The three American crises of Christianity, culture, and government: Christian Idolatry, Part I

I have been struggling to write anything for the last several months.  The thoughts in my head I’ve wanted to share have been noisily rattling around, but I’ve been wrestling with despair and concern that whatever I write is going to be misunderstood.

We are living in a wild and dangerous time in America for people who want to communicate with everyone and not just with those who share their outlook and beliefs. 

It was worse during the Civil War, but other than that, this is the most polarized American society has been, where people are only willing to listen to those in their own political or social tribes and seek to villainize those who aren’t.

Most of us screen who we are willing to listen to by first determining what tribe they belong to – are they “liberal” or “conservative,” and, depending on the answer, we’ll either give them a listen or tune them out.

We need to move beyond that.  We need to listen to people who don’t identify with our tribes or else we’ll continue to be blind to our own faults – reform often starts with those on the outside looking in.

With that said, please hear me not as yet another tribal talking head on your TV screen or on a podcast, but instead as a person sharing his perspective – and it’s OK to disagree with that perspective.

I see three broad crises in America right now, one of which is with culture, one with government, and one with Christianity.  I’m linking the series of posts I’ll be writing about these crises under the heading “Christian Idolatry,” which has a couple layers of meaning. 

Idolatry is a biblical issue in which people worship a manmade statue as if it is a real god.  The surface problem is that something made by a human can’t be divine, because a real god can’t be created by a person.  The root beneath that surface problem is that people tend to put our trust and devotion – our worship – in the wrong things.  When we do that, we can turn anything into an “idol,” so to speak.

The first layer of meaning behind “Christian Idolatry” is that American Christians have many idols we don’t usually identify as idols, and those can range from celebrities to political leaders to ideas.  The second layer of meaning is that the most central idol is quite often an idea of what America itself is – we worship a specific idea of America.

This idolatry is connected to the three broad crises of culture, government, and Christianity, because there are idolatrous problems with each that are distinct and yet intimately connected.  To properly address any of these crises, you have to address them all.

And yet, this is hard to do, particularly for the Christian.  For the Christian, the Kingdom of God is bigger than the kingdoms of the world, though it’s the kingdoms of the world that draw the wrath of the prophets in scripture because they are often opposed to the methods and goals of the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God as described by Jesus is meek, humble, self-sacrificial, and devoted to loving servitude and the restoration of both human hearts and all of creation.  The kingdom(s) of the world as represented in Jesus’ time by the Roman Empire and its ruler, Caesar, is about loudly imposing its will on everyone through violence, brute force, intimidation, and fear.

In short, the Kingdom of God is about power working under people (motivating others to willfully choose to belong because of love) and the kingdom of the world is about power working over people (forcing them into submission through intimidation and fear).

The tension between the two kingdoms has been long debated (perhaps most famously – or infamously – in Augustine’s huge book The City of God), because – since the Kingdom of God does not force itself on people – there is a need to agree to some basic rules (laws) between the groups of people that make up societies in order to keep people safe while trying to avoid the methods used by Caesar.

As governments attempt to navigate providing order for their people without resorting to the ways of Caesar (though more and more governments seem to be instead embracing Caesar’s ways), there is a long Jewish and Christian tradition of holding the leaders of these governments accountable when they abuse their power and especially when they outright contradict the ways of God.

This is seen through the words and actions of several prophets in the Old Testament, most notably against the kings of Judah and Israel.

Stay with me here, because this is the point at which I will lose some of you – let’s call our present reality in America like it is: we greatly lack enough prophetic voices calling our political leaders (all of them) into account and, more crucially, calling out the faults and weaknesses and complicity in the ways of Caesar of many within the American church.

The words and warnings of the Old Testament prophets usually fell on deaf ears, and even Jesus said that his teachings could only be understood by those who were open to receiving them, whose hearts were willing to listen:

“The reason I speak…in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’  With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen but never understand, and you will indeed look but never perceive.  For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, so that they might not look with their eyes, and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn – and I would heal them.’  But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear” (Matt 13:13-16)

A common phrase Jesus repeats in the gospels is, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”  Again meaning, if you’re able to truly listen and take the risk that you might be wrong, then let your hearts be open to that possibility and hear.

We don’t really understand Jesus unless we appreciate how radical he was – the gospels state that the heart of his message to his fellow Jewish people was that they’d misunderstood God and their own religious tradition in several ways.  If Jesus would say that to the “church people” of his day, we can expect it’s something he would say to us, too.

We need to get in the practice of introspection and regularly asking ourselves if we are sharing any similarities with the people Jesus had the most problems with.

With prophetic warning and urgency, fellow Christians, I’m telling you we are.  We need to have eyes to see and ears to hear how we are, especially when we are tempted to close off discussion about anything we don’t like or that makes us uncomfortable.

Over the next five posts, I’ll be tackling America’s three broad crises one at a time – first, the crisis within American Christianity, second, the crisis within American society as a whole, and lastly the crisis within American government.

I’ve been feeling a strong prophetic urging on these issues for a long time, and a large part of it likely owes to my interests in theology, history, and political theory – I’m nearing completion of a seminary degree in ministry, and my undergraduate degree is in political science.

I hope you’ll be able to hear and receive the critiques that will follow as (for Christians) a call to seek the heart of God anew and be open to the possibility that you – that we – have strayed from God in crucial ways; and for all Americans, as a corrective on how we understand American history, and how there has always been a deep tension in American politics.

While I hope you as the reader can receive these words knowing they’re intended to do good (even if you disagree with them), I also know there will be those who won’t be able to receive them.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.