The New Jerusalem (Tapestry of the Apocalypse), 14th century. Kimon Berlin. Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0
SUMMARY
A sexual metaphor proves helpful. When “America” forces himself on “Hope,” a bastardized form of Christian hope is born. When America forces himself into an intimate, consummating relationship with the Christian eschatological vision, we are left with an illegitimate form of Christian hope. The consummation of the eschaton is rightfully and only the province of God. No nation-state, no human actor, no social or political party—including the church of God—may take upon itself the role of consummating the hopes for which we long. Too often America and its leaders have arrogated to themselves such a role, and the bastardized forms of hope have wreaked much mischief and at times much horrific violence.
EXPOSITION
In 1980, on the eve of his election, US President Ronald Reagan said,
I have quoted John Winthrop’s words more than once on the campaign trail this year—for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining “city on a hill,” as were those long ago settlers. . . .
These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still . . . a shining city on a hill.1
And in 1989, in his farewell speech, Reagan said,
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.2
Reagan’s rhetoric is striking and brilliant, mixing Jesus’s description of the kingdom of heaven in the Sermon on the Mount, Paul’s description of the baptized community in the book of Galatians, and John’s heavenly vision in the book of Revelation.
While Reagan’s rhetoric is indeed brilliant, we must see it as idolatrous.
(It is important as well to note here that this critique—this charge of idolatry—is not and must not be a partisan one. Reagan here provides but a poignant example of the rhetoric often employed by the American Left and the American Right. The intention here is not to single out Reagan—for he is but one spokesperson in a long tradition of speaking in such ways, which will be developed in a subsequent chapter. The intention here is to take Reagan’s rhetoric seriously and to do so from a theological perspective. Again, our task is to stake out a Christianity neither right nor left nor religious.)
The New Jerusalem (Tapestry of the Apocalypse), 14th century. Kimon Berlin. Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0
Compare and contrast, then, the apostle Paul with President Reagan.
For Paul, God entrusted a ministry of reconciliation to the church. The church, rather than grounding its identity in any form of ethnic superiority or nationalism, would in fact set aside the various mechanisms of power and hostility attached to particular identities. The church comprised people of every land, tribe, ethnicity, welcoming all. The church then was called to go forth and sow seeds of reconciliation. Hostility and partisanship were to be defeated through love of enemies and doing good for those who do us wrong. For Paul, then, it was the “new humanity” created in Christ who embodied “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28 NIV).
But for Reagan it is the “awed” citizens of the United States who “do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans.” No, transcending all these markers of division, the Great Communicator contends, is patently not the fact of a unity in Christ. Transcending all these markers of presumed hostility, he claims, is the fact that “they are Americans.”
For Reagan, the biblical task entrusted to the church of Jesus has been transferred to the United States. Now America is the “city on a hill.” Now the task of reconciliation has been transferred to the United States. For Paul, it was the nonviolent baptized people of God who were to embody reconciled humanity. But for Reagan, it is now the United States of America, the shining city on a hill, projecting its global military might throughout the world, which is not “white or black, red or yellow.” For Reagan, “they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans.” They are simply Americans.
Reagan weaves Paul’s vision of reconciliation into John’s depiction of the new Jerusalem, whose gates are always open, whose avenues and streets are filled with peoples of all the nations living in peace. Reagan’s employment of this vision from the book of Revelation is done without the least embarrassment, without the least recognition of the irony.
Yet the ironies are deep and profound. Consider two examples. First, in the book of Revelation the writer John draws a sharp contrast between the mechanisms of empire and the means of the church. The imperial project—bringing about its own vision of peace, the first-century Pax Romana—imposes its vision by hook or by crook, by what appears to be an irresistible strength that cannot be swayed. Similarly, Reagan sought to fortify America early in his presidency with a vast buildup of military might alongside mind-boggling nuclear weapons capacities and the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. “Star Wars”), which would project a sense of impenetrable power.3 In contrast, in the book of Revelation is the faith of the martyrs, those who would not be cowed by imperial might. They bore witness to a truth greater than empire and allowed their blood to be shed rather than bow the knee to the empire.
Second, in the book of Revelation, and indeed all of the New Testament, the “new humanity” comprises people of all nations, tribes, tongues. In this way it is the same as Reagan’s vision of America. And yet here lies the rub: the new humanity of the New Testament is not bounded by artificial geographical boundaries and is not defended by military might. One of the fundamental discontinuities between Old and New Testaments lies here: the baptized community is a transboundaried people, holding passports and citizenships only as a matter of pragmatic convenience or necessity, but not as a matter of fundamental identity. But for Reagan’s vision, “America,” not the “new Jerusalem,” is that city whose gates are always open.
