American religion is more cult than Christianity.
A common mistake among American evangelicals is assuming that the US is a covenant nation. They dress the founding of the US all up in sacred hues, as if God somehow decided to sponsor Enlightenment philosophy instead of His revealed Word. The US Constitution is a very classic Enlightenment document. It is a very long way from being a biblical document. The debate about whether some of Founding Fathers were mere deists or actually true believers is a waste of time because even the true believers were so thoroughly Enlightenment in orientation that it’s ludicrous to suggest they were biblical.
Take a moment to consider how most Western churches remain deeply stained by the social philosophy of their birth. The Catholics are medieval, along with a few other competitors. The Lutherans are Reformist, but the other Reformed groups are more Enlightenment. Virtually every church flavor arising on American soil is strongly Enlightenment in basic assumptions about reality. They are a very long way from the initial Hebrew orientation of the churches in the first century. That’s a plain factual observation without noting whether it’s good or bad.
Treating the US as somehow sacred and special, right up next to the historical Nation of Israel, is most certainly a bad thing. It lends itself to some very destructive and anti-gospel behavior.
It’s bad enough that a very real intent we can discern was to infect similar evangelical churches in other countries with the same burning political fervor, but that same cynical intent was to cause evangelicals in other nations to regard America as somehow special and holy. That was a critical point in the funding and propaganda that shaped and reinforced this weird cultic fervor. What’s worse is that this cult excuses a vast array of abuses against those who don’t happen to be fully committed to that cult.
What we then have is a vast political fervor to enforce a particular brand of social morality backed by an implacable sense that this is what God requires. Further, the thinking asserts that choosing to remain on American soil is tacit acceptance of this imaginary covenant and all the enforcements that go with it. The essentially materialistic assumptions of Western thinking only makes this worse.
The entire New Testament is loaded with both hints and blunt assertions that we cannot get too involved with this world as something important to us. We are told throughout that we should expect conflict and persecution and not whine about it, but rejoice that we are called to share in the Cross of Christ. Somehow we’ve inserted a huge caveat in our thinking that when Christians can get control of government, things will be different. The New Testament pointedly steers believers away from seeking involvement in human government in the first place.
Go all the way back to John the Baptist. He didn’t tell those soldiers to desert their uniform, despite the general hatred among Jews for Romans. He told them to serve honorably and obey God’s Moral Law in the process. His whole message was for them to take what comes until God sets them free from what amounted to slavery, and not try to to feather their nest on the way. A similar otherworldly focus was burned into his message to everyone else. Worry about your own holiness and let God sort out everyone else.
That was preparation for following the Lamb of God. In the New Testament we see a powerful emphasis on, not making Gentiles into Jews, but helping outsiders understand the true essence of what it meant to be Israel morally, not merely religiously or politically. The Covenant of Moses was closed; the Covenant of Christ was born and it carried forward in bold terms what had always been implied by Moses. The meaning of the name “Israel” was restored to its original place — it was the name for a mission to reveal God to fallen men.
We obey the Laws of God, not so much in the particulars of the Law Covenants, because those were contextual examples. Rather, we obey the moral imperatives of God that gave the covenants life and meaning. But while we have a mandate to take that into all the world, by no means do we put our hands to human politics at large. God has all human governments in His hands. Our only part in any kind of human government is within the covenant family, the congregation gathered in Christ’s name.
To follow Christ includes building an ephemeral human manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven in our church bodies. That Kingdom of Heaven is of necessity very much like the Hebrew feudalism in shape and operation. The local church cannot claim to follow Christ if we do not operate on His politics, which have nothing to do with theories of human polity arising from any part of history outside Ancient Israel. It is not a mere cultural and historical artifact. The Hebrew feudal government remains the one best expression of how Creation itself is wired, and thus how every human is meant to live. We could teach this to the world at large, but the enforcement in our hands stops at the boundaries of spiritual willingness to participate in the Covenant of Christ.
If we do not restore our local church body to that ancient pattern, we will remain a cult of mixed religious and philosophical influences very far from Christ.
