Wednesday, October 22, 2003

One Nation "Under God"

Recently, at a meeting attended by a number of public school teachers and administrators, I thoroughly embarrassed myself by muffing the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. While everybody around me was still on "under God," I was already racing ahead to extol the virtues of liberty and justice for all. One of my table partners took great delight in wondering out loud just what kind of a minister I was, anyway.

In truth, messing up the God reference is the way it usually goes for me. Maybe I would get it right if I said the Pledge often enough. But it still would not be easy. For just when they were putting in the "under God" phrase for the first time, I was finishing up my twelfth year of public school saying the Pledge the old way, without mentioning Him at all. My relative indifference to the addition probably has a lot to do with my having gotten along pretty well without it for so long.

The Cold War context for this particular alteration of the Pledge ought to arouse at least a modest suspicion that many of our leaders back then were seriously confused about the scope of God's presence in human history. In specific, they were saying in 1954, whether it is to freedom's shores or to the Pearly Gates, no communists need apply. This kind of Amateur Night theology was still drawing crowds thirty years later, when another ever so faithful President self-righteously condemned the whole of a foreign government as an "Evil Empire." Never mind that more than a few of its citizens were risking everything to worship surreptitiously in supposedly banned Orthodox churches.

It is hard to find fault with a general notion that every nation should aspire to conduct itself as if before the judgment seat of God. The trouble begins when we try to get specific about what the notion implies for a country's legal system, its foreign policy, and its vision for humankind's future. A lot of people in our own country take in the strictest literal sense the Pledge's reference to one nation under God: our nation, and ours alone. But a lot of people in other countries put a quite different spin on the affirmation: their congeries of nations, under their God.

Now that the Supreme Court has taken up the question of whether the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance is permissible under our Constitution, it is likely that we will be hearing a good bit about a peculiar anomaly in our system of government that we do not think about as often as we should. It is that citizens who want to worship their nations' God rather than our nation's God have the "unalienable" right to do so --- by virtue of our belief that the right is God given! Are you keeping up with me on this?

It is difficult to imagine that the constitutional question before us can even be addressed, much less answered, without probing as deeply as we can both the mind of the Founding Fathers and the mindlessness of anti-Communist demagogues, in order to understand better whom they had in mind when they spoke of God. The former seem to have been praising the Maker of the Heavens and the Earth. The latter seem to have been bowing down before a tribal deity who got a bad case of heartburn from reading Hegel, Engels, and Marx. I think I can learn to recite "under God" without further stumbling if I can be sure that it is the first kind of God we are talking about. If the Pledge is about the second kind of God, I will invoke my constitutional right to remain silent while others recite it aloud, and trust that they will not think me any less loyal to our country for doing so.

After all this particular wrangling about religion in American life is over, we may very well be left with the old form of the Pledge of Allegiance, rather than the post-1954 one. Would we be the worse off for it? I doubt it. Frankly, though, I think I would have a hard time grasping how the reference to God in our present Pledge violates the spirit of a constitutional system whose liberties it ensures are so unambiguously attributed to the will of the Deity. Just as hard a time as my atheist fellow citizen --- the man who got all this started --- should have grasping how it is indeed God who is the source both of his right and his capacity to disbelieve.

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Infidels

Branding practitioners of other faiths as unbelievers is hardly a new thing. People have been doing it for millennia, and their successors will continue the tradition for as long as human beings still occupy the planet. (Which may not be too long.) It is a rather effective recruitment strategy, but only if you think conversions forced by shaming or by the sword are as good as conversions elicited by changed hearts. Personally, I doubt that God counts the former kind as worth much.

Although branding someone an infidel is pretty sick, we could do worse. Names do hurt people, but not as much as sticks, stones, and terrorist bombs do. And it may not be all bad for Christians to be on the receiving end, for a change, of other true believers' religious slander. Remember the pious words about freeing the Holy Land from the infidels? For all the centuries the flap went on, who the real infidels were became increasingly difficult to determine. One thing is certain: by the end, fewer infidels were staying out of the Holy Land than were pilgrimaging into it.

As early as the end of the first century, Christian churches were caricaturing people in terms of those who are with them and those who are against them. Consider, for example, an especially purple passage from First John: Anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ is nothing but a liar. He is the antichrist, for he denies both the Father and the Son: to deny the Son is to be without the Father; to acknowledge the Son is to have the Father too.(2:22-23) Apparently, what influenced the writer's florid language was a much simpler statement from the Fourth Gospel, no one comes to the Father except by me. (John 14:6)

Statements like these abound in the New Testament. And they are not very encouraging of serious thought. Action, not thought, is what they call for: get Jesus front and center in your life, now. And reaction is what they threaten: prepare yourself for our wrath, and for God's, if you don't. What especially interests me about this kind of language is that it was hurled at people within the Christian fold as vehemently as it was at people beyond it. Why? The standard answer to this question is that believers were falling by the wayside and needed an attitude adjustment. In this regard, The Book of Revelation may be the most effective get-your-head-screwed-back-on-right book ever written.

This "falling by the wayside" interpretation is worth another look. As I understand the first century evidence, what really seemed to be jerking a lot of church leaders' chains was not that people were denying Jesus as their savior. It was that they were giving more thanks to God for their salvation through Jesus, than they were to Jesus as their God. Making salvation dependent upon acknowledging Jesus alone as humanity's savior became the official corrective to this undesired state of affairs. The result was to make condemnation of people as infidels much easier. Here we go again. We are saved by works and not grace after all, this time by the work of saying the right things about Jesus.

Ironically, Jesus' own words said far more about God than they did about himself.

When I was in seminary, one of my responsibilities in the church I served was to keep the outside bulletin board interesting to passers-by. My first morning on the job, the senior pastor handed me the keys to it while telling me what not to put up behind the glass. My predecessor, he said, once filled it with a startling invitation: Hey, People! Come to Jesus, or Go to Hell! Today, all we have to do is substitute Allah for Jesus in a second formula like this, and religion's potential for bringing about world destruction suddenly stares us right in the face.

Jesus' Way or No Way, then, is certainly one way to understand the Christian witness of faith. Worth studying also, however, is why a lot of unnamed fellow believers in the first century saw the matter a little differently. The many hints in the canonical texts about what they were like are intriguing. One hint is that although they were surely grateful that God had sent His son to them, it was God's own gracious work in Christ that was central to them. Celebrating the work itself seems to have been more important to them than fixating on the name of the one through whom it was initiated.

What Christian infidelity really is, these early witnesses may have discovered, is substituting God's message bearer for God's message, letting a perfect embodiment of the message long ago get us off the hook of striving to be that embodiment ourselves, in the here and now.