“America used to be a Christian nation. And we need to make it a Christian nation again.”
I hear these words, or words like them, from my Evangelical acquaintances.
I can understand their feelings, even though they are deeply misguided. Not only was America never a “Christian” nation and never was intended to be a “Christian” nation, it can never be a “Christian” nation.
It is a secular nation, to use the words of A. Lincoln from his Gettyburg Address, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
So when Evangelicals attempt to re-create an imaginary past to make a better future, I say “No.” Christians should not make the United States into a “Christian” nation. Not now, not ever, no how, no way.
For sure, Christians should bring their redeemed lives and hearts into the community.
What I also say for sure is that history shows that whenever Christians try to take over a government (such as John Calvin’s Geneva, Savonarola’s Florence, the Salem witch trials, and the Spanish Inquisition), that government becomes a narrow sectarian dictatorship that not only persecutes “unbelievers” but also persecutes—often more severely!—brothers and sisters in Christ who merely have theological distinctions on which they differ. In other words, they have words in their heads that don’t agree with the words in the heads of those who hold the gun and the whip and the chain. There is nothing otherwise “wrong” about them. Just their thoughts.
Take, for example, American chattel slavery. It was theologically supported by the Christian church—and not just supported, but also defined as the most Christian things we could do as disciples of Jesus to the people of Africa.
Right there is an example of how Christians took over a government to make it a holy place for Jesus, and unless you are seriously and egregiously out of alignment with modern ideas of Christian obedience and discipleship, you agree that America’s creation of eternal chattel slavery was one of the most wicked creations of American Christians, tied in its wickedness with the genocide of the Indigenous by the same Christians.
I would want Christians to serve in government, sure. We can offer our service to the Lord in our service to the secular government.
What I am flat out against—with all my strength—is any attempt to “make America Christian again.” Because it has never, ever worked, and we are failing as Christians (who are purportedly servants of the Lord Jesus) when we attempt to make a socially created thing into the agent of our peculiar, sectarian, and frankly limited understandings of how God and humans must relate to each other. There are systemic issues such as racism—which is deeply embedded into America’s DNA to the point where fighting racism has become the same as fighting America—that can require us as Christians believers to repent, to seek God to heal us of our selfishness and sin of individualistic, disconnected discipleship, and there are personal issues such of lack of love for our brothers and sisters in the Beloved Community.
But for God’s sake, we must not make the American political system “Christian.” It would not be mete for me or for anyone who would not bow their knee to the president—whomever that president might be, conservative or progressive, Republican or Democratic, straight or gay or queer, atheist or Muslim or Catholic or Hindu.
Compelled belief is not belief. It is simply conformity. And we as Christians who follow Christ are called to make disciples of all humanity, not forcing them to obey as we would like for our theological comfort, but because our family of believers is to be wider and deeper, to include all manner of people that we would exclude if we make our country “Christian.”
When some “Christian” comes around demanding to restore America to her misremembered former glory by making it “Christian” again, don’t just flee. Fight back by demanding that America remain secular and that we bring about honor and integrity and prudence by demanding these values and behaviors from our elected officials, no matter what faith—or non-faith—that they hold.