During this bicentennial year, the church of Jesus Christ should celebrate, as always, the life, death, and resurrection of its Lord and his rule over “all government and authority, all power and dominion, and any title of sovereignty that can be named” (Ephesians 1:21). More than ever, the task of the faithful church in America during 1976 will be to discern how the principalities of American power are dethroned by the victorious triumph of the cross.
According to the Declaration of Independence, all persons are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
As 1975 drew to a close, Americans were informed by the U.S.Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence that their government had ordered and repeatedly attempted the murder of foreign heads of state, such as Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro. Further, it had instigated or encouraged the subversion of other sovereign governments, such as Chile and the Dominican Republic, through military coups and other means including “neutralizing” key leaders if necessary by assassination. To accomplish these goals, the Central Intelligence Agency even obtained the direct co-operation of the Mafia; since our government was engaging in acts of organized crime, it sought the most professional accomplices.
An agent for the United States’ murder conspiracy in the Congo (now Zaire) was glowingly described by the CIA:
“...if he is given on assignment which may be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right, and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions” (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, Interim Report, November 20, 1975, page 46).
Nixon and Kissinger’s continual acts of subversion against the constitutionally elected government of Chile included this prophetic warning about American policy if Allende, just elected President, was allowed to assume office:
“. . . not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to deprivation and poverty” (Message from U.S. Ambassador Korry to former Chilean President Frei, from Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, Interim Report, November 20, 1975, page 23).
In the week that followed these revelations, Henry Kissinger told the Economic Club of Detroit that we must put an end to “the delusion that American intelligence activities are immoral.”
Before last year ended, we learned that the FBI conducted surveillance in past years against thousands of law-abiding Americans, undertook 2,300 efforts “to interfere illegally and improperly in the political process of the United States and in the private lives of many American citizens” (New York Times, November 21, 1975, page 42), promoted black gangs in making war on one another and harassed black activists and anti-war leaders by attempting to break up their marriages, force them out of jobs, and smear their reputations. Spurred by the wire-tapping authorization of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI undertook what became a six-year campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., guided partly by the paranoid rationale that King might someday abandon nonviolence, and ranging from attempting to prevent his meeting with Pope Paul VI to blackmail letters designed to push King into committing suicide. This continued until the day of Dr. King’s death. The full scope of all these actions was characterized by the American press as “massive, systematic and vicious violations of the constitutional rights of American citizens” (Washington Post, November 22, 1975, page 14).
America has systematically attempted to crush the “life and liberty” of people both at home and abroad who have resisted its dominant interests and threatened its structures of power. This is no longer unfounded rhetoric; it is clear historical fact. Defenders of America plead that these attempts did not always succeed. But under American law, such a distinction may only reduce the sentence; it never erases the crime.
Enlightened civil religion will severely tempt the church to join in with the nation’s bicentennial festivities. It will suggest that the church should call forth what is best in America--to return to those ideals which formed the rhetorical basis of the American revolution. Some have even suggested that “God has a lot riding on America.” Churches are performing the bicentennial cantata, “I Love America.” After two years which have disclosed so much that seems wrong, Christians desire to join with others in celebrating what is right about America.
This is all like applying the power of positive thinking to our structures of power in order to achieve their greater sanctification. These sentiments yearn for forgetfulness rather than repentance, for cheap grace rather than divine justice. They typify American Christendom as more intent on sanctifying the culture and state than adhering to the ultimacy of God’s revealed word.
That word relativizes, judges and unmasks the pretensions of our idols, ideologies, and nationalism. It de-Americanizes the gospel.
The prophets spoke that word portraying the truth of a fallen order and proclaiming the imperatives of God’s justice. Theirs was a message of urgency and radicality. Rather than placing hope in evolutionary reforms of oppressive structures, the word of the prophets more often sought to reveal national pretension and idolatry, calling for a people--even a remnant--to live in faithfulness to God amidst the faithlessness of their world.
The first task of Christians is to reveal the truth about America rather than celebrate its dreams. Christ’s word to his church this day continues to call his followers into a body of believers whose allegiance rests uncompromisingly with their Lord. Biblical faith points us to “a city whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10). Precisely because we have given our allegiance to this new city, we live amidst the old as sojourners, as a pilgrim people. Our lives must be given to the building of this new kingdom, and never to spiritually baptizing the very powers which Christ has dethroned. Through participating in Christ’s body, we must dethrone the reign of these powers and principalities in our own lives.
The bicentennial should provoke deep reflection within discerning Christians today about their relationship to the dominant currents of American culture. As with Christmas, American business will seek to exploit this occasion for increasing their profits--a custom as truly American as apple pie. So we hear that “Gino’s gives you freedom of choice,” and see everything from milk cartons to airplanes painted with the stars and stripes. All this should prompt the Christian to ask what stake we have in a nation whose economy is founded on the acquisition of wealth and the pursuit of wasteful super-abundance, whose values are rooted in distrustful competitiveness, whose governing philosophy for living is an indulgent materialism, and whose massive military power is used, in part, to protect an exploitive hold on the world’s wealth.
The Body of Christ and its power is not dependent upon the durability of American culture. The axiomatic presuppositions of that culture are not in any way tied to the gospel; in several cases they are openly antagonistic to the words and commands of Jesus Christ. To take seriously the message of biblical faith and hope means realizing that the disciples of Christ have no stake in preserving the present order.
Reforms in existing structures toward greater measures of relative justice can be welcomed, but not pursued through compromising our loyalties or pretending that is the work of the kingdom of God. The central question is where the followers of Christ place their hope in the fulfillment of God’s promises for human history.
We have no investment in the destiny of America. Seeing that everything turns out right for this nation, despite its sin, is simply not the task of the Christian church. We can have no part in secular hopes for social resurrection that deny the reality of the cross, or in visions of a past or future promised land which ignore God’s judgment on the present American realities. Christ warned against being salt which loses its savor and light which is hidden under a bushel.
The powers of this world--and specifically the ideology of American culture and the worship of American nationalism--threaten to become idolatrous, seeking to win our uncompromised allegiance by the pervasive claims they make on each of our lives. It is the domination of those powers which the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has put asunder. “Now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you then turn again to the weak and beggardly world powers to whom you want to be enslaved once more?” (Galatians 4:9).
The biblical response of the church to the idolatry of its time is always to be formed again by God into a faithful people. The response of Christians to the bicentennial must be the building of a faithful community of believers whose very life and witness can unmask the pretensions of this age.
Our freedom in Jesus Christ, and his liberation of our lives, means that we are to live no longer under the rule of such worldly powers, but under the sovereignty of our Lord. This we can know as a concrete historical reality by sharing as partakers in his body, becoming a new people called by God and loyal solely to Christ and his kingdom.
What Christians in America must pray for this year is a spiritual detachment from the destiny of their nation so we might be bold in our witness for Christ Jesus. We must pray that our churches will be so liberated by Christ from the bondages of America’s principalities and powers that its believers may be “faultless children of God in a warped and crooked generation, in which we shine forth like stars in a dark world and proffer the word of life” (Philippians 2:15).
Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!