They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes.
I did not grow up in a churchgoing household. My father and mother had left their respective churches (Roman Catholic and Missouri Synod Lutheran) as teenagers. Like many 1950s parents, they kept me away from church as a child and left it to me to make religious decisions for myself.
I guess I showed them.
I didn’t actually enter a church building until I was in college, and even then it was for an anti-Vietnam War teach-in. But I began to be intrigued with what I saw there, so in the spring semester of my freshman year I took a Religious Studies survey course on Christianity.
Now if you’re an 18-year-old secular humanist kid in a Religious Studies class where all of the other people seem to have grown up going to Sunday School, you start at a disadvantage. The only thing I knew about Jesus in the spring of 1968 was that he had been born in a barn. Moses and all those other guys were strangers, too.
So how to make up the deficit? I shrink from admitting this now, but hey, I’m on the other side of a long working life in the church, so what the heck? I tried to catch up to my classmates in scripture knowledge by making my way to the college bookstore and buying—you guessed it—the two-volume set of Cliff’s Notes on the Bible.[i]
Now I wish I could tell you that a couple of nights with this dubious study guide made me the equal of all my freshman Bible whiz classmates, but the sad truth I learned is shared by Cliff’s Notes customers everywhere: those things are useless. They’re written by teachers who work at colleges you would never want to attend, and they tend to consist of mere plot summary and character analysis. And the problem with the Bible in both its testaments is that plot summary isn’t much help. (“Moses leads Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.” “Jesus takes a walk by the lake.”) And analysis of what they always call “key characters” doesn’t get you very far, either. (“Paul: enigmatic tentmaker who travels the Mediterranean.” “Ezekiel: weirdo who sees strange visions in the sky.”)
I begin with this embarrassing story because today is Independence Day, and I’m sorry to say, we are currently enduring a lot of crazy talk about America’s relationship with Christianity in general and with the Bible in particular. You may have heard of the publication of the “God Bless the USA Bible”, an edition inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood’s anthem, “God Bless the USA”. In the words of the publisher,
God Bless the U.S.A. Bible
Easy-to-read, large print and slim design, this Bible invites you to explore God’s Word anywhere, any time. This bible has been designed so that it delivers an easy reading experience in the trusted King James Version translation. This large print Bible will be perfect to take to church, a bible study, to work, travel, etc.
This Bible also features a copy of:
· Handwritten chorus to “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood
· The US Constitution
· The Bill of Rights
· The Declaration of Independence
· The Pledge of Allegiance
[https://godblesstheusabible.com]
While they’re at it, I wish the editors this Bible had incorporated the rule book of Major League Baseball, but that’s probably too much to ask.
The publication of the “God Bless the USA Bible” is yet one more troubling sign of the conflation of a kind of Christianity with exceptionalistic ideas of American destiny. It’s a movement some are coming to call “Christian Nationalism”, and its implications aren’t as harmless as the promoters of this Bible seem to think they are: we regularly see pastors in pulpits now claiming the current president is not legitimate; churches organizing rallies for the Second Amendment, claiming that gun rights are divinely given; pressure on school boards to ban any discussion of systemic racism in American history. So far, all efforts to find evidence of Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss in the scriptures have proved fruitless, but I’m sure Christian Nationalists will continue to look.
Today is both Sunday and Independence Day, a double holiday for American Christians. It is important for those of us who try both to follow Jesus and love our country to articulate how we might do these two things at the same time without confusing the two.
There are many ways to describe America, but I have always thought of it as more of an idea than as a place or a particular group of people. This American idea is not a particularly religious idea. It is a humanistic vision of the balance of individual liberties and the common good. In the words of Walt Whitman,
For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the genuine union, when we come to a mortal crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects -- but the fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power. [Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas”]
America, says Whitman, is a “fervid and tremendous IDEA”. We are a community of human beings with competing interests who have come together and pledged our “lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the idea that a society can foster both individual liberty and the general welfare. There has always been a tension in American life between those who think it’s all about personal freedom and those who emphasize the common good. But the genius of America, the “fervid and tremendous IDEA” in Whitman’s words, is that we have, over time, and until recently, managed to hold these competing values in balance.
In the gospel for today, Jesus says to his companions,
No person can serve two masters; for they will either hate the one and love the other or, be devoted to the one and despise the other. [Luke 16: 13, altered]
In Luke’s context Jesus is talking about God and wealth. But we could well apply the idea of divided loyalties to the question of religion and patriotism. All authentic religions stand in what I would call a “prophetic tension” with their cultures. The pressure on all of us people of faith is to try to relieve that tension by making a false accommodation of the two—to have the religion serve and bless the state. We Episcopalians, as descendants of the established, official Church of England, are particularly vulnerable to this tendency. And, as one who served a place we paradoxically call the “National Cathedral” I know this problem “up close and personal” as they used to say on Wide World of Sports. The tendency to deify the nation can be almost irresistible. Loving God and loving your country are powerful drives, and we want to surrender to both by mixing them up together into one great indivisible thing. But love each as we do, we cannot ever conflate them. America is a wonderful, liberating idea. But it is not God. And we shouldn’t pretend to find evidence for its exceptionalism in our Bibles.
What we do find in our Bibles, of course, is all kinds of guidance about the kind of society we can and should be building together. The Hebrew prophets hold Israel to account for the ways in which it has forsaken economic and social justice. Jesus responds to Roman imperialism with a vision of abundant life lived in community and solidarity with others. The Bible is full of incisive commentary on national political life, but it tends to be more critical than most customers of the “God Bless the USA Bible” might expect. The Bible actually points us toward a more visionary, diverse, compassionate, and inclusive vision for our country than Christian Nationalists would like. But it also reminds us, sometimes painfully, of how often we have resisted that vision over the course of our history. A nation that read its Bibles carefully could never have countenanced slavery, Indian genocide, and the oppression of women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans. We have engaged the Bible not to be challenged by it but only to affirm our prejudices. And that’s not reading the Bible at all.
There are many reasons for all of us to love both God and country, but very few reasons to confuse the two. As Jesus says,
No person can serve two masters; for they will either hate the one and love the other or, be devoted to the one and despise the other. [Luke 16: 13, altered]
So: let’s continue to read our Bibles. And let’s continue to study the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The more we do so critically, the more we will see the prophetic tension in which our faith and our nation continue to stand. On this Independence Day, let’s give thanks for what Whitman called the “fervid and tremendous IDEA” of America, of a place that can both respect individual people and support the welfare of the larger community. And let’s give thanks for a Biblical faith that calls us continually to hold that idea and our performance of it to account. We will always stand in this prophetic, creative tension between God and country. But as the teachings of Jesus and the lives of Bible reading Americans like Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, and others have shown us, that’s a creative and vibrant place to stand. Amen.
[i] One on the Old Testament and one on the New. Actually, they were Monarch Notes, but you get the idea.
