They dragged Jason out of his own house.
Paul had come to Thessalonica and done what Paul always did — three Sabbaths in the synagogue, reasoning from the Scriptures, laying out the evidence that the Messiah had to suffer and rise. Some were persuaded. Others were furious, and collected some men from the marketplace, formed a mob and went looking for him. Failing to find Paul, they took the man whose house he was staying in and hauled him before the city authorities:
These men who have upset the world have come here also... They all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.
Two thousand years later, on this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, that is still the whole question. What does the Christian faith have to do with the American story, and where does a Christian's allegiance sit?
Let me tell you where I stand before I say anything else. I love my God. I love my country. I worship my God. I do not worship my country. My God is perfect — infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth, as the catechism has it. My country is none of those things. Great people make great mistakes, and so do great countries. We have. So has every nation on earth.
What the word means
Nationalism, without the adjective in front of it, is loyalty and devotion to a nation — near enough a synonym for patriotism. If you doubt that people love their countries, watch the World Cup. Some of you were at the Marlins game when the Scots were in town. Man, those people love Scotland. They also love American beer, but that is another story entirely.
Christian nationalism is a different animal. It is what happens when a person folds his Christianity into his patriotism and wants to wrap the cross up in the flag — when being a good Christian and a good American become, in his mind, the same thing.
So am I saying it is wrong for a Christian to love his country? Not for a moment. God places us in the nations where we find ourselves. When his own people were carried off into exile he sent word through Jeremiah: seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. That city was Babylon — pagan through and through. Pray for your country. Be a good citizen of it. Just do not set that allegiance on the same shelf as your allegiance to Christ.
The case that we are a Christian nation
Reasonable Christians disagree here, and there is real evidence on both sides. I have spent seventeen years doing a deep dive into early American history and I will try not to drown you. Here is a sample.
The Mayflower Compact, written aboard ship in 1620, opens: In the name of God, amen, and says the voyage was undertaken for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith. Ten years later John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella, told his people they had entered into covenant with God for this work, and would be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon them — a phrase lifted straight out of the Sermon on the Mount. He closed by handing them Moses' farewell to Israel out of Deuteronomy 30: life and death are set before you, therefore choose life. They understood themselves as a new Israel crossing the water to a promised land — which is why Benjamin Franklin, hardly the most orthodox believer among the founders, wanted our national symbol to be Moses parting the Red Sea.
And Alexis de Tocqueville, a French Catholic aristocrat who could not fathom how this upstart country had become what it became in fifty years, came over and spent nine months on horseback finding out. Americans, he wrote, combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of the one without the other.
Case closed, then. Drop the mic. Well — as the great football coach Lee Corso likes to say, not so fast.
Not so fast
You can cherry-pick in the other direction too. John Adams, himself a fairly orthodox believer, put his name to a document stating that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Why? He was negotiating with the Barbary states, whose ships were raiding ours in the Mediterranean, and he wanted it stopped. Sanctified lying, basically. It did not take, which is why the Marine hymn mentions the shores of Tripoli.
So let us be precise, because the whole argument turns on what the phrase means.
If by Christian nation you mean a country settled and formed by people who were overwhelmingly Christian, who knew their Bibles and built the thing on biblical principles — that is simply the historical record. At our founding this nation was ninety-eight percent Protestant.
If you mean a nation established as Christian by charter, with an official state church — the way the Dominican Republic is Catholic by charter — then the answer is no. The founders deliberately declined. Their grandparents had come out of countries with state churches and had seen what that produces. Bolt the church to the government and one of two things happens. Either the state runs the church, and the church goes weak and feckless and finally becomes a joke; or the church takes hold of the state, and Lord Acton's rule applies — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Would I want it?
People ask whether I, a conservative Bible-believing Presbyterian minister, would like to see this country made Christian by charter.
Absolutely not.
I do not want to force anybody to believe what I believe, and I could not if I tried. You can force a person to submit. You cannot force a person to believe. The power of the gospel is moral and spiritual persuasion, never coercion. I want it to go out and people to receive Christ freely — the way, I expect, most of you did.
Os Guinness puts the whole thing in a line: keep God above America and you will keep America; lose America under God and you lose God and America both.
Which brings us back to a house in Thessalonica, a mob at the door, and an accusation that has never once stopped being true. There is another king.
We have no king but Jesus.
