Nation

The day after the Trump assassination attempt, The Wall Street Journal ran a story in which they interviewed Americans about the state of our nation. The article concluded, “The weariness was palpable nationwide as The Wall Street Journal spoke with more than four dozen people about how they felt about the shooting that came close to killing a former U.S. president. They pointed fingers and expressed anger, fear, and heartbreak...”

Nearly to person, they expressed a sense of dread, saying there seems to be no good news on the horizon… But unlike other times of crisis, after 9/11 or Sandy Hook or George Floyd, this event left few Americans hopeful that any good might come out of tragedy.

A sixty-three-year-old cook said, “The world has gone to Hades in a handbasket.” A thirty-two-year-old electrician from New Orleans said, “There’s a hole in this country…We’re not sticking together.” A retired project manager said, “We’re in crisis. There is no easy solution, there’s no sound bite. We’ve lost our ability to listen or to hear.”

The article ended by focusing on a married couple in their late 40s from Austin, Texas. “They used to joke about plans to survive a zombie apocalypse,” the authors noted. “Now they talk seriously whether they can afford land outside of a city. A quiet place away from civil unrest.”

Two days after the attempted assassination of former President Trump, The Wall Street Journal ran an article with the following title:

“‘I’m Tired. I’m Done.’ Nation Faces Exhaustion and Division After Trump Assassination Attempt, Americans express dismay about the state of the country: ‘The world has gone to Hades in a handbasket.’”

They spoke to four dozen Americans across the country and gave the following summary:

Nearly to a person, they expressed a sense of dread, saying there seems to be no good news on the horizon. Their list of concerns is endless: The lingering effects of a socially isolating pandemic; violent protests over disagreements about war; three election cycles of increasing polarization; and decades of escalating gun violence. That is not to mention economic turmoil and inflation. And unlike other times of crisis, after 9/11 or Sandy Hook or George Floyd, this event left few Americans hopeful that any good might come out of tragedy.

Towards the end of the article, they quoted Clement Villaseñor a 32-year-old electrical maintenance, who said, “There’s a hole in the country, and this is a part of that. We’re not sticking together,” he said. “There’s so much separation, it makes me feel far apart from people.”

There is a brilliant short interview on Patheos with Os Guinness based on his book, A Free People's Suicide. Guinness argues that America may be on the road to a slow death by suicide.

Guinness said,

The title [of the book] goes back to Abraham Lincoln. “As a nation of free men, either we will live free for all time or die by suicide.” Strong, free nations always bring themselves down. That's going to be America's problem. It won't come down from foreign challenges but by internal corruptions, and in this case by the corruption of freedom.

Guinness also adds, "This is explicitly not a partisan issue. ... The framers had a vision of freedom which … was not only negative freedom from but also a positive freedom to be. American freedom now is almost exclusively freedom from—freedom from interference or freedom from constraint."

Editor’s Note: See also historian Will Durant's observation that “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

History is filled with the evidence that nations which forsake godly principles and embrace sin will face severe consequences.

When Americans go to the polls, they go to town halls, high school gyms, fire stations, and churches. There are more than 60,000 polling places in America, and roughly one out of every five is located in a church.

Conflicts over the correct relationship between religious communities and the state frequently grab headlines. But church polling places are rarely controversial. Here, governments rely on churches to be safe, trusted civic spaces. And 12,875 houses of worship extend hospitality to their neighbors, opening their doors for elections.

Top Six States in Percentage of Polling Places that Are Churches:

62% - Arkansas

58% - Oklahoma

38% - Florida

36% - Kansas

35% - Arizona

35% - Ohio

The podcast, “The Agent,” tells the story of Jack Barsky, a Soviet-era KGB secret agent embedded in the US, beginning in the 1970s. Gradually, his loyalties shifted and in a remarkable turn of events, the FBI actually eventually helped him to secure US citizenship.

Near the end of the podcast he says,

I had a home again, an official home. … I’d put East Germany out of my mind. I stopped thinking about the folks back there. ... I put it away and put it in a part of my brain that I didn’t want to access anymore. You always want to belong to something. This is one of the basic things that make us human. … Now I had a country again. That felt really good.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Christian's change of citizenship is far more dramatic, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, thanks to Christ Jesus, our King.

When the crowd inside the gymnasium stood to its feet to begin the game between the West Portsmouth High Senators and the visiting Tigers of Waverly High, everything seemed to be ready. Except, there was one missing ingredient. The announcer had just directed everyone to stand for the national anthem, but after a few awkward seconds turned into a minute, then two minutes, it became clear that something was wrong with the sound system.

That’s when Waverly parent Trenton Brown decided he’d waited long enough. Brown told CNN, "I looked over at the announcer and the music didn't play and didn't play and I looked over and he was getting a little frustrated. My wife gave me a little nudge and said ‘Sing’ and I said, ‘All right.'" Brown began to sing, and after a bit, others in the crowd also joined in.

Johnny Futhey was in the crowd, and managed to catch the moment on video with his phone. Futhey, whose son is teammates with Brown’s, felt the moment was special, so he posted it to social media. Futhey said, "He brought about everyone in the gym to tears when he saved the day by standing up in the crowd and singing the anthem.”

Despite the video getting over a million views, Brown has taken the whole experience in stride. "There was a lot of awkward silence ... and then I started singing and that was it."

Possible Preaching Angle:

As a Christian you never know when you might be called upon to provide a needed service in a critical moment; it’s important to remain flexible and ready to move when the Spirit provides opportunity.

America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a Pew Research report explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated—the "nones"—have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the US will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population.

