The Myth of a Christian Nation

by Gregory A. Boyd

  This wasn’t just an unavoidable means to a noble end. To the contrary, this act of love in obedience to the Father expresses the very heart of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish. “The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to the kingdom,” Yoder correctly notes, “it is the kingdom come.”9 Sacrificial love, therefore, isn’t simply an effective means to a greater good: it is the “set apart” kingdom of God on earth! When one obeys God and loves as Christ loves in a kingdom-of-the-world context, it always looks like this. This is the “holiness”—the set-apartness—of God’s kingdom on earth. And this is why everything hangs on not allowing it to become co-opted by immediate, obvious, and self-serving kingdom-of-the-world methods, however good the immediate consequences may appear to be.10

  Jesus knew what we must know: Everything rests on our resisting the Devil’s temptation to do what seems to be immediate good things without suffering, instead of kingdom-of-God things that are slow, discrete, and always involve an element of sacrifice. As Camp argues, everything hangs on our confidence that

  it is not through the power brokers of human history that God will effect God’s purposes, but through the little minority band of peoples committed to walking in the way of Jesus of Nazareth, bearing witness to the new reality, the new creation, the kingdom of God.

  But as Camp further notes, this requires “great trust: that it is not our task to make things turn out right, but instead to be faithful witnesses. We have to trust that God will be God, and do what God has promised.”11

  THE CHURCH MILITANT AND TRIUMPHANT

  Tragically, the history of the church has been largely a history of believers refusing to trust the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptation he resisted. It’s the history of an institution that has frequently traded its holy mission for what it thought was a good mission. It is the history of an organization that has frequently forsaken the slow, discrete, nonviolent, sacrificial way of transforming the world for the immediate, obvious, practical, and less costly way of improving the world. It is a history of a people who too often identified the kingdom of God with a “Christian” version of the kingdom of the world.

  For the first three hundred years, this wasn’t so. Followers of Jesus during this time saw themselves as “resident aliens.” They were a persecuted minority and as such did not dream of corporately exercising “power over” others. Indeed, the church of this time grew—and grew at a mind-boggling rate! This growth came about not by Christians fighting for their rights, as so many do today, but largely by Christians being put to death! It was during this time that the word martyr, which originally meant “witness,” came to mean “one who dies for their faith,” for dying was one of the primary ways these early Christians witnessed for their faith. In fact, many considered it an honor to be allowed to imitate Christ in being sacrificed for the kingdom they were citizens of.

  This is not to suggest that the early church was a perfect expression of the kingdom of God; they had their all-too-human faults as we all do and absorbed their share of pagan ideas and attitudes. But as a corporate whole, their general relationship with the kingdom of the world replicated that of Jesus. To a large degree, the early church looked like a corporate version of Jesus dying on the cross for those who crucified him. The main proof they offered the world that Jesus was real was the fact that the new reality of the kingdom was manifested in their lives, both individually and corporately.12

  It’s difficult to overemphasize the change that occurred when, in AD 312, the emperor Constantine was converted. Just prior to an important battle, legend has it that Constantine had a vision in which he was told to paint Chi Rho (the first two letters of the Greek word for “Christ”) on the shields of his soldiers. Allegedly, a voice in the vision announced, “By this sign you shall conquer.” Constantine obeyed the vision and won the battle. The magic apparently worked, and so Constantine and his administration dedicated themselves to the Christians’ God. This was the first time anyone ever associated the Christian faith with violence, but its success stained the church from then on.

  Constantine legalized Christianity in AD 313, and because of its association with him, the religion immediately exploded in popularity. Within seventy years it was proclaimed the official religion of the Roman empire—making it a crime not to be a Christian (the Jews were exempt from the law, but not from the growing anti-Semitism of the church). The first recorded instance of Christians killing pagans occurred shortly after. In short order, the militant church extended its power by conquering lands and peoples throughout Europe, compelling them to become baptized Christians or die. As Charlemagne instructed his Christian troops in their conquest of the Saxons: “If there is anyone of the Saxon people lurking among them unbaptized, and if he scorns to come to baptism…and stay a pagan, let him die.”13

  The “power under” kingdom centered on the cross had succeeded in becoming a massive “power over” kingdom centered on the sword. The church had become “the church militant and triumphant,” and the kingdom of God, manifested in the crucified Nazarene, had become the empire of Christendom.

  The sacrificial love and humility that characterized Christ and the early church had to be reinterpreted at this time to accommodate the new power that church leaders believed God had given to the church. Instead of being seen as the essence of the kingdom of God, the “power under” lifestyle of Jesus and the early Christians came to be understood as a provisional inconvenience that had to be tolerated until Christianity could gain status in the world. Jesus and the early disciples had to be humble and suffer, it was argued, because they didn’t have the power to do otherwise. Forgetting that “the god of this age” owns all the authority of the kingdom of the world and gives it to whoever he wills (Luke 4:6–8), church leaders of this time insisted that God had given the church the power of the sword and thus concluded the church had an obligation to use it.

