, that authority comes from the people and not from God (as Paul claimed), and that it is a natural right to throw off a government comes as much from Locke, Hume, and Rousseau as it does from his reading of the New Testament. They hinge, once again, on an understanding of God as a distant creator, leaving mankind, who he has endowed with Reason, to his own devices.
While I'm actually kind of comfortable with the implications of this cosmology (though I don't think it's particularly correct), because it requires man to take responsibility for his own actions and control of his own destiny, I have often been under the impression that most of those I've heard asking God to return us to our founding principles would not be at all comfortable with such cosmology/theology. Instead, most of the people I hear repeating such prayers are from southern evangelical denominations who tend to believe in a God who is actively involved, not just in the large scale affairs of man through major but infrequent interventions (like the American Revolution), but in the day to day affairs of individual Christians. We (and by "we" I don't mean "me.") believe that we are called to certain professions, that there is a person chosen to be our spouse, that we can pray for God to open or close this or that door in order to guide our decisions. I happen to believe that reality splits the difference between these two extremes, and that God is intimately concerned with individuals and will, on occasion, intervene in our lives especially when we ask him to, but who is also content to be on an adventure with us. He gives me as much agency as he claims for himself. These three views of God are not the same and, in some ways, even compete, since living according to each may lead to very different behaviors.
So the question is, when we ask that God "return us to our Christian principles," which of these three competing Christianities are we asking for? If we are asking that we truly return to our Nation's founding principles, then we are asking for a view of God which posits him as a good, but distant sovereign who is content to let us live as we see fit. I don't think that this is what most of the people speaking this prayer have in mind. Instead, I suspect that they desire that God would intercede in the day to day operations of governments in order to guide our laws. This is absolutely not what our founders had in mind. Whenever one of us asks for a Christian Nation, I suspect that each of us is asking according to our own understanding of God and his proper relationship with the governance of a nation. And this is where such a prayer becomes problematic.
These different understandings of Christianity (which are, again, influenced by philosophy and cosmology), may not seem that different, but that is because they do not have the effect of civil law. What happens when we begin to base a system of law on one of them. What happens to forms of Christianity that are not majority forms? That majority forms don't even consider Christianity. What happens when Methodists control government and outlaw the teaching of Baptism for the remission of sins? What happens to The LDS church when Baptists (who consider them a cult) take office? For that matter, what if we really did establish a "Christian" nation which, we should assume would mean that we based our laws on the teachings of Christ. Would we enshrine in law that citizens must sell all their possessions and give them to the poor? Would we, instead if imprisoning thieves, give them our coats instead? Although, for reasons not established here, this sounds pretty good to me, most of the people who speak such prayers would likely call this communism and say "the difference between Christianity and communism is that Christianity is a choice." But, of course, when Jesus spoke these things, he spoke them as commands. So which version of Christianity to we enshrine in our laws?
Such concerns are why our founders were genius enough to decree that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercising thereof," which is commonly understood as the separation of church and state. They understood that their understanding of the relationship between God and man (which, as we have seen, have little resemblance to the actual teachings of Christ, though it shares Christ's respect for individual people) is a great way to frame a nation, but not a particularly good way to run it.
Finally, I think it's completely appropriate that we pray for revival in our nation (and indeed in our world). I think we should pray that God will move in our communities, and that God will inspire and protect our leaders. Perhaps more importantly, we should not then stop at prayer, but we should go out and begin to produce change; we should do the work of revival. I think that, to a certain extent, our desire for a Christian Nation is a way to pass the buck. We make it the responsibility of the government to institute laws rather than taking on ourselves to teach a higher law. We desire prayer in schools while we fail to pray at home, and we wish for Bibles in schools while ours collect dust from Monday to Saturday. We want the ten commandments in front of our courthouses but not in our lives. We support political parties that protect the unborn but which also protect corporate greed, and when that party is installed, we somehow think that we have taken a step toward restoring our Christian roots. So then, if we look around and we see that out culture is sick (it is) and dying (it is), it is not that our government has failed to retain its Christian roots; it is that we have. After all, our kingdom, which is not of this world, precedes and far exceeds the American Constitution.
I don't want pray for God to return our nation to its Christian roots, since they were never particularly Christian to start with. Instead, I pray that God will fully and firmly establish His own kingdom in his earth and that we His people will be his instruments.
