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But is this fear justified?

Perhaps. The Dallas Morning News recently noted that "the American flag has replaced the cross as the most visible symbol in many churches across the country." As an attempt on one Sunday to signal sympathy with terrorist victims and loyalty to country, all well and good. Anything more is idolatry.

Fortunately, at the highest levels of the nation's life, civil religion is not currently a threat. In his September 20 speech to the nation, President Bush set out the issues in decidedly nonreligious terms. What is under attack, he said, was "democratically elected government" and freedom: "our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

Given the occasion, Bush ended in a curiously humble way: "In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may he watch over the United States of America." This is hardly the stuff of which a jingoistic religious nationalism is made. No official in this administration has even implied that America is God's chosen nation. But many have sought God's wisdom, protection, and favor. We hope that government officials would always do that.

Still, as a result of September 11, church and state are dancing, trying to figure out the new relation of religion and society. In the meantime, we think the church has an important role to play in national affairs.

After Vietnam and Watergate, churches joined the culture and fled from patriotism. That's when the flag was removed from sanctuaries, literally and figuratively. This was largely good. We reminded ourselves that the church is not the servant of the state, that our calling transcends that of the nation.

At the same time, though, many churches became sentimental—that is, they practiced justice as a mere sentiment or wish. They imagined they could pursue justice by merely criticizing national and international injustice from the safety of the pulpit (or with the scathing editorial).

This will no longer do. We've been reminded that real justice in the real world means one must commit to supporting real, fallible, human institutions that pursue justice. The apostle Paul says government is instituted by God and "is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer" (Rom. 13:4). As such, the nation-state is God's most powerful instrument of social justice.

Furthermore, the United States is one among many nations that hold justice at the center. G.K. Chesterton's analysis of our Declaration of Independence gets it right: "It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, and that governments exist to give them justice, and that their authority is for that reason just."

In brief: We believe it is time for churches to recommit themselves to our nation and to its highest purpose. We are indeed a "nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," a people committed to "the great task," as Abraham Lincoln put it, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Thus, to evangelism, relief work, Christian education, and foreign missions must be added a particular form of social justice—engagement with the American experiment.

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November 12 2001, Vol. 45, No. 14