A vision incompatible with Christian faith and faithfulness

Earlier this afternoon America and the world heard and read President Trump announce in his inaugural address that "from this day forward a new vision will govern our land." If the new vision is that "from this day forward it's going to be only 'America first! America first!'," American Christians must reject and resist it from the outset. For followers of Christ, our vision in relation to the polis is summarized in the Epistle to Diognetus in the 2nd century AD: "[Christians] live in their respective countries, but only as resident aliens; they participate in all things as citizens, and they endure all things as foreigners. Every foreign territory is a homeland for them, every homeland foreign territory."

Therefore we must reject and resist also this expression of the new vision: "At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells us, 'How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity.'" NO! Our total allegiance is to Christ alone, and then comes our obligation to the global community--God's world in which God's reconciling work is to make the community for which God created the world--of which our national community is a part, and only then our national community in relation to those larger loyalties. There must be no giving it a chance and seeing how it goes--the vision has been clearly articulated, and it is one incompatible with Christian faith and faithfulness.

Ecumenical thoughts on post-election unity

Some thoughts from an ecumenist about the post-election call for American national "unity":

According to Ephesians 4, "making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (v. 3) entails "speaking the truth in love" (v. 15), which contributes to the body's growth toward mature unity (vv. 15-16).

The history of the modern ecumenical movement includes failures to do that (for example, the failure of the Conference on Life and Work to denounce the Reichskirche and recognize the Confessing Church as the authentic church in Germany, which greatly frustrated Dietrich Bonhoeffer) as well as more faithful acts (for example, the efforts of the World Council of Churches' Programme to Combat Racism in relation to the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches' expulsion of that church, with both forms of truth-speaking leading to eventual restoration of that church to ecumenical fellowship).

All this may be applied to this moment in our national civil life and the days ahead. Speaking truth is a way of embodying love for our national community. When people are publicly grieving and lamenting and calling for justice and engaging in acts of nonviolent protest, they are loving their national community and making their own contributions to its unity--not a quick and ultimately false unity superimposed on division and its causes, but a unity forged out of our earnest and honest contestation of what sort of community we are going to have. Let the truth-speakers speak, and let us enter into genuine dialogue with them.

On Trump, violence, and ecclesial complicity

Yesterday's crossing of a line by a presidential candidate, as egregious as it was, is symptomatic of a pervasive malady afflicting the American church as well as its cultural context: credence in the "myth of redemptive violence" (Walter Wink's coinage). It's time to declare the renunciation of all forms of violence and the embrace of the nonviolent way of Jesus a matter of status confessionis for the church (a state of affairs in which the fundamental essence of the Gospel the church confesses is at stake).

This will include forsaking the Niebuhrian realism that has been the received ecclesial justification for American foreign policy since the 1950s, in the Cold War and in the "war on terror." Its pervasive influence was evidenced in the 2008 presidential election campaigns, with both John McCain and Barak Obama crediting Niebuhr's influence on their political philosophies. It can be argued that Niebuhrian realism, offered to the polis by the church, undergirded both the invasion of Iraq under President Bush and the escalation of drone strikes under President Obama (I assert this as someone who voted enthusiastically for Obama twice and continues to admire him and his presidency).

All this is to say that as the church we must both denounce what happened yesterday in Wilmington, North Carolina, and repent of our complicity in the formation of a culture in which those words actually strike a chord with some Americans, so that as followers of Jesus Christ we might actively live into the shalom of the reign of God.