We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
It can be a close thing, mistaking nationalism for patriotism, look too quickly and they vanish into each other. The prevailing exposition is to employ the two terms to help describe the one another, but I contend, that they are not the same, not the same at all.
Yesterday was the Fourth of July, a day that we, as a people have set apart, to, we are told, reflect upon and celebrate the American experiment, to recall the words of a hardy people put to pen by Thomas Jefferson. But that declaration wasn’t a commitment to American exceptionalism or the elevation of a peoples national interest irregardless of the rights of others. We simply do not, we must not, celebrate the birth ego, but instead the collective expression of loving your neighbor as yourself.
Patriotism, in its most pure and simple form, is the actuated love of neighbor; a commitment to placing others and their needs before your own, setting aside your own so that it will not be required of them and their children. This is the essence of love of country, that at it’s heart, patriotism is a love of people and place, that begins with your neighbor and your town that inescapably and simply ripples outward to touch all who hold that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” are indelible rights, granted to us and upheld by God, that all humanity innately grasps and holds to as foundational to the institution and preservation of a just and civil society. But that, that has all but been evaporated by the searing and insufferable heat of self interest, statism and the rapid emergence of a balkanized American society.
We, as the people-without which there is no country, no American Dream-set the tone and example for our leaders. Our leaders rise up in response to the cries of the citizenry, out of the collective ideals of the community; they often become messiah to our false faith in the redemptive power of the Republic. This is the reality, that much of what passes for political persuasion today is predicated on the belief that this or that regime can effect the sort of change that we have become convinced is fundamental to the continuance of the American species. Don’t mistake me, though, for as our leaders, for good or ill, are the Athena to our Zeus, so the establishment they comprise is the agency of our collective will (the contrast must be made, of course, between the expressed will of the vocal and the repressed will of the silent).
So, I choose to be a patriot of people and place, to set the needs of my neighbor and my village ahead of my own. In this way I can love the soldier and yet hate the war. It is how I can cherish my country yet disapprove of it’s policies. And it is how I can know that this isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore, but that it still has the opportunity and capital to be. The American Dream People and Place is a dream still worth having, so grip tight with every ounce of patriotism you possess and never let go. In the words of Langston Hughes,
Langston Hughes, novelist and poet, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
1. the doctrine or practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.
Christians, as God’s Covenant People, are not, were never meant to be, socio-politically oriented as liberators, or as agents of a distinct cultural mandate. Liberation and cultural patronage are the activities and purview of the common realm, of the Seculum. Because entrance into and continued membership in the Covenant Kingdom of God is not based upon a persons economic, intellectual, or cultural situatedness, it’s confessionally oriented. And on account of that, politics and cultural pursuits don’t fall within the paradigm of pilgrimage, the journey of God’s people through this present evil age. The People of God exist in a different covenantal orientation then the common man that he co-habitats with in the creation, the one in grace the other still ruled exclusively by law, united only in their natural occupation as image bearers. Michael Horton highlights this when he writes,
Intrinsic to humanness, particularly the imago, is a covenantal office or commission into which every person is born;…This is to say that “law”—in particular, the divine covenant-law—is natural, a verbum internum (internal word) that rings in yet is not identical to the conscience. The covenant of creation renders every person a dignified and therefore accountable image-bearer of God.
Even the fall did not eradicate the original revelation of God’s righteous law to the conscience; indeed, to this day this covenant law is in force: “Now we know that whatever the law says,” whether written on the conscience or on tablets, “it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world held accountable to God” (Rom. 3:19). The law brings hope of relief, but only the knowledge of breach. (v.20) The gospel, by contrast, is entirely foreign to the human person in this natural state. It comes as a free decision on God’s part in view of the fall and can be known only by a verbum externum (external word), an astounding announcement proclaimed that brings hope and confidence in our understanding before God (vv. 21-26). (Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology, pg 94)
And the gap only widens as the two disparate groups, one covenant keepers through Christ and the other covenant breakers through Adam, move eschatologically forward. The Church’s sword is blunted, affecting a spiritual nature rather than a civil one, into the cudgel of church discipline and excommunication and the magistrate is empowered by God to dispense justice to the godly and ungodly without partiality, relying not on revelation but on creation; a division is established between the Sacred and the Secular. Thus, if the kingdom of heaven is truly in a state of already/not yet, still lacking in earthly permanence, a dual citizenship must then be part of the nature of the Christian in the present age. The Christian is one who lives concurrently under the authority of the divine and the magistrate, being beholden to both, to the one functioning as one created in the image of God and affirming the solidarity of the human race and to the former as one in covenant with God who has redeemed and reconciled him to himself through the work of the cross. And activism, if left solely to the pursuit of the betterment of man is perfectly acceptable, but it is when the Gospel is cannibalized in order to justify the relevance of the Church and her Gospel to the culture that it sojourns in that activism becomes syncretism.
