Cross & Flag: The Uneasy Burden of Patriotic Christianity
Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 10:00AM | by Otter 
The Old Rugged Cross. T-shirt available from the weird-ass folks at EmpoweredFromAbove.com, who, whatever their silkscreening gifts, don’t know a Jewish messiah when they see one.I’ve taken a little mail-flack for posting a link to Kurt Willems’ (Mennonite) article, and wanted to say what I do and don’t think about it.
Christians are, I believe, a little too easy in their assumption that “liberty” (as Jefferson or Adams or Patrick Henry might use the word) is a Christian virtue.
It’s not, and it’s only by quite extra-biblical manoeuvres that one can make it so.
The New Testament insists time after time that the image of the cross, of declaring the Kingdom of God in the face of persecution and death, is the pattern and paradigm set by Jesus, so much so that Paul talks of being made “like him in his sufferings” and persistently writes with an almost-masochistic pride in his beatings, floggings, and persecutions.
Furthermore, Paul urges that the demonic, idolatrous Roman government is nevertheless instituted by God and to be obeyed. Jesus enjoins his followers to “love your enemies” and “pray for those who persecute you.” While it’s easy to abstract that from the first century context of a Jewish messiah declaring the Kingdom of God and apply it to (I dunno) some gossip at church, it’s a pretty good bet Jesus had in mind more lethal enemies: and his insistence in the gospels that his followers be all-in indicates that this is the case.
You must, in short, be prepared to suffer and die so that the Kingdom of Jesus might be realized.
Patrick Henry: Give him liberty or give him death. Preferably the deaths of British soldiers.
Against that, set the very good idea of Thomas Jefferson & Company: that liberty and the right to self-governance are worth struggling and, if necessary, killing for. I don’t dispute that the Revolution was a war that was, if not strictly defensive, at least defensive of the rights that are articulated in the Declaration of Independence. But there’s no doubt that the same Second Continental Congress that promulgated the Declaration of Independence also promulgated the Declaration of Causes and took action to raise a standing army to ensure its independence.
Patrick Henry might (or might not) have said, as William Wirt reported 42 years later, “Give me liberty or give me death,” but Wirt also records that his audience immediately responded enthusiastically, “To arms! To arms!” Peter can put away his sword: but in the cause of liberty, you have to dispense death in order to receive it. As it happens, Henry received liberty, and then death from stomach cancer in 1799.
So on the one hand you have the Christ of Israel who declares that suffering and death lead to glorious victory; on the other hand you have the prophets of the Enlightenment declaring a right to self-governance.
Both are damned good ideas.
But I really don’t see how they could be considered compatible.
The argument runs that violent defensive action is a form of love, but that’s an argument taken from some necessity way outside the circle of the gospels and epistles, where the judgment of God must suffice for those who raise their hands against the Kingdom and its children.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. attempted something of the way of the cross, and discovered that it works, if you don’t mind dying. Jefferson, more prudently, discovered that you can live to enjoy the Kingdom a little more happily if you don’t mind killing.
If one claims that Christianity is about loving one’s enemies and praying for those who persecute you, and that the Kingdom of God comes through self-sacrifice, and that even a pagan demonic government (as Paul characterizes the Roman government) is “instituted by God” to restrain evil but is passing away, I don’t see that as being remotely compatible with the idea that human beings have certain inalienable rights that must be protected through armed resistance.
I can see the draw of both philosophies.
But I can’t see them as being compatible in any way at all.
It’s not the Christian belief that the cross is something to embrace from the Roman end of the hammer. It’s to be embraced from the Jewish end of the nail.
And while I love my country, and I love liberty, I don’t think that it’s “Christian” in any sense at all, and I think there’s enormous danger that comes from pretending it is.
On the one hand, you dismantle the gospel as it’s contained in the scriptures and substitute for it one that’s laden with your current, historically conditioned ideas about what must be acceptable to your Messiah.
Where he said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” you give yourself license to conceal your handgun and follow him.
It also does damage to the ideals of the Founders of the United States.
They envisioned a secular, religion-blind state. It’s quite true that many of them were religious, but it’s equally true that they felt that reason, and not religious dogmatism or biblicism, must arbitrate public life. One might bring one’s religious morals to a public question, but one could not presume on religious authority to settle that question. The statehouse in their writings was not a place to thrash out theology but how best to govern people so that their liberty might best be maintained.
To say that they had God’s blessing is a useful thing for a religious person to say, and a way of saying, “1776 was a good moment in history.”
To say that the state risks losing God’s blessing by not following a certain course is also within one’s rights, and a religious way of saying, “Your policies do not meet with my approval.”
But it’s not an authoritative argument, nor is it an argument of any weight with the Constitution.
And I think that both the Christian religion and public life are diminished by the assumption that there was anything remotely Christian in the Revolution’s ideas and ideals, which were mighty indeed.
They betray the Founder of Christianity and his ideas and ideals.
And those also are mighty.
America, Founding Fathers, Non-Violence, Patriotism in Culture, Politics, Religion 
Reader Comments (2)
Huh. Plenty of the posts at Riparian Church bring out the contrarian in me to varying degrees; this one and the last didn't raise so much as a flutter of it. I'm familiar enough with (and in some cases, identify enough with) evangelical subculture that I usually feel I like I "get" where those folks are coming from, even where my beliefs strongly diverge from theirs, but the insistence that America is/was "a Christian nation" or that our country was founded on Christian values has always flummoxed me. Not only is not true to any meaningful degree that I can discover, I don't even understand what value there would be if it WERE true. What drives the desire to link America so closely with Christianity? And it is SUCH a strong desire for some folks--so much energy poured into the matter. Unfortunately, I haven't found a tactful way to do research on this one. I mean, I suppose I could just ask "WTH is up with that?" the next time my parents offer to loan me their church's video series on The Faith of the Founding Fathers . . . but I'm not sure it would result in a profitable discussion.
I can only say "yup!" and join you both in shaking my head in wonderment at the fervent, fervid drive to conflate American mythos with Christian liturgy. In their earliest incarnations, the two are just about antithetical. Their current incarnations, though, are becoming distressingly easier to conflate--much to the detriment of both.