By David Gushee
Responses to 9/11 and its aftermath have deepened the paradox of Christian patriotism, which may be more acute in the United States than anywhere else in the world at this particular moment.
It is indeed a perennial question: how shall Christians arrange their loyalties so that Christ alone is Lord (as we promise when we are baptized) and yet give due regard to subordinate loyalties? In particular, how shall we bring our loyalty to our nation and people into relation with our loyalty to Christ Jesus, whose lordship is over all the earth and every people?
This pivotally important question has been answered in starkly opposing ways during these 10 years.
At one pole, American Christians have responded by more-or-less collapsing the distinction between the two terms “American” and “Christian.” Anyone who has studied the history of western Christendom could anticipate this would occur. For the United States, it is quite clear, is still deeply affected by a legacy of Christendom — the pervasive cultural establishment of Christianity. This cultural establishment has been present from the beginning of this nation even while the founders protected us from some of its worst dangers by a sturdy legal disestablishment.
Amid the crisis of 9/11, it is not surprising that the United States, beginning at the very top of the government, would turn to Christian spaces (like the National Cathedral) and Christian symbols, images and language to cope with this massive wound to the body politic.
It was more surprising, and certainly more disturbing, when many American Christians began to conflate a terrorist attack on America with a Muslim attack on Christianity and interpret 9/11 as the latest incident in a 1,400-year-old war between Islam and Christianity.
President Bush sought to forestall such an outcome with early disavowals that 9/11 had anything to do with a mainstream understanding of Islam, but once he left office the floodgates broke. Today we witness wide-ranging assaults on Islam as a religion that can be practiced legitimately within the borders of the United States. This is simultaneously a major threat to First Amendment religious liberty protections and a terrible example of misdirected Christian patriotism.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” it is said, and the national sense of desperation after 9/11 also weakened Christian moral scruples related to our nation’s treatment of “detainees” in the “war on terror.”
In our era of creeping moral relativism, one of the best contributions of Christians in American culture has been that some of us still believe in objective truth and real right and wrong. But that rigorous moral code was all too readily abandoned when our leaders began to tell us that moral scruples must not be permitted to set limits on our treatment of suspected terrorists.
When “the gloves came off,” we wandered over to “the dark side,” and absolutist Christian morality went missing. This is “a new kind of war,” we told ourselves, requiring “new kinds of means.”
Indefinite detention, disappearances, rendition to (Libyan!) prisons, black sites, waterboarding — these all became acceptable as our loyalty to the nation trumped Christian moral principles.
At the opposite pole, a significant and influential group of dissident U.S. Christians, seeking to be faithful to Christ as Lord, became increasingly drawn to a totalized rejection of any legitimate loyalty to one’s nation. Many of the most influential voices in contemporary Christianity reject any and all forms of national identification or loyalty. The Christian is a citizen of the neighborhood, kingdom, global church or the world, to the total exclusion of any national loyalty.
Ten years after 9/11, the space for a constrained and critical Christian patriotism that is neither idolatrous nor contemptuous of the country of one’s earthly citizenship appears smaller than ever. But it is where we need to stake our claim under the lordship of Christ. The dangers of nationalist idolatry are clear; but so are the dangers of abdicating Christian civic responsibility.