Yes, the United States of
America is a Christian nation. Because it is NOT a Christian nation.
The American experiment,
democracy American style, was possible because of the long struggles of the Judeo-Christian
tradition to live out its ethic. Yes, our nation is Christian in origin.
But two thousand years of
Christian experience convinced the initiators of the American experiment that a
nation could not be Christian if it were Christian. To be able to follow the
dictates of Jesus--to love others as one’s self, to pray for God’s kingdom to
come and God’s will be done--would require a nation that did not have an
established religion, a nation where everyone had freedom to worship in his or her
own way. Not just a religious freedom tolerated by the preachers and priests
and scribes and mullahs in charge, but a religious freedom on an even footing
with everybody, including those in the religious majority.
Totally religious and
totally not religious at the same time. It was a radical concept, one that was
hard to grasp, one that is still hard to grasp for many people.
The various groups of
European immigrants all came to America to escape religious persecution, to
have freedom of worship. Very quickly, though, they turned from persecuted to
persecuting, insisting that they alone were to have religious freedom. Thomas
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and others realized that the United States
didn’t have a chance if it were just an extension of Europe, with all the old
animosities of the Old World simply transferred to different geography in the
New World. If there were only one acceptable religion, there would always be conflict
and persecution. So, all religions were to be accepted.
Acceptance of everyone is
a particularly Christian--ie Jesus--idea. There will always be people who claim
to follow Jesus, who call themselves Christians, who claim their religion
requires them to exclude people unlike themselves. They are hypocrites and
mean-spirited, but in America, because of Jesus, hypocritical and mean-spirited
religions are accepted, too.
The USA is a Christian
nation because it is NOT a Christian nation.
JRMcF
I tweet once in a while as
yooper1721.
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