The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View …

CAN A NATION BE CHRISTIAN?

I am composing this installment of this series in the heart of southeast Asia, in the ancient kingdom of Siam, known today as Thailand. Since barely 1% of its population professes to be Christian, no one claims that this is a Christian nation. In fact the king, who embodies the nation, could not legally be a Christian. He, like most everyone else in Thailand, is a Buddhist, though there is a considerable number of Moslems in the southern provinces. Thailand stands alone in this part of the world in allowing freedom of religion. It is consequently inundated with missionaries, who seem to have minimal effect upon the Thai people even after a century of effort. This is why most of them work among the subcultures: the Chinese, the refugees from Communist countries, the many tribal peoples, all of whom are more receptive to the gospel than the Thais.

On this same journey I was a week in Japan where again no more than 1% of the population even professes the Christian faith, and this after three centuries of missionary effort. The religion is Shintoism and Buddhism, which have a close alliance, and no one says that Japan is a Christian nation.

But how about the western nations? Are not the European nations Christian, where a majority professes to believe in Christ and where a cathedral or a village church is a common sight? Is not the United States a Christian nation? Australia? Canada? Mexico? When “Christian” is used in its broadest sense the nations of the west, and perhaps a few others, are described as Christian.

My thesis herein is that there is no nation in the world that can properly be called Christian, nor has there ever been such a nation in all of human history. It is unlikely that there ever will be this side of the millennium when “the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rev. 11:15), but this may have to be left as an open question. It is probable that the world as we know it, for the foreseeable future at least, will never have a Christian nation. Our thesis further asserts that nations by their very nature are self-serving, even immoral, and cannot and will not be truly Christian. The most that we can hope for and work for is that a nation be just. But being Christian transcends justice in that love and mercy are the dominating virtues.

I have some obligation to define a Christian nation, though it is not easy. Is it a matter of percentages? If 60% of the people are truly, not just professing, Christians, would it be a Christian nation? 80%? 90%? Might the vast majority be Christians and yet the nation, a corporate entity ruled by laws (supposedly), not be Christian? Might a nation be great, free, democratic, and even humanitarian without being Christian? Might it be considerably influenced in its origin, history, constitution, laws, foreign affairs, politics, and economy and yet not be really Christian, just as an individual might be influenced by Christianity and yet not be a Christian?

For a nation to be Christian it would have to have those qualities essential to the Christian faith: a love for God and man as reflected in the life of Christ; an ethic of self-denial that puts others first; a manner of life motivated by mercy and compassion. A Christian nation, like a Christian, would not seek an advantage; it would seek the welfare of other nations before its own, even to its own hurt. Its leaders would be ruled by God and Christian imperatives, not by expediency.

Such a nation would not of course be perfect in Christian virtues, just as no Christian is perfect, but if truly Christian it would be exemplary among all nations of the world in seeking first the kingdom of God.

It is surely true that “righteousness exalts a nation,” as the Scriptures assure us, but where in all the world is such a nation?

Various myths about our own nation have nurtured the doctrine of a “Christian America.” These include the notion that this nation was founded by people in search of religious freedom, which is only partly true at best. Another is that our pilgrim fathers were exemplary Christians, which does not take into account their presumed mandate to destroy the Indian “savages” like Israel did the Canaanites, or their persecution of the Quakers.

Another myth is that the American Revolution was inspired by a spirit of religious revival and was therefore a “righteous” revolt against an ungodly nation, when in fact it was as “politically” motivated as revolts usually are. The main complaint of the colonies was the “taxation without representation” of the British parliament, which was not as oppressive as the Declaration of Independence implies, and no different from the way Puerto Rico and Washington, D. C. (who are taxed without representative voice) are treated today. To be sure, colonial America was about the freest place in the world in the 18th century (and they knew it!), and the British threat to that freedom was not nearly as great as it was made to be, which explains why there was so much loyalist sentiment.

Cut it as you will, the colonists rebelled against Britain for being “oppressive” while they themselves held slaves, murdered Indians, and persecuted the unorthodox, “witches” as well as Quakers. Colonial America was hardly exemplary in its Christian faith, but has our country ever been exemplary, despite some definite Christian influences? Not only have we written dark pages into our history by our treatment of Indians and blacks, but we staged one of the most gruesome civil wars ever, which not only questioned our presumed “Christian origins’” but threatened our survival as a nation.

Another major misconception is that our founding fathers were models of Christian liberty and based the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights upon the Bible, thus giving rise to the myth that God had raised up America to be the millennial kingdom. That our nation’s founders knew the Bible (as did most educated people of their day), quoted it, and were influenced by it is true, but we can hardly conclude from this that they were serious disciples of Christ, or even that they were consistent in their love of freedom.

Most of them (James Madison would probably be an exception) were deists and humanists who rejected anything supernatural in religion, though they did believe in God and invoked his providential care upon the young nation. Yet they viewed as superstition such basic Christian beliefs as the deity and resurrection of Christ.

