Washington for Jesus

The United States of America is in trouble. And so is the church. It was this twofold belief that moved more than 200,000 Christians to come to the nation's capital April 28-29 for the Washington for Jesus (WFJ) rally. And while the crowd was much smaller than the one million expected by WFJ leaders, it was one of the largest rallies ever held here.

During the two days of singing, praying, preaching, and marching, church leader after leader drove home a consistent, four-point message:

1) we are in bad straits;
2) we must seek God;
3) we should repent; and
4) then righteousness shall return.

In its bare-bones form, this approach to reading and responding to the signs of the times is clearly a biblically established method. But if scriptural soundness is to be preserved in putting flesh on this skeletal framework, a careful analysis of both the specifics of the gospel and of our historical moment must be made. Evidence of this discernment is what I looked for as I moved in and among the events of Washington for Jesus.

Many WFJ speakers assailed the backslidden condition of the church.To heavy applause, they spoke in anguish of the "many preachers who have failed to take a strong stand for the Word of God." While there were few specifics mentioned, there was an obviously common feeling that the church was abandoning its vision.

Very few Christians will disagree with the claim thatthechurch intheU.S. is in deep trouble. The lack of vision and vitality is crippling its life and witness. Faithful discipleship and evangelism have too often succumbed to the values of the culture.

Similarly, sermon after sermon asserted that America is in trouble. Very few people, Christian and non-Christian alike, could disagree with the general claim that the U.S. has major problems today. The dividing question, however, is exactly what the problems are.

There were primarily three problems in America that WFJ prayers and sermons repeatedly pointed to: military weakness, destruction of the family, and economic disintegration.

Preacher after preacher pounded away on the theme that the Russians have "outspent, outmanned, and outgunned" the U.S. While they spoke in fear of nuclear war between the superpowers, they were primarily afraid of U.S. defeat and Soviet victory, and perceived the threat of nuclear war only as the result of Soviet nuclear buildup and U.S. nuclear "disarmament."

They also saw a problem even more fundamental than that of strategic imbalance. The U.S. military bungle in the Iranian desert the week before the rally was all-too-vivid proof for them that U.S. military power is sharply declining around the globe. "Once-mighty America has become the laughingstock of the world," said Southern Baptist leader Adrian Rogers. And a woman in the crowd told me it is because of such events that she and others are "feeling out of control, powerless" as a nation.

In this spirit, Pat Boone wrote and sang a special "song of intercession for the hostages" held in Teheran. It began with a recording of a mob chanting (in English) "Death to America." Their voices were gradually drowned out by a "God Bless America" music score. The chorus of Boone's song went: "Lord bring them home. Show them we're in your hand. Lead them out of this land."

The second of the three problems focused on the crumbling family structure that was called the direct result of the immorality sweeping the nation. Homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and extramarital sexual relations all were decried as direct violations of God's Word and as active destroyers of "the basic building block" of society: the nuclear family unit.

The third of these problems was described repeatedly but vaguely in terms of the declining material wealth and power of America. The fragility of the U.S. economic system, the taxpayers' burden of government spending, and the erosion of economic gain by persistent inflation were scored in sermons and prayers.

In all of the more than 100 sermons I heard during the two days of WFJ meetings, only one mentioned "the sins of war, poverty, injustice, and bigotry," and that was in passing in a prayer.

Many of today's most critical problems were ignored. In contrast to the gospel imperatives, the problems of the arms race and proliferating violence went unacknowledged. The poor's problems of hunger, unemployment, and deprivation weren't mentioned. Nothing was said about an economic system that strains family relationships, commercializes sexuality, and incites consumerism in the face of global poverty. The list could go on.

So, while there can be widespread agreement in the church that the U.S. is in trouble, it is clear that the specifics of that judgment vary significantly.

The only Christian response to troubled times is to call for a turn to God. Washington for Jesus' central purpose was precisely this. But WFJ did not just call for a turn toward God, it called for a return.

It is certainly in the tradition of the Scriptures and the people of God to call upon the church to return to God. In the new covenant, the church is God's new Israel, the only people who can return to God, because they are his own. Returning to God is the church's message to itself, a message of revival and renewal.

It is also a sound biblical task of the church to call all nations and people to turn to God. God called on Ninevah to turn to him. And God's call is much the same today.

But the call for a return to God was applied by WFJ to America as readily as to the church, confusing the distinction between God's people and America's citizenry. It admitted no difference between God's work with the theocratic, Old Testament Israel and his work with the United States.

