A Christian Nation?

Is America a Christian nation?

ABC News has a story about Sarah Palin's statement that America is a Christian nation. In her words, God has shed his grace on this country. And the idea that a national leader could say that America isn't a Christian nation? Well, Sarah Palin thinks that's "mind boggling."

I can't resist saying (quite sincerely) that I'm not sure how much mind Sarah Palin has to boggle. It might not be a difficult task.

Of course America is a Christian nation. Most of its citizens think of themselves as Christians - about 78% according to the Pew Research Center. Pew includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and a few other little groups in their numbers that I don't really think of a Christian. But still, three out of four America's are Christians.

And I think of myself as a Christian.

Sarah Palin (among others) would like you to think that as a US Senator, Barack Obama told the 2006 Call to Renewal conference that America is not a Christian country. Here's what he actually said:

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

You can see the whole speech here.

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I think the idea that America is a Christian country is undeniable. Did the Founding Fathers intend for us to have a Christian government? That's a different issue. I've written before about the exchange between Jefferson and Franklin in the preparation of the Declaration of Independence. But there's plenty of other evidence that the Founding Fathers didn't intend for us to have a religious government. It was to be part of our freedom that, as individual citizens, we get to maintain the country's status as a Christian nation by our private, personal behavior and beliefs - without the help of government.

Albania: How the World Has Changed

I was driving to work today and listening (as I often do) to NPR and I heard a piece of news that struck me, made me consider how much the world has changed in the last 25 years or so.

I graduate college in 1983 and shortly thereafter left the US to work with a Christian missions organization called Youth With A Mission - YWAM. The organization had a number of people who'd done great things (we thought) and who served as role models, heroes of a kind. One of them was a woman named Reona Peterson. In the 1970's she visited a small, politically isolated country in Southern Europe: Albania. She'd been given a visa for a few days to take part in a very guided tour of the country. And her only real goal was to pray - to get inside Albania for a few days and intercede with God on behalf of what, at the time, was probably the most Communist country on earth.

After entering Albania the authorities there discovered that she had a Bible. I haven't heard the story or read her book for years, but if I remember correctly, her Albanian interrogator asked if her parents were still alive. She said yes. He gave her pen and paper and said, "Write them, for tomorrow you die..."

Tomorrow You Die... became the title of a book about her time in Albania when her week of prayer in the country was over. It describes the things she went through.

The news I heard? Albania was invited to become a member of NATO today.

What happened to the Cold War? To Communism? History books will tell you that President Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with the demise of Communism and the end of the Cold War. I suspect that we will one day learn that Reona Peterson's contribution was more important...

The Stoics

I recently finished the chapter on the Stoics in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. It was a chore, one of his longer chapters. But I enjoyed it and learned a few things…

I wasn’t aware that Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor portrayed at the beginning of the movie Gladiator as Joaquin Phoenix’s father, persecuted Christians. If you lived through a good liberal arts college education, you probably read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

I wasn’t aware that the Stoics originate in Syria, not Greece. Russell presents the Stoics as something of a bridge between the Eastern philosophy of Asoka’s proselytizing, Buddhist India and European thought.

Most of my life I’ve been involved in Evangelical Protestant Christianity. And over and over I’ve heard teachers in Church suggest that I go back to the Bible and examine my beliefs and try to sort out “Eastern influences” in my Christian thought. So I found this chapter interesting because the Stoics influence early Christianity.

If I say stoic, you probably think of the absence of emotion. Stocks view emotion as destructive and self-control as a virtue. My perspective is that they were half right: self control is a virtue. The stoics were big on virtue; but virtue was internal, introspective. You can’t take it from me because I have it inside of me. Externals, like wealth and power, can detract from virtue (though some of the Stoics, like Seneca, were both wealthy and powerful.

Stoics also believed in determinism – to a greater extent that Greek philosophy had previously embraced that idea. Things are what they are because, well, they’re just bound to be that way.

So a contradiction developed, and it remains in many Western worldviews. On the one hand, things are the way they are because they’re supposed to be that way for some reason. When it’s your time, it’s your time (I don’t believe that). And so on… On the other hand, you should try and do good, make a difference in someone else’s life. The question is, if the life of Bob over there is predetermined to be that way, how does me trying to do good things for him change anything. The answer of the Stoics was, it doesn’t – but it’s virtuous of you to try. That makes virtue a pretty selfish concept.

I see that kind of selfish virtue in Christian circles some time. I see a determinism I don’t believe is Biblical in the mind of the Church. I see confusion about the place of emotions.

I thought the chapter was interesting. Thought provoking. Next I’ll probably read the chapter on the Cynics and the Skeptics (I’m jumping around)…