The Myth of a Christian Nation

by Gregory A. Boyd

1. Approximately seven hundred left during the six-week “Cross and the Sword” sermon series. Another three hundred or so left when I “didn’t have the good sense” to back off the topic but rather returned to it once again just prior to the election.

  2. By myth I mean “a story that speaks of meaning and purpose, and for this reason it speaks truth to those who take it seriously.” Richard T. Hughs, Myths Americans Live By (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 2004), 2.

  3. For two excellent treatments of this dimension of American mythic history, see Richard Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade against Evil (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003); and Hughs, Myths Americans Live By. As shall become clear later on, the American myth is simply a version of a myth that has dominated Christianity since the fourth century when Christianity emerged from its persecuted past and “triumphed” as a global force. From Constantine on, the church has more often than not seen itself as the religious guardian of the empire—with disastrous consequences for the gospel and often for the empire.

  4. Other factors contribute to the increased political activism of American evangelicals. For example, 9/11 obviously increased patriotism nationwide. What’s more, since the 1970s, after years of lying dormant, evangelicals have experienced the political clout they wield when they speak with a united voice.

  5. Following Revelations 11:15, I shall speak of the kingdom of the world as a single kingdom because, as we shall see, in a spiritual sense all earthly governments are part of one kingdom that is ruled by Satan (cf. Luke 4:6–7). I should also note that the “kingdom of the world” isn’t only about governments. It is manifested on a personal, societal, and global level whenever we try to advance our own interests at the expense of others’ interests, thus exercising “power over” them. In this work, however, I am centrally concerned with governmental manifestations of the kingdom of the world and how Christians are to relate to it.

  6. For an excellent critique of “the Christian left” along the theological lines put forth in their books, see Vernard Eller’s Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy over the Powers (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987). Unfortunately I happened upon Eller’s work only just before to the publication of this book and thus was unable to integrate it into my own.

  7. This paragraph could be read as assuming that all Christians actively participate in the political process by voting or by other means. Some Christians, of course, choose to abstain from this participation as a matter of principle. Following the example of Jesus, they have decided that they have no business trying to improve the world by political means of any sort. Moreover, some point out, quite rightly, that all participation in political processes involves compromise. As kingdom people, they refuse to choose between competing compromising positions. While I myself continue to participate in the political process, I want to register my sympathies for this position (which is not to be confused with abstaining from participation out of apathy).

  CHAPTER 1: THE KINGDOM OF THE SWORD

  1. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in a Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 62.

  2. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2nd ed. 1994 [1972]), 201–2. Another insightful discussion of Romans 13 is found in Eller, Christian Anarchy.

  3. See Barbara R. Rossing, The Choice between Two Cities: Whore, Bride, and Empire in the Apocalypse (Harrisburg, Penn; Trinity, 1999); Christopher Rowland, “The Book of Revelation,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 12 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 685–86; D. E. Aune, Revelation 17–22 of the World Bible Commentary 52C (Nashville: Nelson, 1998), 960–61.

  4. Yoder has an excellent discussion of the powers as they relate to the structure of societies in The Politics of Jesus, chapter 8. Though he overly demythologizes “the powers” in my estimation, Walter Wink’s series on The Powers is very informative and insightful. See Walter Wink, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Unmasking the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). See also Hendrikus Berkhof, Christ and the Powers (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 1962); G. B. Caird, Principalities and Powers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956) and Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2001).

  5. See Wink, Engaging the Powers, 13–31. Wink traces the origins of the myth to Babylon and argues that the violent religion of Babylon, “not Christianity, is the real religion of America” (13). The essence of the religion is the belief that violence can redeem us and exterminate evil rather than simply perpetuate it.

  CHAPTER 2: THE KINGDOM OF THE CROSS

  1. See, for example, G. R. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986); B. Chilton, Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996); R. Horsely, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); E. Maloney, Jesus’ Urgent Message for Today: The Kingdom of God in Mark’s Gospel (New York: Continuum, 2004).

  2. See Gregory Boyd, “The Christus Victor View of the Atonement,” in Four Views of the Atonement, eds. P. Eddy and J. Bielby (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity, 2006). Here I argue that Jesus’ life, teachings, ministry, death, and resurrection are all centered on overthrowing Satan and the powers.

  3. For example, according to Acts, so closely does Jesus identify himself with his “body” that he regards Paul’s persecution of Christians as a persecution of him (Acts 9:1–4). On the close identification of the church as the “body of Christ” with Christ in Paul’s theology, see J. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 548–52.