"We believe that God wants to do for us what He did for King Jehoshaphat and Judah-Jerusalem centuries ago (II Chronicles 20)," wrote the WFJ leadership. America "has gone off course spiritually," said many of the preachers, and "it has strayed far from its spiritual moorings." The major assumption was, as WFJ co-chair Pat Robertson said, that "this nation belongs to God Almighty."

Justified by this understanding of the U.S. as "one nation under God," the language and symbols of American civil religion permeated the entire event. The crowds sang "God Bless America" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The history of the early European settlers "claiming America for God" was told and retold with uncritical, sanctifying embellishment. Pictures of Jesus weeping over the Liberty Bell were handed out.

Despite how repugnant these expressions of civil religion may seem to some Christians or to foreigners, the people attending WFJ appeared to be sincerely responding in ways they knew and trusted as part of their religious experience, their reflexes shaped long ago by civics textbooks and July 4 picnics. What they seemed to lack was an understanding of the reality of the church as distinct from every nation and as loyal to the kingdom of God which judges all earthly kingdoms. No one appeared to be aware of the atrocities that have always followed the fusing of the purposes of God with the purposes of a nation.

The third step in WFJ's agenda was a call to repent. WFJ called on both the nation and the church to repent, certainly a biblical response to the prophetic responsibility of the church. But here again, the specifics of this call are crucial. Who is being asked to repent and from what?

Pre-rally literature from WFJ maintained a relative balance between pleas for self-repentance and the repentance of others, although others' need for repentance was spoken of more specifically. As the events of WFJ transpired, however, the specifics of the rally's prayers became largely for repentance for other people's sins and not for those of the assembled. As Robertson said, "we're here today to pray for change in our fellow citizens' lives."

I asked one woman in the audience what she was specifically praying for repentance from in her own life. Certainly she hadn't had an abortion, wasn't divorced, and hadn't allowed the Soviets to, as she put it, "walk all over the U.S." No, she replied, she guessed she was praying for her "inaction and apathy" in response to the problems WFJ was focused on. Repentance for her, she said, "might mean...being more involved politically."

Here was the key to the fourth WFJ step in which righteousness returns after repentance. Unless one considers the Bible to have no effect on the way a Christian life is lived, repentance must mean a change of life as well as of heart. Changed lives mean changed values. Values shape all of society, including our economics, culture, and politics.

But WFJ left the fruits of its version of repentance unclarified. Each speech or sermon ended just short of spelling out what a repentant church or nation would look like. Yet, because of the specific substance of the problems WFJ identified, the nature of its problem-analysis, and the character of its call for repentance, the audience was left with an unspecified yet certain understanding of what repentance would mean.

For example, after Robertson had finished saying that one of America's big problems is that it is "outgunned" by the Russians, I asked him whether, if America repented, it would have more guns than it now has. "It doesn't make any difference unless God is with us," he replied. And WFJ co-chair Bill Bright added that it would not just mean more guns, "but a closer walk with God," so that "our enemies will not threaten us."

Such specific examples of a repentant America were hard to come by due to the vagueness of the speakers' generalities. But the repeated pleas for a nation that is "once again great" on the whole sounded like they would lead less to international cooperation and conciliation and more to hegemony and confrontation.

Throughout the WFJ events, I began to sense a hazy, yet emerging foundation for a spirit and a worldview that loves neighbors but hates enemies, that determines righteousness by measuring material blessings, that refuses food to those out of work instead of feeding the hungry, and so on. Obviously this has social and political ramifications, but it goes far beyond that. It points to theological misunderstanding.

The more mainline churches were annoyed by WFJ's politics. They primarily confined their response to WFJ to the charge that its leadership was mixing religion and politics, confusing "church-government relations." For example, the Lutheran Council-U.S.A. said it disagreed with "Christians...who plan political action under any guise of religious evangelism, worship, or revivalism--or in the 'name of Jesus.' " Yet, but for the pejorative phrase "under any guise of," this charge appears to be the very rationale all these churches use to justify their lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. Few Christians would be able to say, upon reflection, that their religious convictions do not have political implications.

The main question asked of WFJ should have been: Is it biblical? This more theological approach was largely avoided by the rally's critics, particularly those in the church. Thus there was no real possibility for dialogue nor any hope for discernment and change extended to the thousands of understandably troubled Christians attending the rally. The single most effective rejoinder to Washington for Jesus would have been to ask them to join in reading the whole of our Bible.

Phil M. Shenk was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.