One Nation Under God…?

Something is rotten in the state of America, but far more remains glorious

Fifty years ago, American Christians split six ways from Sunday over whether abortion should be legal or illegal.

The Vatican may impose uniform doctrine upon Catholics. Sometimes. At least, it appears to have done so for four of the justices on the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

But for Protestants, it took years of work to oust preachers who bothered to agonize over what to do when a woman’s life is in danger, when a woman has been raped or impregnated as a result of incest, and any of the other myriad circumstances in which imposing a judgment upon other people would be deemed improper.

This year, many Christians will celebrate the 4th of July with an air of triumph: their judgment has prevailed.

And that sort of triumphalism — the embrace of a worldly legal decision while ignoring all the more explicit commands, instructions, and teachings that are actually contained within the sacred texts they claim to believe…the willingness to judge first, and to idolize those who pronounce judgments, is a strange sort of ‘Christianity.’ One that casts a pall over festivities and apple pie. Who exactly are these people?

Heretics?

I lack the requisite expertise to distinguish genuine faith from heresy. Even if I possessed that expertise, I’d probably hesitate to render such judgments.

Others have attributed loyalty by the Trump faithful to ‘Christian nationalism.’ Odd sort of faith that might blend firework displays with religious devotion.

Personally, I’m most convinced by Kevin Kruse’s arguments in “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.” Except the corporate America that invented Christian America in the 20th century has evolved even further in the 21st.

Corporate Christianity prized stability and private property. However, every corporation can be subject to a ‘hostile takeover’ if someone finds a handful of insiders, pays them a bit, and then collaborates with them to take over the rest of the system and siphon off the profits for themselves, while letting the bulk rot.

Con artists abound in America. But they’re nothing new. We survived con artists in the form of slave owners and traffickers, genocidal aggressors, Jim Crow, bigots, homophobes, lynch mobs, and more.

For almost 200 years, the Supreme Court did not recognize any Constitutional ‘right to privacy’ that prohibited states from criminalizing abortion.

Today, the United States turns 246. We will probably still be confronting con artists when the United States turns 446.

But a thing is not beautiful because it is saintly. A country does not become ‘great’ because someone puts a hat on and says they’ll ‘make it so’ — nor does it become ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because any one person labels it. We all have belly buttons. We all have judgments. The existence of either cannot dictate the meanings for others.

For me, the United States is more glorious in 2022 than it was in 1922, or in 1972. How shall we measure glory?

We might start with the number of children poisoned by lead. Or infant mortality, or maternal mortality. Or literacy. Those benefits are unequal, and yet, even in the most hard hit communities, conditions in 2022 are better than they were in 1972 (let’s look more closely at lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan in 1972, back when industrial operations dumped far more lead into the air…). Or…well, what measures should we care about?

A ‘Christian nationalist’ doesn’t care that the government fixed problems that killed children. Neither does an ‘anti-nationalist’ who despises America. To both sorts of ‘critics,’ every tiny step that makes some human life tangibly better might obscure some broader arrangement that makes things worse.

The risk of nuclear Armageddon seems remote? Well, what about global climate change and mass extinction? What about terrorism? Crime?

To which, the same answer applies: before any problem can even be discovered, let alone confronted and rectified, one must first love a community enough to hope that it can and should endure. Only after that fundamental love takes root can we begin to consider how best to improve upon this space we share.

Far more remains glorious in America than detractors assert, not because of its own attributes or history or failures or successes — but because we MAY choose to make this country glorious.

Unless we sell out to con artists. And then…