Thus Reagan weaves Paul’s ministry of reconciliation into John’s vision of the new Jerusalem, and in a shameless coup de grâce co-opts Jesus’s language from the Sermon on the Mount: the shining city on a hill.
Again, the ironies are deep. Jesus’s shining city comprises those who weep over the injustices of human history; who are merciful with an outrageous mercy with which their God is merciful; who love their enemies and do good to those who despitefully use them; who rejoice in being persecuted, for they know that the powers have always persecuted those who bear witness to the steadfast love of God; who speak the truth, take no oaths or pledges, and forgive as they have been forgiven. Blessed are the peacemakers, proclaimed Jesus’s beatitudes, those who are merciful, mournful, and poor in spirit.
But for Reagan’s bastardized hope, it was America wielding nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles—ironically called Peacekeepers—that would yield the end of history.
Clearly for Reagan history is not one damn meaningless thing after another. He refuses to spiritualize away the rhetoric of the New Testament. But he fundamentally changes the narrative. It is not the work of God in Christ evoking the end of history; it is not the people of God bearing humble, even suffering, witness to the work of God in Christ. Reagan has not merely redacted the story; he has changed the story. It is America, both agent of and witness to, the hope of the world.
Reagan, in other words, simply overlooks the fact that a nation-state cannot be the father of eschatological hope, because no nation-state can be legitimately wed to the kingdom of God. A dog cannot breed with a cat. Nor can the nation-state bear legitimate offspring with the kingdom of God. In fact, John’s Apocalypse employs some of the most graphic sexual language in the New Testament on precisely this point. To those who seem tempted to enjoy a “friends with benefits” intimacy with the empire, John says: “come ye out of her,” an apparent allusion to coitus interruptus. Before you climax, pull out.
In summary, Reagan casts a theological vision, describes the end of history, but casts the United States of America as the protagonist. In doing so, Reagan subverts the radical political purposes for which Jesus, Paul, and John employed such a vision. For them the kingdom of God transcends any and all human kingdoms, empires, and nation-states. Yet for Reagan the United States of America will carry human history to its destiny.
In response, many Christians contributed to the subversion of Christianity itself. In celebrating such political speech in service to a partisan agenda, they thereby celebrated the subversion of the nonpartisan agenda of Christianity. Pushed out on a limb, many Christians cheered on the one who took his sharp rhetorical saw to the branch.
Why would Christians sell their inheritance for a mess of American stew?
Perhaps one reason is this: they did not understand that Reagan—and the likes of Reagan—are liberals in sheep’s clothing.
Liberalism
Christians must learn the differences between liberalism and Christianity. And the differences may not be what many presume.
Liberalism is a political theory and movement that focuses on the liberty of the individual over against various forms of authority or power. With the rise of the Enlightenment, old established forms of authority were challenged: that of the church, monarchies, and patriarchy. Much of the old was discounted, and the emphasis on the individual using his (and in time, her) autonomous reason and rationality was seen as the hallmark of the new. “Have the courage to use your own reason—that is the motto of the Enlightenment,” said Immanuel Kant, one of the premier Enlightenment thinkers.4
There is much to celebrate about liberalism. Its movement allowed the undoing of a great deal of corrupt power-mongering, allowed for the redistribution of wealth held unjustly by powerful men, and challenged various forms of superstitious religious practice. In time, at its best, it would contribute to the undoing of slavery, the protection of children, and the (theoretical at least) equality of women, as well as (theoretically at least) racial equity. Various forms of scientific inquiry were set free in pursuit of truth, and many communities were given a degree of self-determination through democratic processes.
Moreover, it can be and has been convincingly argued that Christian tradition contributed key philosophical resources needed in the rise of liberalism and democratic orders. (And one might make such a case without falling prey to the false notion, as argued below, that America is a so-called Christian nation.)
All these facets of Western liberalism should be celebrated. (And Christians have all manner of biblical and theological reasons to celebrate such: freedom of the press, for example, is analogous to Paul’s insistence that everyone in the assembly should be allowed to have their say. And, it turns out, even with all of its challenges, that a free press provides a great check on corrupt power. For example, some sources report that no famine has ever grown in widespread destruction in countries where freedom of press reigns.)
