Our Country and “The State”

Greetings,

      Abraham Lincoln singlehandedly reinterpreted the meaning of the Declaration of Independence for America.  His “Gettysburg Address” and “Second Inaugural Address” put into words his new vision for The United States, which he was so desperately fighting to keep United.  The document which was intended as a statement of justification for rebelling against the British King and government, became a charter for how the new (now almost 100 year old) government should conduct itself and a statement of the rights and expectations of its citizens.  His new definition of the Declaration in turn redefined the interpretation of the Constitution.

      The Bible is clear: God has no preferred form of government, only an insistence that any government conform itself to God’s will and the standards of God’s justice.  It also reveals that although God has no favorites among people or their governmental methods, humans stubbornly persist in withstanding God’s impartiality.

      In 1892 Herman Melville wrote:

      “We Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world…Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come.  But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings.  And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of the earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.”

      Simone Weil wrote in 1943:

      “The nation is a recent innovation.  In the Middle Ages, allegiance was owed to the lord, or the city, or both, and by extension to territorial areas not very clearly defined.  The sentiment we call patriotism certainly existed, often to a very intense degree; only its subject was not set within territorial limits…

      “The idea of making the State an object of loyalty appeared for the first time in France and in Europe with Richelieu…It was he who first adopted the principle that whoever exercised a public function owes his entire loyalty…not to the public, or to the king, but to the State and nothing else…It was this sin which the devil wanted Christ to commit…Christ refused.  Richelieu accepted…His policy was to kill systematically all spontaneous life in the country, so as to prevent anything whatsoever being able to oppose the State…

      “The State is a cold concern which cannot inspire love, but itself kills, suppresses everything that might be loved; so one is forced to love it, because there is nothing else.  That is the moral torment to which all of us today are exposed.”

      Karl Barth said “Everything that has to do with the State is taken a hundred times more seriously than God.”  We noted with interest that a number of stores and even some restaurants are closed for the Independence Day holiday today.  Many of those same places are now open on Easter, Thanksgiving Day, New Year’s Day and some are even open on Christmas.  The State Birthday is becoming the only “sacred” day.

      I hope that these several days worth of reflections on the holiday have not suggested any lack of “love” for the State, but rather have proved useful in bringing about serious thought as to our relationship as Christians to the State and to this nation which many of us proclaim to be “under God.”  Enjoy the holiday, but take some time to think and pray.

Yours & His,

DED