There is nothing inherently Christian about activism, yet that does not disqualify Christians from being activists. The essential element, though, which defends against the Gospel from being used as a resource for political action and manifesto, is motivation. The minute that we seek to act in the public arena because we are Christians with the express intent of spreading the Good News of The Gospel by transforming the culture or baptizing vocation, we have confused the two kingdoms and abandoned our role as pilgrims; intent on bringing heaven down now through the “sweat of our brow and the strength of our back”. We must recall that Christendom is a failed project; it resulted either in attempted genocide and or the forceful acquisition of land and their people under the auspices of manifest destiny while wearing the guise of converting the savages, which is neither ethically, morally, or theologically defensible. So, when the Gospel is placed within the shell of activism, what is distinctly Christian begins to be transformed into something more culturally recognizable, while what is secular (see culture) is made the concern of that which is sacred, twisting the message to fit the appetites of the audience. Activism in the Church flattens out any distinction between the two kingdoms to eventually politicize and moralize Christianity, leaving it as a rationalistic methodology that speaks the hollow rhetoric of religious connotation; always looking for the meaning the words affect rather than the meaning the words represent, the sign becomes greater than that which is signified. It devours Christianity to leave it stripped of a gospel, of a savior, while nonetheless attempting to maintain the illusion of transcendence. But in the end it will become a race that we cannot win, a faith we cannot have, in a messiah who shall never return.
As well, when the the Church becomes primarily a shelter, a refuge, for the less fortunate of society, it has jettisoned the otherworldliness of the Gospel for the historical Jesus of liberal theology. And though I’m certainly not suggesting that they all actively set out to subvert the message of the cross, the result is that they functionally deny it by harnessing the resources of the Church for social activism rather than the care of the congregation and the evangelization of the community because they interpret the transcendent through their navel. But then again, this is why the social Gospel is so appealing, it offers the kingdom now with no cost, being already in line with the natural tendencies of man rather than declaring the Gospel over and against the natural inclinations of mankind; offering not what is attractive and desired but what is irreducibly necessary.
The meta-narrative becomes lost in a Kantian induced postmodern miasma where nothing is true yet all receive affirmation and validation, the ultimate concern being to justify a Dionysian hedonism as the normative ethic, because man, when given the choice, will always choose himself rather then God. Yet the conscience (the natural law) stands in the way of that, with the Gospel offering absolution and an end to the accusations of the Law, but man would rather choose narcissism. But I don’t mean a narcissism in the classical sense, but one that collectively expresses man’s inherent love of himself and will to power, one that sets man not only above the rest of creation but above God himself as the source of that which is good and right in the world, in which the breaking of the covenant in Eden is seen as liberation from the oppression of “primitive myths” to finally be human. For them the Gospel, if it is good news at all, must be dealt with solely on the mortal plane, conflating any vertical activity into the horizontal as mere myth intended to justify militant social activism, moral/ethical improvement and to explain the common phenomena of the conscience.
In the end, the passivity of the Christian Pilgrimage is simply at odds with the activist inclinations and sympathies of the natural man. Man naturally wants to do to cause or affect change. But that is to practice dominion, to homestead, and it is certainly not the image of a pilgrim sojourning for a time in the midst of his journey.
In 1925 something happened, and to quote General Maximus, “what we do in life echoes in eternity“, and it is certainly true for this American life—that something was The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, otherwise known as The Scopes Trial or the Scopes Monkey Trial. For the sake of brevity, I am going to assume that you all passed American History in High School and not provide any sort of detailed accounting. Suffice to say that a school teacher, John Thomas Scopes, violated what was called the Butler Act in the state of Tennessee and was brought to trial, setting the stage for the creation vs. evolution debate to take a place of prominence in the American civil discourse from then on. In a sense, this is at the heart of the cultural/epistemological wars. What they were missing then and many still miss today is the difference between the narrative of existence and the scientific explanation of what is before us.
As preparatory, here are two definitions:
Science: The systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.
Narrative: For the this purpose, the grand story of existence.
Narrative knowledge produces a prescriptive impulse whereas the form that scientific knowledge embodies is fundamentally denotative. Though science can tell us the what, it can never move from empirical to moral. Science will always fail to tell us the why and the what for of existence, only the moral or prescriptive narrative can provide that. Thus science/fact is unable to create a cognitive matrix on it’s own that explains it’s own existence. So science, real science, is inherently non-religious, neither for or against, because science can produce no ethical impulse. Because the why is the narrative. The empirical only substantiates or disproves belief and or speaks ontologically when contextualized by the narrative. Science can never give you the why because it then would move from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from the empirical to the religious. That is why atheism is as religious as theism. Both purport to explain what is back behind what is.
But, and there always is a but, we mustn’t allow ourselves to imply or propagate the belief that the empirical can be found in the narrative in an embryonic state; there is no proto-science within the creation/fall/redemption narrative; science does not find itself subjugated to the narrative as its source of meaning as a practicum, but rather as the handmaid to the story. It is only when science attempts to become the narrative that it loses it’s legitimacy The real, modern tension between science and religion, Christianity specifically, arises when they are illegitimately juxtaposed and, being found insufficient to the task, are unnaturally inflated in order to achieve hegemonic status. It is only when they are seen concursive elements in the engagement of the creational and the revelational can they create a dramaturgical picture of existence that does not rely so much on paradox or Faith or Reason, as the common agreement of interaction.
Christianity and science are not at odds and they are only made to be when, well meaning but extreme, fundamentalist, both Christians and Atheists, abuse and confuse their claims in the dramaturgy of what is. Science is not liberating nor redemptive and Christianity, which is both liberating and redemptive, was not and is not intended or sufficient as an empirical compendium or encyclopedia. That I believe one is intrinsically more necessary than the other goes without saying and is the topic for another time.
, pg 94)
Way Station 