Church and State–A Sketch in Five Acts (Principle 3)

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Now we have to tackle the issue of identity. This is where we get down to brass tacks. Our first two principles taught us that (1) there are two kingdoms, Babylon and Jerusalem, and Babylon will lose, and also that (2) God’s kingdom is distinct from every nation state. So far, so abstract—what are Christians supposed to do with this information?

Principle no. 3: A Christian’s core identity is as a child of God and a kingdom citizen, and so her principal allegiance must be to God’s kingdom (“Jerusalem”) and not to a nation state.

Christians are tempted to blur the lines between the sacred and the secular because of the “here and now”-ness of life. We live in America. We love America. We want kingdom values because God’s way is best. We want Christ to have a seat at the table in the public square—and why not? In 1956, a Presbyterian minister wrote:

The United States is so completely the child of a great religious heritage that the worship of God is essential to its survival in the purity of its pristine character. The worship of God is not an option in our life, but an indispensable requisite for our very existence. Allow worship to languish and we begin to deteriorate.¹

It’s true that the pastor made this comment during the Eisenhower administration, when that president and patriotic preachers had worked together to carefully craft a generic, anti-communist Christianity as a national civil religion.² But, its ethos is still felt today. As soon as we start down this line of thinking we may quickly wander off the reservation. The New Testament is where God tells us how the new covenant relationship works. And, in the new covenant, God says nothing about secular patriotism—which means love or devotion to your country.³ That doesn’t mean it’s bad to love your country; it just means it’s not something Jesus or any New Testament author spent any time discussing or demonstrating. So, while it isn’t a sin, it also isn’t a meaningful issue for your Christian life—it’s unimportant.

Think about it.

Your mind might immediately drift to Jesus and the fish and the coin; “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” (Mk 12:17). That’s about respecting government. It isn’t about patriotism.

Are you now thinking about Romans 13? That’s also about respecting the government. Along the way, the Apostle Paul sketches government’s sphere of responsibility in the world. Good stuff, but that ain’t patriotism.

Are you perhaps remembering God’s instructions to His people while they were in exile, in Babylon? Jeremiah told them:

… seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper (Jeremiah 29:7).

Fair enough. Christians ought to want their place of exile to flourish. But, God never told us to pledge allegiance to or to love “Babylon” (we’ll return to this point in truth no. 4, below). This means that if we love America more than God’s kingdom, then we’re essentially traitors. The great trap is sprung when we subtly conflate Babylon and America and assume America is God’s kingdom. We might not do this explicitly, but it can be the implicit trail down which our thinking leads us.

Christians have a duty to respect and obey their governments (Rom 13:1-7) insofar as it’s possible (see Acts 5 for an example of where Christians ought to draw the line)—particularly for evangelistic reasons (1 Pet 2:13-17)—and to pray for its leaders (1 Tim 2:1-4). But, that’s about it. One Baptist theologian noted that Christianity will naturally make “narrow forms of patriotism die.” He explained:

… the desire for national greatness, based on the injury of other nations, is wholly alien to the spirit of Christianity. Christ died for the human race. And while national feeling and patriotic loyalty are not opposed to the gospel, yet every form of such feeling which forgets the rights of others is opposed to it. A narrow nationalism which forgets other nations is an antichristian ideal.⁴

That’s because Christians aren’t Americans, Canadians, or Ecuadorians. They’re kingdom citizens, now. The Apostle Peter tells us that a Christian’s identity is as a member of Christ’s family, and our allegiance must be to that kingdom. That’s our patriotism. Each believer is an individual “living stone” placed into the “spiritual house” which God is building. Collectively, all Christians are part of a “holy priesthood” which offers “spiritual sacrifices,” (1 Pet 2:5). The cosmic contrast is between those who receive Jesus as the “cornerstone” of this structure, and those who reject Him. “They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for,” (1 Pet 2:8).

However, on the other side of this great divide, we see something quite different.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Peter 2:9).

Jesus’ community is a chosen people—an ethnic people whose commonality isn’t genetic but spiritual. We’re priests who represent Him, which is why we’re “royal.” God forges this community into a socio-political entity—a nation. This nation won’t take legal shape until Jesus returns, but it still exists as a dispersed force in the battlespace that is this world. Together, this scattered community is “God’s special possession” … to do what? Peter says our job is to praise God to everyone, because He called us out of darkness and into His beautiful light.

Many Christians mistakenly think of salvation as a purely individual event—“a Robinson Crusoe to whom God’s call is addressed as to one on an island.”⁵ That’s not right; each of us live in a social context in a wider world, and our salvation is a total renovation of values, morals, and allegiances—a re-orientation of life. We aren’t islands. We aren’t Americans who now just happen to be Christians. Rather, in union with Christ, we’re kingdom citizens who just so happen to be living in the Babylonian battlespace that is America.

Humanity’s problem in the world is not simply that we commit isolated sins or give in to the temptation of particular vices. It is, rather, that we are imprisoned within a closed system of rebellion against God, a system that conditions us to absolutize the relative and to relativize the absolute, a system whose mechanism of self-sufficiency deprives us of eternal life and subjects us to the judgment of God. This is one of the reasons why evangelism cannot be reduced to the verbal communication of doctrinal content with no reference to specific forms of people’s involvement in the world.⁶

Because salvation triggers a divine crossing from death to life and produces this dramatic reorientation of life, values, and allegiances, our identity must be with Jerusalem—not Babylon. This is our patriotism. This is our identity, our flag, our uniform. Does this mean we should just withdraw from the public square? Not at all. I’m just emphasizing here that our self-identity and patriotism must not be centered on America, but on the Jerusalem that is above.

This isn’t a new idea; in the late second century one Christian wrote a letter to a man named Diognetus, explaining the Christian viewpoint of the believer vis-à-vis society:

But while living in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each have obtained by lot, and while following the local customs both in clothing and in diet and in the rest of life, they demonstrate the wonderful and most certainly strange character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but as aliens. They share in everything as citizens and endure everything as foreigners.⁷

In 2005, the Christian band Casting Crowns released the song “While You Were Sleeping.” The lyrics recount how Jerusalem didn’t recognize its King during the incarnation. The song then asked, “America, will you go down in history as a nation with no room for its king?” This is not the question, and it’s never been the question. The real question is, “America, will you leave Babylon and pledge allegiance to the New Jerusalem by joining God’s family?”

You may be an American, but your “… citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body,” (Phil 3:20-21; cf. Eph 2:19).

You might be proud to be an American, but God doesn’t really care.