I have been giving a good deal of thought lately to patriotism and to Christianity. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the number of people who are not the least bit reluctant to make judgments about a person’s patriotism or religious commitment or both.
Although the phenomenon is not new, it reached a fever pitch during the interminable presidential campaign. The political campaigns, aided and abetted by the Internet and the media (especially cable television), gave legitimacy to this judgmental mood.
A few snapshots: A congressional candidate said she thought Barrack Obama was “very anti-American” and that the media should investigate members of Congress who she thought were not “pro America.” A senate candidate tried to pin a Godless label on her opponent, who happened to have been a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher. A vice presidential candidate said she was happy to be campaigning in a part of the country that was “pro America.”
People who count themselves as Christians, many of whom I know and like, happily circulated the most scurrilous items about Obama, cleverly posed in the form of questions, as if that absolved them of responsibility for what they were doing. They implied that he was a secret agent of Islam (perhaps they’ve seen too many reruns of The Manchurian Candidate) and they argued that even if he went to a Christian church, he couldn’t possibly be a patriotic American if he heard the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and didn’t walk out (I’m sure they carefully read through Rev. Wright’s sermons and weighed the context of those brief video clips that we all saw.)
No matter how acceptable it might have become, I think judging another’s religion or patriotism is a dangerous game.
In both cases, the people doing the judging are demanding conformity to their ideas of how Christians and patriots should behave.
But patriotism often demands nonconformity.
James Bryce, a British jurist, historian and statesman, observed, “Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”
Mark Twain once wryly observed, “The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which.”
On a more serious note, he wrote, “Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.”
Christians probably have a longer history of nonconformity than patriots do.
Thomas Jefferson counted the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom along with the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia as the only accomplishments worthy of noting in his epitaph.
The preamble to the statute is a sentence long enough to give an English teacher heart failure, but Jefferson’s points are worth considering:
“God has created the mind free, so that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion … the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, has established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world …. .”
Jefferson’s correspondence indicated that he was equally concerned with the interference of the church in affairs of state.
Too bad he isn’t around to offer his insights on the present role of politics in religion and vice versa.
If that’s not enough, the Bible itself has a warning for Christians in Matthew 7:1-2: Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make, you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
Wearing a flag lapel pin doesn’t make one a patriot. Quoting the Bible doesn’t make one a Christian.
Sinclair Lewis had a grim vision of the danger of mixing religious certainty with patriotic certainty: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
