Christian Patriots

 

As so many people who are, I strongly suspect, Patriot Christians, actually think they are Christian Patriots it must be the case that Jesus, who they follow with such devotion, had a great deal to say about patriotism and unconditional love of country. What a surprise then when we turn to the Gospels and find total silence on the subject. Christ enjoined love of God and of neighbor and self. Neighbor is NEVER defined in the New Testament as those who belong to the same nation as you. Nor is love of country EVER commanded in the Sermon on the Mount or in the discourses of John where Jesus lays out the demands of the Kingdom of God and the charity which is its founding principle. If patriotism is essential to God’s kingdom then Jesus does not belong to it. That might be just what some of his contemporaries thought and by contemporaries I mean the people who killed him. Zealots and others interpreted messianic hopes in terms of a worldly kingdom, a nation in the exact sense that Christian patriots understand it. This would be a NEW and more powerful Israel/America. Alas, standing before Pilate, with his physical life at stake, Jesus witnessed that this was not his intention. He said, in words that must have sounded foolish and not at all like John Wayne, that his kingdom was not of this world. In fact he had been offered such a kingdom by Satan himself and had rejected it. The Kingdom of God , he insisted, was not a kingdom as Hebrew patriots understood it. Indeed, the early church came to understand that the Kingdom of God was a universal spiritual brotherhood. It was not an earthly polity at all that inherited God’s promises to Israel but a spiritual one that was in this world in many ways (how could it not be) but not of it. This meant there was no longer need for a ‘sacred nation’ in the Old Testament sense. This belonged to the old dispensation: it was a type but not an antitype (i.e the fulfillment of a type). Thus, any reversion to the idea of a sacred nation or a chosen people would be as unnecessary as reverting to the Jewish dietary laws.             

I say all this because there are Christians in the United States who believe they live in a chosen nation and a New Israel. Worse there are (for reasons I can hardly begin to fathom) many Christians in the U.K., Australia and Canada who believe them. I would like to point out to these people that there is, as far as I can tell, not a scintilla of Biblical warrant for this idea. Of course, it could be that I am possessed by a demon or the spirit of Jezebel or Ahab. It could be that I am either a Haman or one of the wimpy people who went along with Haman. I realize that for many of them God has revealed these things not in scripture but in private dreams and visions. Well, alas, he has not revealed these things to me nor do I have any idea by what standard or criterion I am supposed to give credence to them. External church governance has many frustrations but its overwhelming virtue is that it does not put us at the whim of ‘prophets’ and ‘visionaries’ who are prophets and visionaries on nothing but their own say so. I do not accept Q or dreams about the Holy Spirit brooding over Trump as a distinct stream of revelation. Fine as it is I do not hold the Declaration of Independence to be equal to the Gospel or Revolutionary heroes like Paul Revere to be equivalent to the heroes of Joshua and Judges. Christianity is NOT a myth of national redemption OR a myth of national glory and, to be blunt, nation states in the modern sense barely existed for much of its history. You are putting the temporal in place of the eternal in the clearest possible way. Please note though, that I am not saying this in rage or contempt but simply sadness. If that makes me a servant of the Kingdom of Darkness so be it but, frankly, I think I’m in good company there.    

 

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