Love Your Country--Enough to Criticize It

Happy Fourth of July! Have a wonderful weekend with your friends and family.

I love my country. You should too. My son serves America in a U.S. Army Airborne Combat Brigade stationed in Italy. Some of my fondest childhood memories coincide with the fireworks, family, and food that punctuated the annual Fourth of July celebrations in the Midwest. God has blessed America in manifold ways.

Many years ago, a church history professor, for whom I have great respect, handed me a copy of The Search for Christian America, authored by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden. I have been recommending the book ever since. I commend it to you.

Noll, Hatch, and Marsden maintain that Christians should be the best of citizens, but they are at pains to emphasize that Christians in America have often embraced mistaken notions about the founders, documents, and events that formed the nation. These three fine Christian scholars offer a sober counter-balance to our, at times, uncritical acceptance of certain interpretations of our history. You may disagree with them, but you must come to terms with their arguments.

I offer several excerpts:

We feel that a careful study of the facts of history shows that early America does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly or even predominately Christian, if we mean by the word “Christian” a state of society reflecting the ideals presented in Scripture. There is no lost golden age to which American Christians may return. In addition, a careful study of history will also show that evangelicals themselves were often partly to blame for the spread of secularism in contemporary American life (17).

In making our case, we do not want to contend that Christian values have been absent from American history. . . . Their presence, we agree, justifies a picture of the United States as a singularly religious country (18).

One set of questions has to do with how much Christian action is required to make a whole society Christian. Another way of stating the same issue is to pose it negatively—how much evil can a society display before we disqualify it as a Christian society? These kinds of questions are pertinent for all of early American history. When we look at the Puritans of the 1600s, do we emphasize only their sincere desire to establish Christian colonies, and their manifest desire to live by the rule of Scripture? Or do we focus rather on the stealing of Indian lands, and their habit of displacing and murdering these Indians wherever it was convenient? Roger Williams, one of the Puritans himself, asked these very questions and came to much the same conclusion as we have more than 300 years later. Again, do we place more emphasis on the Massachusetts Puritans’ desire to worship God freely in the new world or their persecution (and, in four cases, execution) of Quakers who also wished to be free to worship God in Massachusetts? (19).