Drumbeats of a Tribal God

What scares me most about the politicalization of Christian fundamentalism is the eerie drumbeats of the tribal god, the joining of Christian ritual and national identity into a civil religion, political philosophy, and revisionist history of happy little Christian communities celebrating the good old time religion every Sunday followed by Sunday dinner until the crazy _____________ (fill in the blank with communists, Catholics, immigrants, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, etc.) came and ruined the party.

Yes that was one sentence. Phew! Anyway, our country has never been that static when it comes to religion, economy or history. A slave-owning Deist who erased miracles from the Bible wrote our Declaration of Independence, for starters. It is a myth that our nation is a Christian nation. We are a democratic republic that allows freedom of religion. Christ is never mentioned in the Constitution or Declaration. Neither is YHWH or Allah, or Krishna—God is a delightfully ambiguous clockwinder in this nation’s seminal texts.

Yet the drumbeats of the tribal god insist that our nation is somehow God ordained on an intimate level. For some, the Christian identity is intertwined with the national identity and citizenship—true citizens are true Christians and vice versa. Case in point: today for the first time in history a Hindu man opened the Senate floor with the morning prayer. There is a prayer every morning the Senate is open, so figure 150 days the Congress is in session each year since 1789, the first full year after the ratification of the Constitution, and that makes 32,700 prayers preceding the first Hindu Senatorial prayer, they deserved their chance. Yet three baffoons thought they had the right to protest the prayer by screaming from above the Senate floor, ”We are Christians and patriots!” [1]

What is so scary about this example is that it is a rumination inside the hearts and minds of thousands of Americans, that the grammatical expression they screamed is a conjoining (conjunction junction, what is your function?) of Christianity with Patriotism.

The tribal god is obsessed with his servants professing allegiance for such things as Ten Commandments in courthouses and believing it is our divine right as a noble nation to wage war against other nations. [2] This is what led to wars between Lutherans and Catholics (Thirty Years War), World War I, and World War II (the Aryan God being supreme). This is a religious notion that can be made only when a person and their community divides their allegiances between ”God and country” (another dubious conjunction). Allegiance must always fully belong to the Kingdom of God, reigned over by Christ, and spread by the Church and His Holy Spirit.

Christian participation in anarchy and crass citizenship is not the issue here either, for we are called to live in accordance with the government so we may lead peaceful lives serving our Saviour until he returns (1 Timothy 2). N.T. Wright writes:

Above the High Altar in Westminster Abbey are inscribed words from Revelation 11.15: ”The Kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ.” This is typical of what the New Testament declares: God is king, and the kingdoms of the world are thereby demoted. The crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Messiah, Lord of the world; he is already reigning at God’s right hand; he will reappear to complete this rule by abolishing all enemies, including sin and death themselves.[3]

This is the type of thought that must permeate the Christian mind, for we are Christ-ians not America-ns. We are but aliens in this world. Our God is not an American God any more than he is a German or Italian God. At the feet of our God will gather all the nations and tribes of the earth, where every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

[1] Charles Babington, for the AP (article).
[2] I do not want to consider in this post either the personal salvation of people who are part of the ”religious right,” ”fundamentalism,” ”separate Baptists,” or any other group that could be surmised from this post—I have no right as a clumsy, silly sinner to ever begin to judge others. I also do not want to argue here that the Iraq War is wrong or anything like that, I am only disagreeing with how some people philosophically approach this issue as being a war brought on ”with God’s full support.” Who knows the heart and mind of God? No one save the Holy Spirit and Christ.
[3] ”God and Caesar, Then and Now” by Dr N. T. Wright, Canon Theologian, Westminster Abbey (from June 30 2003: Bishop of Durham) (article).