Liberalism entails a number of institutional practices: democratic processes instead of patriarchal or monarchical hand-me-downs. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense decried the idiocy of thinking that someone was capable of ruling well because he or she happened to be the heir of the current king or queen. Common sense, he insisted, would support the rejection of such medieval tradition and make space for liberalism. Thus, communities, nations, should be free to choose their own leaders, their own laws.
So, when small government advocates rail against the imposition of federal bureaucracy, they are being in this regard good liberals.
Liberalism makes similar moves with regard to economic institutions. Individuals should not be stuck in one economic class or station in life due to the traditions of their forebears. They should be allowed to choose their own vocation. They should be free—to use the language of the US founding documents—to enjoy their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For an Enlightenment thinker like John Locke, the pursuit of happiness entailed the pursuit of the accumulation of property, the potential amassing of wealth according to an individual’s industry. Free-market capitalism, in other words, is liberalism made manifest in economic practice.
Liberalism makes similar moves with regard to religion. No one should impose on another individual a given religion. Individuals should be free to “worship at the church of their choice.” There should be no state-established religion, for this would violate the conscience of individuals who should be free to pursue their own conception of God, the afterlife, or the responsibilities imposed on humankind by the Deity.
One of the fundamental philosophical problems with liberalism, from a Christian perspective, is this: liberalism does not explicitly concern itself with a shared conception of the meaning of life, the purpose of life, or the end of history. For a community as a whole to embrace the notion that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive” or to embrace the claim that the purpose of being human “is to glorify God, and enjoy God forever” would entail particular practices, habits, commitments, and convictions. As one example, for a community as a whole to embrace the notion that wealth must be employed for the common good and not wasted on extravagance or indulgence or vanity would entail yet another set of shared pursuits with attendant practices, habits, commitments, and convictions.
Classical liberalism does not concern itself with answering these sorts of questions. It is, instead, seeking to hold together some loose collective in which peoples of diverse ultimate commitments may abide together. Not only does it refuse to give a principled answer to these sorts of questions, but it in fact also rejects the notion that commonly shared answers to many such questions should be addressed in our shared public life. These matters are private. Thus individuals are free to make their own choices about the meaning of God or to choose their own values with regard to the disposal, use, and accumulation of wealth. But they must not expect that their convictions can in any way be made publicly relevant or important.
So, we might revise the contention here. Liberalism may in fact, after all, concern itself with the “meaning of life” or the “end of history,” but only by privatizing the question of what a good life entails. Liberalism privatizes the good, but liberalism by definition refuses to make the question of “the good” a matter for rigorous public concern.
This does not mean, of course, that liberalism is unconcerned with ethics. A great number of ethical theories have proliferated since the rise of the Enlightenment, each trying to sort out what is right and what is wrong, with all manner of legalisms foisted on us. But these Enlightenment ethical theories differ sharply from many ancient moral traditions (as in the likes of Aristotle or Moses or the eighth-century BCE prophets or Jesus), all of which begin with the end in mind. These older moral traditions ask questions about what it means to be human, or they ask questions about where history is headed. Then, and only then, do they seek to describe the practices or morality or laws that should order common life, to fashion a people toward that end.
If you are unfamiliar with virtue traditions, you might think of it in simple terms such as this: What does it look like to be a good basketball player? Or an excellent musician? With an answer in mind, then determine what habits, dispositions, rules, and practices allow someone to become such? What habits, dispositions, and practices constitute such? This, with too much brevity, is a schema for the virtue traditions.
But liberalism does not think in such terms. One of the fundamental agendas of liberalism is not to determine any shared, thick conception of what the “good” entails. This is to be left to individuals. Individuals may choose to be basketball players or musicians or businesspersons or whatever, and they are free to do so.
That being said, however, liberalism needs some minimal morality by which it can be kept from self-destruction. After all, if all the individuals go mad pursuing their own privatized goods, then all hell will break loose. So, there must be some morality, some standards purportedly guaranteed by what liberalism calls rights.
Note then this contrast between the morality of liberalism and the morality of virtue traditions. In the virtue traditions, virtues are practices that make possible an excellence, a joy; they are a means of liberty. The violinist, for example, who has submitted to years of discipline, who has submitted painstakingly to good authority becomes free, thereby, to play and perform with a liberty otherwise not possible to the rest of us mere mortals. This was the vision of morality in days of old.
But with the advent of liberalism, morality and rights are primarily seen as a restriction of human liberty, not the pathway to greater freedom. Morality becomes, under the purview of liberalism, a constraint to human freedom.