  Indeed, since the church knows the truth and thus knows what is best for all people, the thinking generally went, it would be positively immoral to lay this power aside and “come under” the heathen. Rather, for their sake and for the glory of God, the church must use its newfound “power over” to compel (by force) heathens and heretics to agree with it and be saved. Why else would God have given this power to us, they thought?

  A HISTORY OF PERSECUTION IN JESUS’ NAME

  What followed was a long and terrible history of people using the sword “in Jesus’ name for the glory of God.” Though there are, of course, many wonderful examples of Christlike people and movements throughout church history, the reigning church as a whole—“Christendom”—acted about as badly as most versions of the kingdom of the world. The Holy Roman Empire was about as violent as the Roman Empire it aspired to replace. It just carried out its typical kingdom-of-the-world barbarism under a different banner and in service to a different god.

  Augustine was the first theologian to align the church in an official way with the use of the sword, and it happened to be against a fellow Christian group, the Donatists. Among other things, the Donatists believed that the alliance between the church and the state that had been forged since Constantine was undermining the purity and integrity of the church, and they wanted to keep the church pure.14 Though Augustine had previously spoken against the use of coercion for religious purposes, his ongoing battle with the Donatists led him to reverse his view.

  Augustine now justified the use of force by arguing that inflicting temporal pain to help someone avoid eternal pain is justified. Since God had given the church the power of the sword, Augustine reasoned, it had a responsibility to use it to further God’s purposes in the world just as a stern father has a responsibility to beat his child for his own good. Since God sometimes uses terror for the good of humans, we who are God’s representatives on earth—the church—may use terror for the sake of the gospel.15 If the end justifies it, the use of violence as a means to that end is justified. (This is, in essence, Augustine’
s “just war” policy.) Augustine thus invoked a recent edict of the emperor Theodosius to criminalize the “heresy” of Donatism and attempt to persecute it out of existence. This set a tragic precedent for handling doctrinal disagreements for the next thirteen hundred years.

  Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, millions were burned at the stake, hung, beheaded, or executed in other ways for resisting some aspect of the church’s teaching or for failing to operate under its authority.16 Thousands upon thousands were tortured in unthinkable ways in an attempt to elicit a confession of faith in the Savior and the church; some of the macabre torturing devices were even inscribed with the logo “Glory be only to God.” Christian sectarian groups such as the Paulicans, Cathars, Albigensians, and Waldensians were massacred by the towns—often including women and children—and Christians in both the West and the East slaughtered each other in Jesus’ name as ruthlessly as they slaughtered Muslims. Terrible atrocities were carried out on Jews, especially when the Crusades needed to be financed, and multitudes of women (estimates range between sixty thousand to several million) were burned or hung for allegedly being witches—most of whom denied the charge.17 The church of resident aliens had become a horde of savage warlords.

  The militant, Constantinian mindset carried into the Protestant Reformation. So long as they remained a persecuted minority, Reformers generally decried the use of violence for religious purposes. But once given the power of the sword, most used it as relentlessly as it had previously been used against them. Indeed, with the exception of the Anabaptists, every splinter group of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spilled blood. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and other Protestant groups fought each other, fought the Catholics, and martyred Anabaptists and other “heretics” by the hundreds. It wasn’t until the bloodshed became economically unbearable and unfeasible in the Thirty Years’ War that a truce (the Peace of Westphalia) was called and Christians agreed, at least theoretically, to end the violence.

  Yet while the Christian use of the sword subsided in Europe, it continued in the New World. As God gave Canaan to Joshua, many argued, so God gave other lands over to white European Christians. To the thinking of many, the church “militant and triumphant” was on the move to conquer the world for Christ, and all who resisted it were seen as resisting God himself and deserving death.18 Christians coming to the long-inhabited land of America participated in the slaughter of millions of Native Americans, as well as the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans as a means of conquering and establishing this new land for Jesus. Such, it was claimed, was the “manifest destiny” of Europeans,19 and it wasn’t simply warriors who died at the swords of Christians. As is common with kingdom-of-the-world conquests, raping, torturing for sport, pillaging, and treatise breaking were widespread.

  While the violent expression of the Constantinian mindset has been largely outlawed, the mindset itself is very much alive today. To be sure, in some parts of the world Christians still engage in violence against other Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and other groups. But even within the borders of America, the mindset is alive and well. When Jerry Falwell, reflecting a widespread sentiment among conservative Christians, says America should hunt terrorists down and “blow them all away in the name of the Lord” (emphasis added), he is expressing the Constantinian mindset. When Pat Robertson declares that the United States should assassinate President Chavez of Venezuela, he also is expressing the Constantinian mindset. And when Christians try to enforce their holy will on select groups of sinners by power of law, they are essentially doing the same thing, even if the violent means of enforcing their will is no longer available to them.

