Recently, there has been quite a bit of buzz as Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and others have called for Americans to “take their country back” and return to our Christian roots. Lots of folks got upset a while back when President Obama famously said that “America is not a Christian nation”. Quite frankly, I am a bit confused by why they ever thought that it was a Christian Nation. Just when has the United States ever represented the ideals, the teachings or the example of Jesus of Nazareth?
Maybe it was actually before the actual founding of the United States of America, at the dawn of the European invasion of the American continent. You know, when Europeans ‘discovered’ land that people had been living on for centuries and took it from them at the point of the sword and later, the gun. Was it Christian charity when the European settlers waged a virtual genocide on the native peoples and reneged on countless treaties?#
Perhaps it was during the Constitutional Conventions, when the founding fathers had the chance to make slavery illegal, but chose not to because of financial interests. Was it when the countless ships flowed into the ports of the United States, bringing millions of African in chains to be sold in our town squares as so much chattel?
The Christian founders these people talk about – which president was that? The ones who owned slaves (at least twelve of them)1, the one who fathered children with them (Jefferson) or the ones who just lived in the house built by slaves (that would be all of them after Washington)2? Of the first five people to hold the office of President of the United States, four of them actually owned slaves while they were in office3.
When the nation finally decided to rid itself of the horror of human bondage, it resorted to war, with brother killing brother and families divided. In fact, the Civil War resulted in the death of more Americans than any other US war. Was this the result of following the teachings of Jesus to love our enemies and to resist not the evildoer? If it was not this war, which one was acceptable and pleasing to God?
When we forcibly removed thousands of Cherokee and other Native Americans from their ancestral homeland and forcibly moved them to reservations during the Trail of Tears – which part of Holy Scripture were we listening to then? Surely not the admonition to care for the stranger, or to love our neighbor as ourselves. 4
Was it between 1932 and 1972, when the US Public Health Service injected African American males with syphilis without their knowledge, in order to see what would happen?5 Was it when we killed several hundred thousand civilians by bombing with nuclear weapons a people who had already proposed surrender?6
Or was it during the era of Jim Crow, when separate but equal was the law of the land. Was this what St. Paul meant by his admonition that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”?7 Or was that verse our guide prior to 1919, when women were denied the right to vote for the politicians who would tax them and send their children off to war?
Was the Holy One most pleased with us when the Governor of Alabama, a Baptist, stood where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as President of the Confederacy and told us his policy was “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”8?
When was this Holy period in our history? When did the United States of America represent the unconditional love we see in Jesus to the world, or even to all our own residents? Is our understanding of the unmerited Grace we receive from God demonstrated by the over 1200 people the US has killed in the last 34 years to demonstrate that killing is wrong?9
I could go on and on. Vietnam. Watergate. Our lack of intervention in the Holocaust. Our toppling countless democratically elected officials in sovereign nations. Iraq. Haliburton. Ad Infinitum, Ad Nauseaum.
America is not a Christian Nation®. America is a political body, worse than some, better than others. As my friend Karen has eloquently said, God does not love America. God does, however, love Americans. Just like God loves Iraqis and Afghans and Osama Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein. And you.
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Notes:
#: Wikipedia places the high and low numbers of Native Americans killed by the European presence on the continent at between 2 million and 10 million.
1: The history of slavery and the Presidency is chillingly told by this graph from the University of Dayton Law School
2. See this article from CBS regarding the slave labor that went into the building of the White House
3. See #1, above
4. The Cherokee were but one tribe of many that was moved from their ancestral homeland as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (an action originally proposed by George Washington). Over 4,000 Cherokee died as a direct result of the forced relocation.
5. Disgusting
6:”The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.“ Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. (source)
8: George Wallace was a piece of work. But his most inflammatory remarks were made after leaving the Baptist faith and becoming “Born-Again”.
9: Here ya go. And don’t even get me started on how arbitrary it is.
oops double posted …
Hi – first time visiting here. Good post … at one time or another I’ve asked many of the same questions, but never compiled all this information. This will be a useful post to point people to when they are offended that I don’t jump on the bandwagon about ‘taking the country back’
well written. Thanks for this post Hugh.
Hugh, thanks for the frank talk and honest look at our hypocrisy!
I recently had a similar conversation with someone and some of the things I heard were that all of our presidents were “professed Christians”. I challenge that statement, but definitely challenge the inferred premise that we are therefore a “Christian Nation” founded on “Christian principles”. Our actions as you so wonderfully pointed out, have not at all been very “Christ Like”.
The other statement was that most of what makes America a place that people immigrate to is rooted in the actions of the “Church” and our Judeo Christian values. I think one could argue that given our history that is not true and that people immigrate here for political and economic reasons.
You and Karen are right on about this. Although we may want to believe that mommy/daddy loves us best, the truth is they love us the same. God loves all of us the same in ALL NATIONS. I don’t believe He likes labels very much either. He didn’t even label the animals, He left that up to us to do.
Thanks for this excellent reality check. There is no such thing as a “Christian nation;” that is a contradiction in terms.
Nice Hugh, one other caveat about Jefferson though, the DNA tests that have been done can only conclude that someone in his “paternal lineage” fathered the children, and the stance of the Foundation is that he was so very absent from Monticello due to his many travels and you know, Presidency and stuff that it was more likely his nephew or someone else in his family that was there all the time. At least that’s what gleaned last time I was at Monticello, and the wikipedia article explains it pretty well (near the bottom). Also worth a read, his letter to Abbé Grégoire in the same article regarding his stance on slavery. Yes he kept slaves but gave them a great life and didn’t let them go for fear of them going to a worse place or being killed. Again from the historians at Monticello. I’m not much into history but he fascinates me, a wonderful smart man, like you. Thanks
xoxo
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You write well, but you seem obsessed with slavery as proof that we aren’t very Christian. I see that as immaterial. You do remember that Jesus didn’t go around freeing slaves, either, right? (and yeah, there was slavery all around him in those days)
I am well aware that slavery existed in Biblical times. So, is your argument that slavery should still exist, since it is ‘Biblical”? Not sure how you can love your neighbor by uprooting them from their homeland and conscripting them to a life of forced labor and selling their children as so much chattel.
This is so true and you have pointed out things and events all true “Christians” should feel sadness about—I know I do each time I think about any of these events.
OK, So, how do we get all those “lovng Christians” to read this? I would love to see more comments from them as to how they can justify all of the actions in this blog. It’s a given that any response will be loaded with verses from the Bible, of course. That’s all they seem capable of doing. Certainly, free thinking is not part of the network of neurons in their cerebrum . In fact, I doubt that most of them would even be willing to read more than the first paragraph without going off like a Bible verses bomb. The few that do have a somewhat open mind are hard to find, in my opinion.
So, where can this be reposted?
The argument isn’t that slavery should exist, but rather that our moral judgment that it shouldn’t is not really derived from the Bible, or certainly not the Bible as a whole. The Bible *could* have been rather clear and explicit about ending slavery – the laws of our land did that in just so many “verses”.