Today's Clergy Column

Today it was my turn to write the clergy column in the print edition of the local Centre Daily Times. Here it is. Love to have your thoughts...

Suggested Title: America’s Spiritual Heritage: Figuring it Out

Christians are a tough bunch to figure out.
Even for me.

Just when you think you’ve figured out what the legions of denominations stand for, then you discover that there are Episcopalians who speak in tongues, Catholics who are for abortion rights, Baptists who rail against the separation of church and state, and Pentecostals who are stoic.

Yes, it’s risky business to stereotype anyone, and especially the increasingly socially-engaged branch of American Christians commonly known as evangelicals.

Unlike years ago, the term ‘evangelical’ is now used to conflate fundamentalists, moderate evangelicals, liberal evangelicals, pentecostals, charismatics and born-againers of all stripes.

I could write 100 columns about what evangelicals hold and don’t hold in common, but I’m choosing here to address what I believe is possibly our greatest common weakness: naiveté.

Jesus said that we should be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” That has always been my aspiration, though I’m sure I’ve often fallen short on both counts.

I’ve addressed before how Christians sometimes miss the mark of being “harmless as doves,” let me here address the other side of Caesar’s coin.

Few shibboleths get some evangelicals as riled up as ‘God and Country,’ but we almost never ask, “What God?” Since America has such a strong Christian heritage, and since a vast majority of Americans still describe themselves as being Christians, we so often assume that the “God” of the Pledge of Allegiance, printed on our currency, inscribed on the top of the Washington Monument and many other places is the God of the Christian faith.

It is not. It is not the Christian God, the Jewish God, the Muslim God or any other God.

It is the all-of-the-above, e pluribus unim, universalist ‘God.’

Yes, the official faith of America is not secularism; it is most certainly universalism, as best argued by Forrest Church in “The American Creed.”

Now, that’s a rather bold claim to defend in a brief column, but I hope, at least, to open an honest discussion about the question that is probably more important than anything else in our (or any) society—what bedrock spiritual understandings undergird us?

That is why much of the research to prove that America was founded to be a ‘Christian nation’ is worthless. It ignores the obvious: most civic organizations in our society that honor ‘God’ do so assuming that everyone worships the same God—the universalist God. Even many (if not most) who call themselves Christians believe that Christianity is simply one way of worshipping the same God everyone else worships.

The Oprah way is the American way. Believing otherwise is to live in denial.

That’s why evangelicals who hold firmly to what Jesus said about being the ‘only way,’ are met with such disapprobation in society. Holding such a view is not just considered impolite; it’s considered wrong.

That’s why I think it’s high time for evangelicals to recognize that, for us, America, spiritually speaking, is not “home, sweet home.” Rather, like the Amish, we are guests in a foreign land.

And we, as do they, should act like good guests.

If we can figure that out, everyone will be better off.