The Overton Salon

By Austin

Kathy Kattenburg over at the Moderate Voice points to a story NPR did about a U.S. District court ruling that  makes it unconstitutional for the President to proclaim a national day of prayer (a practice that stared in 1952).

Why do I say this is a victory? Because for too long, American Christians have blurred the distinction between worship of God in church and worship of nation at sporting events, national holidays, and schools.

But this blurring is wrong. Christianity has always defined itself against such provincial bonds because it proclaims the life, death, and resurrection is for all peoples, and that the church is universal. I have more in common with my Chinese, Iranian, or Cuban bothers and sisters in Christ than I do with my American neighbors who do not confess Jesus as Lord.

Holidays like the “National Day of Prayer,” while often initiated in good faith, actually participate in national “liturgies” of unity. And these liturgies have a specific function that Christians are often confused about. I’ve heard Christians say that national day of prayer should help us get back to the faith of the founding fathers (read Drew’s discussion of such “faith” here), but the real function of these liturgies is to develop a primary loyalty to one’s nation, rather than a loyalty to Jesus. It does not rule out loyalty to Jesus (obviously that’s a part of this holiday), but it promotes a particular vision of what that loyalty means - the hope is that by getting the country “back onto God’s path” the country itself will prosper and flourish.

But the main guarantee of loyalty to Jesus is not success. In fact, the one guarantee is that if you follows the way of the cross, you will suffer (consider: Acts 5.40-42; Acts 9.15-16;  Rom 8.16-18). The attitude of early Christians we see in the New Testament, and texts form figures like Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch, is that they expected and welcomed suffering. They almost universally did not expect prosperity – which is one of the reasons Romans found them so strange (their view was that Christians were atheists, anti-family, and immoral). Roman civic religion, as Augustine noted in the City of God, promised prosperity to the nation. But Christians knew, said Augustine, that the real “patria” (fatherland) is not the nation, but Jesus.

So this is indeed a real victory for Christians. The more our faith is publically distanced from the nation, the freer we are to be who we are. If we truly confess Jesus as Lord, we will always remember what the Epistle to Diognetus says about Christians:

They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.