In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive, revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty. Others will respond to this shift with sadness, alarm, or outright fear. If you believe that your religion communicates a necessary truth about God, the universe, humanity, the purpose of life, and how we should live it—well, then a precipitous decline in that religion is an inherently horrible thing with eternal implications for millions.

Pastor Eduardo Davila tells this story:

I have here an extremely important document. We all have important documents: a marriage certificate, the title to your car, your birth certificate. This one is my naturalization certificate.

My family and I came to the United States as political asylees, leaving the remnants of a country ravaged by war and destructive socialism that did not deliver on its promises. When we came, we had Nicaraguan passports. We were able to come to the US, but we were not given full citizenship. We were not protected by the US. We were not allowed to vote.

But all that changed in 2008, when we walked into an office in Miami, took a few tests, and swore an oath of allegiance to the United States. We were granted full permanent citizenship status. We were fully in.

During the whole process, one aspect that stuck with me was realizing the seriousness of a statement that then-President Bush wrote: “We are united not by race or culture but the ideals of democracy, justice, and liberty.” Beautiful.

Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:19 that "Now you are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family." Praise God! When you come to Christ, you are no longer a stranger or foreigner. You have the full blessing and protection of the kingdom of Christ. You are no longer undocumented. You no longer need to fret over where you belong or how to survive.

At baptism, you renounced your old citizenship and swore allegiance to Jesus, and you were given a naturalization certificate. You are now part of the new humanity: you are no longer strangers and foreigners. Once a citizen of a different kingdom, your ruler was your vices, addictions, and fears. Your ruler was the prince of this world. That is what you left behind when you were baptized and chose to submit yourself to Jesus as your new King.

The PBS series Civilizations surveys the role art has played in forging humanity. Art can tell us much about where a culture has been and where it is going. Near the end of episode 1, viewers are taken to the Mayan city of Calakmul in Mexico. The city was once one of the most influential metropolitan areas in a vast empire, known as the Kingdom of the Snake. Entombed beneath a canopy of trees rests the remains of more than 6,500 buildings. The tallest is a massive ornately decorated temple whose steps climb to 180 feet (the height of a 15-story building).

Standing at the foot of a massive ziggurat, abandoned now for more than 1,000 years, an unnamed archeologist explains the cultural rationale for such ornate, expansive building:

Ultimately, all civilizations want exactly what they can’t have; the conquest of time. So they build bigger, and higher, and grander, as if they could build their way out of mortality. It never works. There always comes a moment when the most populous of cities with their markets and temples and palaces and funeral tombs are simply abandoned. And that most indefatigable leveler of all, mother nature, closes in, covering the place with desert sand or strangling it with vegetation. And then civilization dies the death of deaths, invisibility.

All nations come to an end. But there is a government which will stand the test of time. Isaiah writes, “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end. . . The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this” (Isa. 9:7).

Liberal democracy in a pluralistic society is an endless but fruitless search for the lowest common denominator that can serve as society's moral bond. The more pluralistic the sociey, however, the more difficult it is to find a common denominator. Let us try to explain the problem crudely and oversimply, but not entirely inaccurately.

We did away with state churches in this country so that all the Protestants could feel at home in it. We de-Protestantized the country so that Catholics, too, could feel at home in it. We have dechristianized the country to make Jews feel welcome, and then dereligionized it so that atheists and agnostics may feel equally welcome.

Now we are demoralizing the country so that deviants from accepted moral norms will not feel excluded. The lowest common denominator, we have discovered, is like the horizion, always approached but never reached.

"The systematic violence, both physical and spiritual, done first to indigenous people and then to black Africans was, indeed, the original sin of the American nations. In other words, the United States of America was conceived in iniquity."

Abraham Lincoln was the first President to use the phrase, "This nation under God." It inspired President Eisenhower, in 1954, to add the words "one nation under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

There are three possible ways in which the church can act toward the state:

In the first place, it can ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e., it can throw the state back on its responsibilities.

Second, it can aid the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community, "Do good to all people."

The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. Such action would be direct political action, and is only possible and desirable when the church sees the state fail in its function of creating law and order.

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

David Lawrence--one of my favorite people; he's in heaven now--was the only non-senator who was a member of the Senate prayer breakfast. He never missed and often was asked to speak. He was the founder, and at the time he wrote this, editor, of U.S. News and World Report, This editorial was written May 5, 1956. David Lawrence wrote, "It is a temporary answer to the threat of world disturbance that we face. The North Atlantic Treaty is temporary. The United Nations is temporary. All our alliances are temporary. Basically there is only one permanence we can all accept. It is the permanence of a God-governed world, for the power of God alone is permanent. Obedience to his laws is the only road to lasting solutions to man's problems."

The chief impediment to religious liberty in our generation is the renewed effort to make of the United States a theocracy rather than the constitutional democracy the founders set in place. With increasing frequency the founders' church-state views have come under attack, particularly Thomas Jefferson's conception of separation of church and state. The views of Jefferson and James Madison, father of the Constitution, are now labeled by some of the leaders of the so-called Religious Right as aberrations and the notion is advanced that the founders actually sought to establish a kind of holy commonwealth in which, while government would not dominate the church, the church could well dominate the state.

Closely connected to this historical revisionism is the view that America occupies a special role in God's plan for the ages, that the United States is the successor to the covenant people Israel, that she is God's own possession among the nations of the world. Although this kind of nationalistic messianism is not new to the contemporary Religious Right, it remains as morally bankrupt today as ever, amounting really to a form of national idolatry.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.