  4. Under the influence of the dispensational/rapture theology that has taken evangelicalism by storm over the last hundred years, many Christians are expecting God to take Christians out of the world and then destroy the earth. Heaven, they believe, is “located” somewhere else. Scripture, however, is consistent in its witness that God will not abandon the earth. The kingdom of God will be established on a renewed earth (for example, 2 Peter 3:13; Rev. 5:10; 21:1–3). On the errors and dangers of the dispensational view, see Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2004), esp. 141–58. See also Norman C. Habel, ed. Readings from the Perspective of the Earth (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) and Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1005). We shall discuss dispensational theology further in chapter 4.

  5. See Rossing, Rapture Exposed, 109–22; Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, chap. 12, “The War of the Lamb.” See also Ward Ewing, The Power of the Lamb: Revelation’s Theology of Liberation for You (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Press, 1990).

  6. For a full discussion, see Boyd, God at War, chap. 9; and Boyd, “The Christus Victor View.”

  7. “The cross,” writes Hauerwas, “is the summary of his whole life.” S. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1983), 76.

  8. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 235.

  9. Lee C. Camp, Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Braznos, 2003), 94.

  10. See Walter Wink , Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 13–27.

  11. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 103–4. For Gandhi’s own translation of Satyagraha, see Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Navajivan Trust, Ahmedabad, 1961), 10:64. On Jesus’ influence on Gandhi, see Michael Battle’s insightful discussion in Blessed Are the Peacemakers: A Christian Spirituality of Nonviolence (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004), chap. 3.

  12. Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 84.

  13. Ibid., 85–86.

  14. For an excellent discussion of the unique kingdom community Jesus came to establish as expressed in Matthew 5, see Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New
Creation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 319–29. Hays writes, for example, that

  the kingdom of God as figured forth in Matthew 5 is full of surprises. Matthew offers a vision of a radical countercultural community of discipleship characterized by a “higher righteousness”—a community free of anger, lust, falsehood, and violence. The transcendence of violence through loving the enemy is the most salient feature of this new model polis.…Instead of wielding the power of violence, the community of Jesus’ disciples is to be meek, merciful, pure, devoted to peacemaking, and willing to suffer persecution—and blessed precisely in its faithfulness to this paradoxical vision. (322)

  15. According to Scripture, suffering is to be expected by all who follow Jesus (1 Peter 2:20–21; 3:14–18). Carrying the cross is essential to discipleship (Luke 14:27–33). Indeed, when disciples suffer they participate in the suffering and death of Christ (2 Cor. 1:5; 4:10; Phil. 1:20; Col. 1:24; 1 Peter 4:12–16). “The believer’s cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social nonconformity.” Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 96; cf. 120–27. As Bonhoeffer noted: “Suffering…is the badge of true discipleship. The disciple is not above his master.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995), 91. The church is called to be a “cruciform church,” as Leonard Allen put it. All we are about in one form or another manifests Calvary. We are called to sacrifice and thus on a variety of levels suffer for the advancement of God’s reign. See C. Leonard Allen, The Cruciform Church: Becoming a Cross-Shaped People in a Secular World (Abilene, Tex.: Abilene Christian University Press, 1990).

  CHAPTER 3: KEEPING THE KINGDOM HOLY

  1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 1995 [1949]), 350.

  2. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 38.

  3. Eberhard Arnold, Writings Selected with an Introduction by Johann Christoph Arnold (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2000), 41–42. Arnold goes so far as to call the church a “second incarnation.” Ibid., 143.

  4. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 82.

  5. John the Baptist’s critique of Herod (Luke 3:19) does not constitute an exception to this once we understand it in its cultural context. We shall discuss this in chapter 7.

  6. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 350.

  7. Andre Trocme, Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution (Farmington, Penn.: The Bruderhof Foundation, 2004), 53.

  8. Camp, Mere Discipleship, 105.

  9. In some regions the Jewish outrage against coins bearing the emperor’s image was so great the government minted special coins without this image. See the discussion in G. Boyd and P. Eddy, The Jesus Legend (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book, 2006), chap. 2.

  10. Eller’s comment is relevant: “A prime characteristic of wordly politics is its invariable framing of itself as an ‘adversarial contest.’ There has to be a battle. One party, ideology, cause, group, lobby, or power bloc which has designated itself as ‘the Good, the True, and the Beautiful’ sets out to overbear, overwhelm, overcome, overpower, or otherwise impose itself on whatever opposing parties think they deserve the title.” And it is “a power contest among the morally pretentious.” Christian Anarchy, xii.

  11. Trocme, Non-Violent Revolution, 132.

  CHAPTER 4: FROM RESIDENT ALIENS TO CONQUERING WARLORDS

  1. Rev. Jerry Falwell, CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, October 24, 2004.

  2. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York: Macmillian, 1960 [1943]), 51.