By our own day the term liberal has come to be used for one branch of liberalism, while conservative is used for another branch of liberalism. One might summarize the similarities and differences between liberal liberals and conservative liberals this way: they both support liberal institutions such as constitutional democracy, maximizing individual liberties within certain parameters, the free exercise of religion within certain parameters, and the like.
But they disagree about the parameters. They disagree about the places at which individual liberties should be limited.
Liberal liberals, for example, insist that a maximum amount of freedom should be afforded to an individual’s use of their bodies, that a great deal of freedom should be extended with regard to sexual mores, gender identity, and sexual preference. For a liberal liberal, restrictions of abortion are, put most crassly, the federal government intruding into a woman’s control over her own womb. But liberal liberals believe that the government should limit what individuals (and corporations) are allowed to do with their money and their guns.
Conservative liberals, on the other hand, insist that a maximum amount of freedom should be afforded to individuals and corporations in the use of their money and their guns. For a conservative liberal, restrictions of gun ownership are, painted in broad strokes, the beginning of the slippery slope of the federal government becoming a totalitarian state. But conservative liberals believe the government should limit what individuals are allowed to do with their bodies and sexual mores.
Generally speaking, neither the liberal liberals nor the conservative liberals are posing a fundamental challenge to the basic institutions of Western liberalism. Instead, they are arguing over the proper forms of liberalism, which, again, does not have any sort of rigorous or compelling or thick account of what it means to be human. Democrats and Republicans or the Tea Partiers and the Green Party are not arguing about whether to return to other forms of governance.
A king telling a businessman how to run his business is as repulsive to the conservative liberal as a king telling a woman what she will do with her womb is to the liberal liberal. They are not having an argument about whether to overthrow or question the foundations of the classical liberal tradition. They are not having an extramural debate; it is an intramural debate. They are having a family argument. And, of course, there is nothing like watching a family argument.
A potentially fruitful practice for American Christians, then, when discussing the politics of the nation-state, is for us to change our labels. Perhaps rather than ever using the term conservative let us substitute conservative liberal, and instead of using the term liberal let us substitute liberal liberal.
This would force us to think in different categories. Rather than seeing one such partisan movement as being the Christian one, we are forced to realize that the Tea Partier and the Green Partier are in fact not trying to sort out the best way to be Christian but how to be the best partisan of liberalism.
In other words, one of the first great steps Christianity can make in the Western world today is to realize that when we get co-opted or triangulated into the American family argument, we have thereby failed to understand either classical political liberalism or Christianity.
(It is important to state here that the would-be Christian may be able rightly to celebrate particular aspects of the liberal tradition. The point here is not to suggest that it would be preferred for us to have a philosopher-king [though there are times when a philosopher-king might be preferable to a mad ruler selected by democratic processes] or to have a socialist state. It all depends on the particulars. Instead, the point here is [a] to understand the differences between Christianity and liberalism, while [b] refusing to confuse the Christian eschatological vision with the American eschatological vision—which is to say that we must not bastardize Christian hope by seeking to bed American liberal might.)
To return to the sexual metaphor with which we began, when we reduce the political possibilities for the Christian church to being either a liberal liberal or a conservative liberal, we’ve bought hook, line, and sinker into the rhetoric that gives us a bastardized form of Christian hope.
It means we’ve been duped, been used, allowed ourselves to be used.
1. Ronald Reagan, “Election Eve Address ‘A Vision for America,’ ” American Presidency Project, November 3, 1980, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/election-eve-address-vision-for-america.
2. Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, January 11, 1989, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/011189i.
3. The Arms Control Association summarizes Reagan’s endeavors this way: “Reagan’s mixed legacy has permitted rival claimants to offer divergent views of his role in the end of the Cold War and the easing of nuclear tensions in the 1990s. Some facts, however, are beyond dispute. Reagan presided over a massive nuclear buildup and launched an expensive effort to build a defense against strategic missiles, which exacerbated tensions with Moscow. His military policies catalyzed widespread anti-nuclear activism that increased the political impetus for nuclear arms control. Yet, Reagan’s unconventional leadership style and determination also allowed him to reach out to the Soviet leadership and relate to Gorbachev’s new and bold thinking. Together the two leaders set their nations on a path toward arms control arrangements that reflected their personal abhorrence for nuclear war and addressed domestic and international concern about where Cold War nuclear rivalry might eventually lead without such restraint.” Daryl G. Kimball, “Looking Back: The Nuclear Arms Control Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” ArmsControl.org, accessed July 13, 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_07-08/Reagan.
4. Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment?, trans. and ed. L. W. Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 286.