They also had a statement that was considered by Roman authorities to be not only unpatriotic, but downright dangerous, subversive, and unacceptable. The early Christians said that "Jesus is Lord." This was intolerable to Roman authorities because if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not. And this is still the heart of the matter. Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.

Patriotism is simply the love of one's tribe, or city or state or nation. It is legitimate and necessary for any society to survive. As Americans we have every right to rejoice in our form of government, our way of life and in our historic role in the world, Truly the song has it right "America the Beautiful." We celebrate as Americans, but we also remember who is Lord.

Jesus deeply loved his people, but he placed loyalty to himself above allegiance to family and nation. By placing himself above the Temple, Jesus relativized the significance of even that most sacred of places. Because "the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us", the entire earth and all its people have been raised to a new dignity and status. We must never forget this even on July 4th.

When I reported to duty as a chaplain with an infantry unit in Vietnam I met the chaplain I was replacing as he was getting out of his jeep. He was carrying an M-16 rifle, had a pistol strapped onto his belt and a bandolier of ammunition around his shoulder. His first words to me: "you had better get a .30 caliber on this jeep, because this is a hot a.o," I replied that if I had wanted to be a grunt, I would have joined the infantry.

When I met the battalion doctor, he told me that this chaplain had caused a lot of harm to the soldiers by encouraging them to kill for religious reasons. The troops, former acolytes and Sunday school students, knew about the prohibition of killing. They had learned the beatitudes and "love your neighbor", and "turn the other cheek." So they knew that "Kill a Commie for Christ" made no sense. When asked the same question, the only answer I ever gave was: "You may kill others because they are trying to kill you." This is an act of simple, elemental self defense. There is a huge moral and religious difference between these two answers.

In my years of work with veterans after the war, I found that many had a rage against religion because they believed their Christian faith had endorsed and encouraged what happened in combat. Without any theological training they knew that one can sometimes perform an act that is the "lesser of two evils." such as killing enemy soldiers in combat. But they had been scandalized in the biblical sense by a version of Christianity that said this killing was God's own work. As a result of this confusion, thousands of them lost their faith. As one former Marine put it: "When I went to Vietnam I believed in Jesus Christ and John Wayne, and in Vietnam both went down the tubes." This is a great metaphor for what scholars call "American civil religion." One writer called it "muscular Christianity." It is a hybrid form of superpatriotism undergirded by the misuse of Old Testament Scripture. It is not authentic patriotism. It is a caricature of biblical faith. Not only is it still with us today, but it now threatens to engulf us.

This is an old problem. When the Emperor Constantine freed the Church from persecution in the 4th Century, he soon made it the established religion. From that moment on Christians began to use the power of the state for religious reasons, sometimes fighting crusades and wars in the name of Christ. This is a long standing aberration which continues to plague us. The immediate roots of American civil religion can be traced to John Calvin who established the city of Geneva as a theocracy in the 16th Century. English Calvinists were convinced that they could establish the biblical "city on the hill" in England. For eleven years they ran the country as a fierce and ruthless theocracy. They exported their ideas to New England and set the tone for all subsequent American history.

In 1630, in Boston, John Winthrop gave the speech that still resounds "[We] must consider that we shall be as a City set upon a Hill, the [eyes] of all people are [upon] us." In that moment the myth was born: America was to be a chosen people among the nations of the earth. It was to be a moral example to the rest of the world. The corollary was also implied by Winthrop: the rest of the world must keep its eyes upon us and follow our lead, for "the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory..."

The Lord's people, the colonists, believed they could depend on the God of Israel even in the face of overpowering odds. God is the true leader on whom the small settlement on the edge of a fearful wilderness was to rely. Their enemies were His enemies; their friends, His friends. From that day to this, whenever Americans have taken up the sword and gone into battle, they have carried with them their primal myth of origin.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the myth was thoroughly secularized, divorced from whatever connection with biblical religion it may have had originally. Though the notion of God and humankind's relationship to God has been largely lost in the public culture, the myth of a chosen people and a city on the hill remains unabated.

