The UnChristian Quest for a Christian America


04/21/2016 10:09 am ET
Lee C. CampHost of TokensShow.com, Professor of Theology, Lipscomb Univ.

Love of Country

I do love America.

How could one not love the forests of Maine; the gorges of the Cumberland plateau in Tennessee; the mesquite trees of west Texas; the ragged coastline of California? All of it like a hymn of praise, a song of thanksgiving for so much abundance and goodness.

And being a grateful citizen of Music City, I must stop there a moment: how could one not love the prophetic consciousness of Johnny Cash, the mesmerizing cadences of Don Williams, the angelic strains of Alison Krauss?

Or considering socio-political greats: how could one not admire the virtues of industry and wit in Benjamin Franklin; the democratic impulses of the nineteenth-century religious reformers; the cry for justice in the words of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the humility suffusing Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address; or the persistence and sheer human courage seen in the likes of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Chuck Yeager?—all like paeans to the human spirit.

One could go on and on, in all good faith, with more accounts of beauty and courage.

Christian Nation

Here in the Bible Belt at least, this rather honorable love for land and neighbor, however, gets conflated with another, less helpful construct: the myth of the Christian nation. “Conflated” is a word too little used or appreciated: the melding or melting of two ideas into one.

I am rather convinced that to conflate love of country with the myth—or the pursuit of—a Christian nation is bad news: bad for the country and bad for Christianity. To claim that the United States once was a “Christian nation,” or to seek to recover some supposedly lost “Christian nation” status, is bad news because it is historically false; misunderstands basic Christian theology and practice; and contends for a strategy that is sure to back-fire into resentment and hostility.

1. Historically false

Read more at  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-c-camp/the-unchristian-quest-for_b_9728054.html


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst...
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastr...
Read more

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Image
  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...
Read more