Hello Everyone,
This morning I was going about my normal routine involving the consumption of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a brief scan of the facebook feeds when I saw a youtube link someone had posted. By the status that contained the link, I knew it was something political, so I clicked it to find out. Apparently, President Obama made a recent trip to Turkey and participated in what appeared to be a town hall type meeting with some Turkish official. The title of the video is “Obama In Turkey “We Do Not Consider Ourselves A Christian Nation”. The video has had more than 20,000 views in the almost two days it has been posted and most of the comments contain either exclamation points, capitalized letters, profanity, or all three. There are supposed Christians expressing their fear that the final “nail in the coffin” is coming for “Christian America” and there are liberals slinging all sorts of shots at what they consider to be the mass idiocy that is the evangelical right.
This issue of America’s inherent Christianity (or the increasing loss of it) is a big issue for both conservative Christians and liberals in our day. But is America inherently Christian? Conservatives need to ensure that their history is right lest they create an entire ideology that is based on historical fallacies. As Christians, we not only have to do the latter, but we also need to examine whether our political beliefs are really “Christian” and more importantly, hold the true Gospel and its bearer, the Church, in their proper place. With that said, I hope to address both some history and some thoughts on Christian politics.
If by “Christian nation” one simply means that America currently is and has been predominately filled with Christians, then this post could end here and there wouldn’t be so many books about it. What many conservative Christians mean by “Christian nation” is that America, from its founding, was built on Christian principles by men who were Christians and is therefore a Christian nation. First, let’s look to whether the Founding Fathers were Christians. According to some statistics I found, of the first 6 presidents, 5 were Unitarian or Deist. In case you are unaware what Unitarians and Deists are, they’re not Christians. Both held morality and ethics as the chief end of religion and that God, though real, was not involved in the affairs of this world. A common name for the Deist conception of God is “The Great Clockmaker” in the sense that God created the universe by “winding it up” and then left it to tick according to natural law. Obviously, this is not the Biblical picture of God and Thomas Jefferson was so committed to this view that he revised Scripture by removing all references to the miraculous, leaving only “Christian ethics”, thus creating what is called the Jefferson Bible. Unitarians are by definition not Trinitarians; they deny the Trinity and instead hold God as a single person along with a host of other heresies including a denial of the deity of Christ.
So if many (maybe most, but not all) of our Founding Fathers held to views along the Deist and/or Unitarian lines, then why is it so easy for many of us to see them as orthodox brothers in Christ set on establishing a nation to encourage Christianity? The answer, I think, is a lack of understanding both of Enlightenment philosophy and the Gospel of Christ. What makes matters most confusing is the abundance of quotes we have from them in which they proclaim themselves to be Christians (Unitarians to this day label themselves Christians), followers of Christ, believers in God, etc. I found a website called www.faithofourfathers.net which contains a collection of quotes from many of the Fathers attempting to prove their Christianity. Many of them, on the surface, appear quite Biblical, but closer examination exposes something otherwise. Thomas Jefferson said he supported “the general precepts of Jesus” and was a “disciple of the doctrines of Jesus” and Noah Webster claimed that the basis of education was “the principles of Christianity”. When considering these quotes, ponder the fact that a key tenet of Unitarianism is that the life of Jesus “is the exemplar model for living one’s own life”.
So the questions for us are: Do “Christian precepts” constitute Christianity? Is Jesus our “exemplar model” for life?
Biblically speaking, another term for “Christian precepts” is the Law and considering many of the Founders understood Christianity as primarily morality, this would make sense. But, again, does the Law lie at the foundation of Christianity? No. The Gospel is that every human being enters this world with Adam as his mediator inheriting his rebellious nature and in exercising this sinful nature in sin, is therefore abhorrent to the Holy God and will suffer the punishment of his lawlessness for eternity. But God, in his infinite mercy, sent his only Son Jesus as the second Adam, to fulfill the Law that all of us break and none of us keep, and stand as the mediator of the Elect, his flock, before God where he declares us righteous. The reward for this imputed righteousness is citizenship in the Church, which will one day culminate in the Coming of Christ where we will live in the New Eden for eternity.
Unfortunately, many Christians in America do not understand this beautiful Gospel today. Studies have been conducted to discover the true beliefs of evangelicals and the results of one made the researcher coin a term for what many American Christian young people really believed. The term was “moralistic therapeutic deism” which was defined by beliefs like: “1. “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.” 2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.” 3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” 4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.” 5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.”
You may see where I am going with this. If many Christians in America actually hold Deist beliefs, then when looking upon the Founding Fathers who, in practice, share their belief that Christianity is “being good”, they will see them as brothers in Christ. The problem is that anyone who holds that salvation comes by Law doesn’t see Christ for the Savior that he is. Jesus is not first our exemplar, not first our role model (this is the heresy of Pelagianism), he is primarily the God-Man that received all the blazing wrath meant for us miserable offenders who in ourselves, could never acquire merits for salvation in the eyes of a Holy God.
So, is America a Christian nation? Yes, in the sense that it is built on some Biblical principles such as the dignity of the individual as a bearer of the Imago Dei But America is also heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, in my opinion, more so than Christianity. Again, as I have hopefully expressed, Biblical principles do not constitute Christianity. As Matthew 7:21 indicates, there will be many followers of “Christian precepts” who will be told, “Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness”. That is a sad and painfully ironic end to those who seek salvation by law to in the end by “workers of lawlessness”. The fact is that the only polity that is truly “Christian” is the Church, the Ekklesia, the Bearer of the true Gospel of Christ Jesus.
Quotes:
www.faithofourfathers.net
www.wikipedia.com (Unitarianism)
http://www.christianpost.com/Opinion/Columns/2005/04/moralistic-therapeutic-deism-the-new-american-religion-18/index.html