While George Washington fought the British in the name of freedom, it do not bother him to own 153 men, women, and children as slaves, whom he never freed, while Thomas Jefferson owned 200 slaves while writing about “unalienable rights” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If the righteousness that exalts a nation is to be found anywhere, it would be in its courts of justice. But the highest court of our nation has sometimes seriously sinned against the most basic human rights. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 classed millions of our fellow Americans as property, the chattel of their owners, with no more rights than their cattle. In the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that a Louisiana man, one-eighth Negro, could not occupy a railroad car designated for whites only. The court rejected the complaint that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” This is the case in which Justice Harlan, the lone dissenter, wrote those famous words in protest: “In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” While that is an eminently Christian statement, it was the minority opinion of the Court of 1896, a minority of one!

I recall from my boyhood days in Dallas the continued effects of this ruling. The streetcars were segregated with signs designating “Colored” and “White” sections, with the coloreds always seated in the back. When there was standing room only, a black person, boarding at the front, would have to worm her way to the rear so as to stand in her proper place. If there were seats available in the “White” section but not the “Colored,” she still had to go to the rear and stand. I grew up practicing this sort of discrimination, and the Supreme Court of our “Christian nation” had’ ruled that such practices did not treat the Negroes as inferior!

And only the judgment of God can reveal the horrendous effects of a more recent Supreme Court decision (1973) that has projected us into a program of mass killing comparable to anything invented by Nazi Germany, the unthinkable practice of “abortion on demand.” The current rate is 1.5 million abortions a year, many of which are late-term pregnancies. Some babies live despite efforts to kill them, and medical people are aghast at what to do about this “dreaded complication,” which is sometimes resolved by allowing the child to die through inattention.

It is nonetheless the case that the United States has more going for it in terms of Christian influence than any other nation, and its Judeo-Christian heritage is the main reason why it is the greatest country in the world. This is not a prejudicial view, for it was expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian in about 1829, that the Christian faith had made young America the most enlightened and the freest of all nations. Another outsider, G. K. Chesterton, in the early 1900’s referred to America as a nation with the soul of a church.

The principles of the Protestant Reformation were partly responsible for this influence, especially the biblical principle of inherent rights which the reformers put before the “divine right” of monarchs. The Reformation principle of the fallenness of man also influenced the colonists, persuading them that all men are equal and dependent on a high power.

There is thus inherent in our nation’s founding documents the conviction that man not only has a Creator who governs in the affairs of men, but that man is incapable of directing his own way or being his own lawgiver and judge. Man is not to trust even himself. He must be ruled by laws, not by men, and these laws are natural and God-given. Law cannot therefore be what some judge or fuhrer says it means. It can be only what God says it is. Our founding fathers would therefore have been uneasy with the statement of a recent Supreme Court judge: “The law is what the Court says it is.”

These facts support the thesis that while America has been uniquely blessed with a substantial Judeo-Christian heritage, it has nonetheless, like other nations, been guilty of cruelty, greed, and oppression. We have had our Christian influences, but we have not been all that Christian. While we are a nation uniquely founded upon principles of justice, equality, and freedom, we have ourselves proved our founding fathers right (just as they themselves proved it!) that man is not to be trusted with such blessings, and so there must be laws to protect the dispossessed. It is ironical that a nation so blessed with liberating principles has been somewhat less than exemplary in its treatment of its most deprived people.

Until recent years Americans have had a positive if not romantic attitude toward their heritage. The national anthem, the unfurling of Old Glory, the pledge of allegiance which declares we are a nation under God, and the ceremonies of the Fourth of July have had deep meaning. But in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and various foreign entanglements that our first president warned against there is considerable disenchantment with such notions as “love for God and country.” Our flag waving over the land of the free and the home of the brave no longer arouses the feelings it once did. An alarming number of our people seem to be ashamed of being Americans.

We Christians in America should have an informed, balanced view. Like our Lord, we are not of this world even though we are in it. As citizens of two kingdoms we will be responsible to both, but we will realize that all nations of the earth are by their very nature at enmity with God and are not and cannot be truly Christian. We are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, permeating our nation and this world with Christian goodness, until such time as the One who sits upon the throne makes all things new, which will include a transformation of the nations of the world.

As informed Christians we know that America did not lose her virginity in Vietnam and that sin in Washington did not begin with Richard Nixon and Watergate. America has never been a virgin. She was born in sin and shaped in iniquity amidst sinful revolution, as nations usually are. But like fallen man, our nation is a mixture of good and evil, and we believe it has ingredients in its heritage that makes for greatness. We can make a more responsible Christian response to our kind of world with this more balanced view.

Like Jacob who leaned upon his staff even in his dying hour, we realize that we are pilgrims in this world, regardless of earthly citizenship, and our staff is never beyond our reach. We are on our way home. As a pilgrim community we are in this world to be a blessing. Being a blessing to our own nation begins with an honest evaluation of where we really stand in terms of the values and principles we cherish. —the Editor

 

The Christian world view teaches a unified view of truth. Its principles deal in absolutes that do not vary according to circumstances but should, in fact, govern the actions of man as he responds to constantly changing conditions. - John W. Whitehead