A Christian Nation?

A Christian Nation

There’s a myth in America today that this country was founded as a Christian country, by Christians. Suffice to say this is not the case; Jefferson, for instance, was simply not a Christian, and this went into the first amendment. The wording of the founding documents of this country are based on European philosophy and on English Common Law; while that common law traces a distant ancestry to Judaic code, it is a faulty argument to contend that it is derived from Christianity. And it’s a good thing, too, because a morality that is legislated externally by the secular authority is a less meaningful morality.

But lets get away from the topic of legislation. What if we really had a Christian nation? What would that look like?

I think the best way to describe a Christian nation would be as a nation of Christians, governed by Christian principles of governance. For simplicity, I’m going to stay away from the latter for now. What would a nation of Christians accomplish?

In Luke 10, Jesus sends out 72 early disciples. He sends them with nothing and tells them to heal the sick and tell them the kingdom of God is near. When they returned, they told Jesus, “Lord, even the Demons submit to us in your name!”

Heal the sick. I never quite understood that one, because I’ve never managed to miraculously heal someone’s illness. But now we have a lot of medical technology… if you have the money for it. Cancer treatments, heart treatments, transplants, and today biggest of all, antiretroviral medications. So our nation of Christians should start by putting our resources into healing the ills of the world, and specifically HIV/AIDS.

The kingdom of God is near when we engage in the world in the way Christ told us to.

The next thing that a nation of Christians would do is love our neighbors. On a national scale, this means no more aggressive war; we could only be militarily involved in curbing aggression. We would have fought WWII; we would not have fought Vietnam or Iraq. But loving our neighbors would go so far beyond that.

Deuteronomy 10:18: He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.

The fatherless are a sadly growing group in our society. It may seem just a result of divorce and out of wedlock parenting, but these spring from a degradation of respect for women in our society, and oftentimes from domestic violence. It is our duty as Christians to look after the fatherless. So in a Christian nation, every neighbor would be doing all we could, financially and socially, to assist children in single-parent households.

As Christians, we would love the strangers in our midst. This would mean an end to the immigration controversy: we would embrace and love these people and help them to integrate into our society.

“Sell all you have and give to the poor.” If the wealthiest of our society gave even 10% of what they have and earn to the poor, we wouldn’t even need a welfare system. Yet I hear complaints from the wealthier (and by that, I mean the nonpoor) that their money is taken away to be given to “undeserving” poor people, namely those on medicaid and TANF. But could you imagine if the wealthy really did give all to the poor? There wouldn’t be any more poor! Not in this country, anyway. We’ll see what we’ll accomplish on the global level.

A word on wealth inequity. According to the Wall Street Journal (“Plutonomics,” January 8, 2007) the rich in America control 90% of the wealth and 60% of the annual spending. Wow. And that is in the country that, comprising 5% of the world’s population, produces 20% of its income. (CIA World Factbook, 2008).

It is based on these simple facts that I can see what America could accomplish both domestically and globally if we used biblical principles to govern the use of our wealth. If we who earn the most gave a lions share of it to the poor abroad and here, just imagine what would happen.

I have so much more to say, but I don’t want this article to become a book. But a few quick words on what we would accomplish internationally.

If we ended war by loving our international neighbors, we would free up a massive and mobile labor force in the form of the US Military apparatus. A million soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors around the world would be empowered to engage in humanitarian missions. When an earthquake or a tsunami happened, we would be nearby to render aid, to lift rocks and drain floods, to rescue people with helicopters and boats. More controversially, if our weaponry was not engaged in a selfishly motivated war, we could use it to rescue children in the war torn parts of Africa and from brothels in Asia.

If we engaged our agricultural capacity and technology to places abroad, we could simply end world hunger.

If we stopped turning a blind eye to sweatshop labor and insisted on a fair wage and reasonable conditions for every worker, we could end the global labor crisis.

A Christian Nation. 301 million neighbors loving one another and the world. Imagine it.