A while back I outlined my concerns with American Christians who too easily confuse the sacred and the secular, uncritically assuming America's moral superiority and divine favor as a "Christian nation."
In the latest edition of The New Pantagruel, Michael J. Baxter has written an article along much the same lines. He responds to a post-9/11 editorial by Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things. Baxter critiques Neuhaus's assertions that America is a "Christian nation" and that America fights on the side of godly truth and justice in its war against terrorism. He also has some very interesting things to say about Neuhaus's handling of the anonymous, second-century Letter to Diognetus, a commentary on the character of Christians as citizens in the ancient Roman world.
He says:
On this (properly contextualized) reading of the Letter to Diognetus, the church is the one community in which the obligations of Christians to the cities of this world are properly ordered to the love of God. For this reason, the cities of this world are never “under God” in such a way that Christians may pledge their allegiance to them. Such an allegiance is proper only to Christ and the church. Indeed, in view of the entire Letter to Diognetus, it becomes apparent that the primary concern of its second-century author is to enjoin Christians to avoid worshipping the false gods of the world’s cities, gods whose patronage are presented in the city’s mythoi as essential to their security and flourishing. But this is always accomplished by shedding blood, the blood of those who protect the city from its enemies. Beyond the danger of worshipping the gods of various cities, there was also the danger of worshipping the gods of Rome, a particular concern in the Letter to Diognetus. These gods plausibly promised a peace that would reign throughout for the entire empire, the Pax Romana, and yet, like the many forms of civil peace in the ancient world, it was a “peace” founded on imperial violence that was, as the Christians saw it, not true peace at all, not the peace of Christ.
All this talk of Christians worshipping the false gods of the Roman Empire would be quaintly irrelevant were it not for the fact that Roman civil religion, or what Augustine called “civil theology,” has its counterparts in modern conceptions of civil religion, such as the one articulated by Neuhaus, which promises, in effect, a Pax Americana. But unlike the Christians living under pagan Rome, Christians in the United States face the more challenging temptation of living in an imperium that claims to be Christian....
What is lacking in Neuhaus’s vision is an ecclesiology that relativizes the notion of “one nation under God” with the principle, so to speak, of “one church under God.” Such an ecclesiology is evident in the Letter to Diognetus in the analogy of the church as a soul that gives the world with a unity it would otherwise not have. Like all analogies, this body/soul analogy must be carefully interpreted so as to underscore that the soul can never be detached from the body, but rather is the form of the body. In this sense, the church is a soul that gives form to a body whose members are united to Christ and to each other by the power of the Holy Spirit and whose communal life is marked by a bond of charity that extends throughout the world. This is why the Apostle Paul describes baptism as being engrafted into Christ’s body. This is why he stressed the intrinsic link between the Lord’s Supper and the unity that is a mark of the Christian community (I Cor 11:17–34). This is also why he exhorted the members of the church to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God and not to conform to the world (Rom 12:1–2). The image here is of the priesthood of the Levites, the tribe designated by God to make animal or cereal offerings for the sake of the reconciliation of all Israel; but now Christians unite themselves with the offering of the Son to the Father, so that through the power of the Holy Spirit they become “a chosen race, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people set apart” (1 Peter 2:10). But if Christians themselves are “a holy nation,” then at times they will not conform to the aims and purpose of the modern nations, particularly when they claim to be objects of Christian allegiance in a time of war.
Though Baxter's article critiques a Catholic and is written for Catholics, much of what he has to say remains true for Reformed Protestants. Though it is a good thing for Christians to seek to influence American culture and politics, we must be careful to proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ, God as He has revealed Himself, over all areas of life--not the god of American civil religion. We must always remember that God's "holy nation" he has chosen is the community of the redeemed elect, not the United States or any other modern political entity.
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