I’m not speaking against the Reverend to say the real praise goes to his congregation, who accepts what he’s saying as the word of the Lord.
Because it is. IMHTheologicalO, anyway.
And it needn’t be painful to you if it’s truthful. Niebuhr said you can’t have a Xian nation, because a nation cannot be ethical. Ethics requires some measure of sacrifice, and you cannot require someone else to sacrifice for your ethical decision (here we meet the conundrum of the akedeh, the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. The ethical paradox, the ethical crisis, of that story is something Johannes de Silentio will not let us look away from. A nation cannot ask its citizens, the very citizens it is supposed to protect, to sacrifice their lives for the nation’s ethics. For its survival: yes. But what if, as some Christians once said, it is unethical for white Americans and black Americans to live as equals? That the blacks must sacrifice so this ethic can prevail? That’s, in part, the Reverend’s point. To put a finer point on it, would you consider Omelas ethical? They ask only one person to be the living sacrifice.
And what, as Niebuhr asks, if the ethics of the nation require that the nation itself make the sacrifice? Not just give up something; but give up everything.
Omelas points us to a whole separate ethical question coming from the Hebrew and Xian scriptures about how to treat the poor and the marginalized, and how “Christian” a nation can be that doesn’t follow those teachings (major hint: the prophets blame the Babylonian Exile on Israel’s failure to remember the poor and the widows and orphans.) we prefer the capitalism that requires the greatest good for the greatest number be our ethical standard. (Omelas, in the logical extreme.) But is there anything Christian about utilitarianism? Or Omelas?
Aside from that, there’s the problem of defining an “Christian nation.” “One nation, under God,” but under whose God? Israel had (has) a covenant with God. We do not. Our ability to be Xian is really an individual matter, and has been since the Romantics cemented that Enlightenment idea as the foundation of ourselves as persons. Not only because there are too many faiths (religious and secular; we all trust in something), but because there are too many differences alone just between Xians. Am I to bend the knee to the encyclicals of the Bishop of Rome? Of this Pastor? Or Robert Jeffress or Paula White? Should you bend your knee to me? Who preaches the Xianity of this nation to which I must adhere? Or at least acknowledge? The Constitution says “We, the people of the United States….”And already we’ve got a problem. Who are “the people of the United States”? Four out of nine Supreme Court Justices say that not all persons born in this country should be included as “the people of this United States,” even though (I don’t think?) they don’t deny those people are all persons.
Although they seem to think those excluded from “all persons” in the 14th are in a new class of “illegal,” Which may not create stateless persons, but seem to be very close to the old concept of “outlaw:” someone outside the protection of the law, who can be dealt with as anyone sees fit.
(The contemporary example shows up in the “new” “Twilight Zone,” where a man is branded “invisible” for being anti-social. No one is allowed to speak to him or look at him. At one point he’s mugged, but when he calls for an ambulance (because no one else will help him, on pain of being branded “invisible” themselves). When 911 realizes who he is (“invisible”), they refuse him treatment and end the call. For the time he is invisible, he is “outlaw.”)
So who are the people of the United States? And can we claim Christianity for them? “Hang it all, Robert Browning! There can be but one Sordello! But Sordello, and my Sordello?”—Ol’ Ez (Pound; the REAL Ezra). What is the ethics of the four dissenting opinions in Barbara? Can they properly be described as “Christian”? Show your work.
If you ask me if they should be properly described as Christian, my answer is: no. The law should not concern itself with ethical considerations, except as they are considerations of justice (or: why AI can never judge a trial outcome, or a legal appeal). The law has professional ethics, and the ethical concerns for doing justice (a foundational concern of the jurisprudential school known as “judicial realism.”) But I’m concerned with the ethics of Matthew 25 and the Lukan Beatitudes, and rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and giving God what is God’s. With doing justice (and not the legal kind), loving mercy, and walking humbly with my God. With being last of all, and servant of all, in order to be first of all. And how do you ask an entire nation to do any of that?
In other words, I’m concerned with being ethical in a way the world flipping doesn’t understand. And not expecting the world to do so.
So I like what the Reverend’s saying; but I appreciate more, the congregation that supports him in saying it.
Thanks be to God.