  A DEMONIC IRONY

  It has been a profoundly sad and ironic history. In the interest of effectively accomplishing what it thought was an immediate and discernable good thing, the church often forsook its kingdom-of-God call. As a result, it frequently justified doing tremendously evil things. The moment worldly effectiveness replaces faithfulness as the motive for an individual’s or institution’s behavior, they are no longer acting on behalf of the kingdom of God but are participating in the kingdom of the world. The so-called good end will always be used to justify the evil means for those thinking with a kingdom-of-the-world mindset, and in doing this, the church succumbed to the very temptation Jesus resisted. It wanted to fix the world with its superior wisdom and run the world with the sword because it naively believed it could do so better than secular authorities. So, submitting itself to the cosmic “power over” god, it established itself as the ruling Caesar of the West. Far from improving on the old version of the kingdom of the world, however, it brought about a regime that was often worse than the version it replaced.

  In fact, a kingdom-of-God citizen could (and should) argue that the Christian version of the kingdom of the world was actually the worst version the world has ever seen. For this was the version of the kingdom of the world that did the most harm to the kingdom of God. Not only did it torture and kill, as versions of the kingdom of the world frequently do—it did this under the banner of Christ. If violence and oppression are demonic, violence and oppression “in the name of Jesus” is far more so. The church of Christendom thereby brought disrepute to the name of Christ, associating his kingdom with the atrocities it carried out for centuries. The resistance most Islamic countries have to Christianity today, in fact, is partly to be explained by the vicious behavior of Christians toward Muslims throughout history.

  This tragic history has to be considered one of Satan’s greatest victories, and the demonic ironies abound. In the name of the one who taught us not to lord over others but rather to serve them (Matt. 20:25–28), the church often lorded over others with a vengeance as ruthless as any version of the kingdom of the world ever has. In the name of the one who taught us to turn the other cheek, the church often cut off people’s heads. In the name of the one who taught us to love our enemies, the church often burned its enemies alive. In the name of the one who taught us to bless those who persecute us, the church often became a ruthless persecutor. In the name of the one who taught us to take up the cross, the church often took up the sword and nailed others to the cross. Hence, in the name of winning the world for Jesus Christ, the church often became the main obstacle to believing in Jesus Christ.

  THE CHURCH VERSUS JESUS

  While we, of course, have no business judging people’s hearts and deciding who is and is not “saved,” kingdom-of-God citizens must have a vested interest in discerning and declaring what is and is not the kingdom of God. If we don’t declare that this barbaric religious version of the kingdom of the world was not, and is not, the kingdom of God, who will? While Christian apologists sometimes try to minimize the harm the church has done, making excuses for it whenever possible and insisting instead on the good the church accomplished, kingdom people should rather be on the front row declaring that insofar as the church picked up the sword, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the kingdom of God. Far from defending the church, kingdom people should lead the charge in critiquing it, for when it exercised power over others in Jesus’ name, not only was it not the kingdom of God—something that is true of all versions of the kingdom of the world—it constituted a demonic distortion of the kingdom of God.

  For the sake of the kingdom of God, we need to proclaim with our lives, and with our words when necessary, that the sole criteria for whether something is a manifestation of the kingdom of God or not is the person of Jesus Christ. To the extent that an individual or group looks like Jesus, dying for those who crucified him and praying for their forgiveness in the process—to that degree they can be said to manifest the kingdom of God. To the degree they do not look like this, they do not manifest God’s kingdom. Hence, to the extent that the church throughout history has persecuted “sinners” and “heretics” rather than embracing them, serving them, and sacrificing for them in love, it was simply one religious version of the kingdom of the world among a multi
tude of others—only worse, precisely because it claimed to represent the kingdom of God.

  To say the same thing a different way, kingdom people need to lead the charge in proclaiming that the church has nothing to do with the kingdom of God whenever it wields the sword instead of loving. While those who wielded the Constantinian sword throughout history undoubtedly convinced themselves they were wielding the sword in love—this is a common self-delusion among religious power brokers—lording over, torturing, and killing people does not communicate their unsurpassable worth to them; it is not loving.

  Love is patient and kind (1 Cor. 13:4); enslaving and torturing people is neither. Love is never rude (1 Cor. 13:5); burning people alive is. Love does not insist on its own way and is not irritable or resentful when others disagree (1 Cor. 13:5); compelling people to agree with you by using force is the direct antithesis. Love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing (1 Cor. 13:6), even if (especially if) those rejoicing credit God, who supposedly gave them the power to do it. Love bears all things while believing the best in others and hoping the best for others (1 Cor. 13:7); imprisoning, enslaving, and killing others in the name of your religious views is not bearing their burdens, believing the best about them, or hoping the best for them. It’s that simple.