Every tribe, people, and nation has some sort of civil religion. What distinguishes the American version from others is its dependence on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures for its language and concepts. Though the United States owes its cultural origins as much to the philosophy, laws, and ideas of ancient Greece and Rome as it does to biblical religion, we have never acknowledged this fact. We prefer to express our self-understanding in terms of the traditional biblical faiths. Civil religion in America seems to resemble biblical religion, but in fact it is very different. The most significant areas of divergence between the two faiths lie in their respective notions of God.

Civil religion creates in America "a nation with the soul of a church." The nation is convinced that transcendent goals lie at the heart of its own political processes. It inverts religion and constructs a model of God based on its own policy. Our political categories--law, justice, democracy, sovereignty--take on the characteristics of ultimate reality. The trouble with this is "when we relate American politics to God's sovereignty we also relate God's sovereignty to American politics."
Civil religion is, of course, a form of idolatry. It is a thinly disguised worship of the state. It always lurks below the surface in American life, but in times of war it becomes particularly virulent. Never more so than at the present time, when we imagine that we, completely innocent and shrouded in virtue are engaged in the climactic battle against evil. Certainly terrorists and suicide bombers are evildoers. But our faith teaches us that we are all evildoers. We all need redemption from the evil that lurks in our hearts and causes us all to do evil things.

The problem with idolatrous civil religion is that it masks from the people, not only the evil performed by the state, but the evil that lies in their own hearts. Ancient peoples with their national gods, also had a host of other gods running lose: the god of war, the goddess of love, tricksters and thinly disguised gods of the self. That’s still a problem, especially when the god of war is in the ascendancy. As anyone who has ever been in a combat zone knows, lust is never far from violence and corruption abounds. Violence, rampant sex and pervasive corruption characterize a military theater during a time of war. Lying and deception also abound.

In our era of instant communication and virtual reality, all these gods are once again on the march, not just in the war zone, but in the entire culture. Corruption, lust, sex and violence, greed, corruption, war-profiteering, lies, deceptions and denials are all on the march with little opposition today. The false god at the top has turned lose all the minions of idolatry and they now surround us.

When the President of the United States dares to paraphrase John's Gospel, by saying that the United States is the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it, then we have fallen into blasphemy as well. The "muscular god," of our civil religion, John Wayne has blended with Jesus Christ and we seem not to know the difference. Religious conservatives seem to endorse this view, though the national evangelical association is now waking up to the problem. Religious liberals, having little theology left, seem not to recognize it either. As did the beast described in Revelation, this Beast too has "blasphemous names inscribed on its heads."

Both genuine biblical faith and authentic patriotism, real love of country would find this condition intolerable, but political leaders are insensitive to it and church leaders are otherwise occupied, especially at this moment in the Episcopal Church are we totally self-focused. But we need not look to our inept leadership, for we must find within ourselves, the grace of God to withstand this idolatry and blasphemy. As early Christians loved their lands and places, so should we, but as they proclaimed that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not, so must we.

So today, we will quite rightly with genuine love of our country sing with power and enthusiasm "America the Beautiful," but we shall also sing from the heart that "Jesus is Lord," and we shall ascribe to Him alone all power, dominion and glory, for He reigns over all of us in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Endnotes

Regarding the quotes: both are from Out of the Night. The footnotes read as follows:

ANation with the soul of a church@

The term "nation with the soul of a church" was coined by G.K. Chesterton. The term is also used by Sydney E. Mead as a title: Chesterton. The term is also used by Sydney E. Mead as a title: "The Nation with the Soul of a Church," first published in Church History, vol.36, no.3, and reprinted in Richey, American Civil Religion.
Richey, Russell, and Jones, Donald G. American Civil Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

The second passage in quotes right after that one is:@

"when we relate American politics to God's sovereignty we also relate God's sovereignty to American politics."

Its source is also:

Herbert Richardson, "Civil Religion in Theological Perspective," in Richey, Russell, and Jones, Donald G. American Civil Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.