Another Independence Day has come and gone. I’m struck by how often the celebration becomes not one of freedom, but of love for the government and its use of force: dusting off and rolling out of the increasingly rare World War II veterans, the vintage rolling stock, droves of firemen and police strolling down a thousand versions of Main Street. These blatant displays of state power during what should be a celebration of the triumph of Providence and liberty are growing increasingly more disturbing.
[Conveniently Unfortunately, an exceedingly pregnant wife and a sick child conspired to exempt me from the obligatory parade attendence this year. The wife is still pregnant—for now—but the child is well.]
Equally as disturbing is the extent to which the Church seems to have bought into the militarism. From flags under the cross, to campaign speeches from the altar, to “honoring our veterans” in the service, the State and its machinations are increasingly a visible part of the Church. William Norman Grigg recently wrote, in part [links in original]:
As Richard Gambale documents in his indispensable study The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, the militarist heresy is of relatively recent vintage. It was an outgrowth of the WWI-era “Progressive” conceit that the Christian Church had to justify its existence by playing a “positive” role in the expansion of the meliorist state.
Rather than playing the biblically mandated role of peacemakers, the progressive clergy eagerly supported World War I “as transforming event in the life of the church,” observes Gambale. Many of them applauded the Wilson administration’s war aims as a form of Christian “altruism,” one that promised temporal redemption “at the sacrifice, if need be, of five millions of men and billions of wealth,” as an effusive Literary Digest editorial put it.
Nor would this righteous campaign to re-make the world through state coercion cease once altrusitic mass murder ceased. Writes Gambale: “The progressives longed for, and expected, the war for righteousness to continue after the guns in Europe fell silent.” They would not be disappointed.
Again, one collides with an arresting irony: The most outspoken “conservative celebrations of militarism during what used to be called Independence Day a promoting a view devised by the leftist Progressives of the early 1900s, what Gambale aptly calls “the rhetorical sacralization of the nation-state.”
The more pronounced our ruling elite’s apostasy from America’s republican origins, the more insistent became their invocations of our sacred national “mission” in the world. As Gambale notes, one particularly notable example was provided on September 11, 2002 by Bush the Lesser as he “appropriated the words of John 1:5 as if they described not just the Incarnation of Christ but the mission of the United States: `And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness will not overcome it.’”
To the extent that any radiance attends the labors of the Regime ruling us, it is the demonic nimbus of shock-and-awe, not the divine radiance of the Shekinah. The true tragedy of our time is that so many American Christians are blind to that critical distinction.
I grew nauseous as I read this today.
In all honesty, I vaguely remember cheering Bush II as he spoke these words almost seven years ago, still beholden to the American “mandate from God” fallacy. I had read and re-read Romans 13 at that point, and heartily supported following my secular leadership.
That worldview—incidentally, the prevailing American [evangelical] Christian worldview—discounts the thousands of years of recorded history chronicling the depravity of all human authority.
Dunamis, dunamai, didomi, arche, ischus, ischuros, kratos and energes are all translated in the New Testament as “power”, but have decidedly different meanings than the word that appears in Romans 13.
The word is exousia and it is from two Greek words. Ex means “of” or “from”, while orousia is “what one has, i.e. property, possessions, estate.” The word is defined: “power of choice, liberty of doing as one pleases.” Is Paul simply telling you that you should remain subject to the right to choose under the perfect law of liberty?
From the beginning, God has endowed man with freewill, which is the power to choose. This inalienable right to choose is man’s responsibility to govern himself under the providence of God. The Bible also clearly tells us that man goes out of the presence of God, sins against God, and even rejects God when he goes under the authority of other men like Cain, Nimrod, Pharaoh, even Saul and Caesar.
God desires that every man should be a free soul under Him directly, having that divinely endowed right of choice unimpaired. He, like Paul, does not desire that we go under the power of any.
The foundational misconception upon which Christian statists of every stripe build their defense of government power is that the State is ordained by God. But again—and I cannot stress this enough—this outlook ignores the words of YHWH to Samuel:
7And the LORD said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. 8According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. 9Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” [my emphasis]
Fealty to Caesar is rejection of God.
I imagine that in their heart of hearts, most American evangelicals believe they do God’s work when they call on their “leaders” for the slaughter of innocents abroad, when they debase themselves in deference to the Almighty State (even the American State), or when they surrender their own freedoms in trade for ephemeral and often-absent “protection.”
But these actions echo the Pharisees’ declaration to Pilate:
We have no king but Caesar.