  3. On the already–not yet tension of the New Testament, see Werner Georg Kümmel, Promise and Fulfillment: The Eschatological Message of Jesus, trans. D. M. Barton (London: SCM, 3d ed. 1961); George E. Ladd, The Presence of the Future (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1974).

  4. Paul refers to believers as “fellow workers” of God (1 Cor. 3:9; 2 Cor. 6:1). The people of Meroz were cursed “because they did not come to the help of the LORD, to the help of the LORD against the mighty” (Judg. 5:23). The trinitarian God has chosen to create a world in which he often relies on intermediaries to carry out his will. Humans were—and yet are—intended to be God’s viceroys upon the earth, bringing about God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). See E. Sauer, The King of the Earth (Palm Springs: Ronald N. Hayes Publishers, reprint 1981); D. G. McCartney, “Ecce Homo: The Coming of the Kingdom as the Restoration of Human Viceregency,” Westminster Theological Journal 56 (1994): 1–21; G. Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1997), 110–12.

  5. On Satan’s warfare upon the church and the world after the resurrection, see Boyd, God at War, chap. 10.

  6. Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 12.

  7. For an overview of the misguided exegesis and political dangers of this movement, see B. R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2004). Tony Campolo also has a good discussion on the non-Christian and potentially cataclysmic implications of dispensationalism in Speaking My Mind (Nashville: W, 2004), 210–23. See also Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America.

  8. On the domination system, see W. Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).

  9. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 51 (emphasis added).

  10. John MacKensie captures the point when he notes that Satan’s offer is not rejected “because Satan is unable to deliver what he promises; it is rejected because secular power is altogether inept for the mission of Jesus, indeed because the use of secular power is hostile to his mission.” John MacKensie, Authority in the Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 29. Yoder insightfully discusses how both the incarnation and crucifixion reveal that Jesus chose faithfulness to God’s character over “effectiveness” in managing the world. Politics of Jesus, 228–37. Disciples of Jesus are called to do the same. Tragically, as we shall see shortly, the church has more often than not chosen effectiveness over faithfulness. For a brilliant discussion of how Christians (and others) degenerate into evil when we choose efficiency over faithfulness, see Camp, Mere Discipleship, 30–39.

  11. Camp, Mere Discipleship, 54.

  12. Early church theologians often argued that the biblical promises for the “new world” that the Messiah would bring about—the world where violence has ended and love reigns—are fulfilled in their new community. The undeniability of this fact functioned as evidence for Christ’s lordship. See, for example, Justin, “Dialogue with Trypho,” Ante-Nicene Fathers, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999 [1885]), vol. 1, 254; Tertullian, “An Answer to Jews,” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, 154; Origen, “Against Celsus,” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, 558. For a classic overview of Christian attitudes toward war throughout history, highlighting the uniform pacifism of the early church, see Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960).

  13. H. R. Loyn and J. Percival, eds. and trans., The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and Administration (New York: St. Martins, 1975), 52. For overviews of Christendom’s rise to power, see J. N. Hillgarth, The Conversion of Western Europe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), and R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990).

  14. See W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952); J. E. Merdinger, Rome and the African Church in the Time of Augustine (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University), chaps. 2 and 3. There were other theological and sociological factors that separated Donatists from Catholics as well.

  15. C. Kirwan ( Augustine [London: Routledge, 1989]) provides a succinct summary and citation of various sources (214 ff.). See also P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California 1967), chaps. 19–21. W. H. C. Frend notes that it was during the Donatist controversy that “the Lucan text, ‘Compel them to come in,’ was invoked [by Augustine] to justify the use of force with the gravest consequences for the future of Christian brotherhood and toleration.” W. H. Frend, The Early Church (Philadelphia, PA: Fort
ress, 1982), 204.

  16. For overviews, see W. Sumner Davis, Heretics: The Bloody History of the Church (La Verne, Tenn.: Lightning Source, 2002); G. G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (Glouster, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969); James A. Haught, Holy Horrors (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990); Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, abridged by Margaret Nicholson (New York: Macmillan, 1961). The classic text on the persecution of Christian groups not aligned with the official church is Thieleman J. van Braght, The Martyr’s Mirror: The Story of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom, from the Time of Christ to AD 1660 (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 14th Eng. ed., 1985 [1660]). For various assessments of the church’s violent tradition, see Kenneth R. Chase and Alan Jacobs, eds., Must Christianity Be Violent? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Braznos, 2003).

  17. Previous estimates were in the millions, but while some still continue to defend such estimates (Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality [New York: Dutton, 1974]) more recent scholarship has arrived at estimates closer to a hundred thousand. On the persecution of witches, see Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (Chicago: University of Chicago, rev. ed. 2000 [1975]); Brian Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 2nd ed. 1995); and Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Content of European Witchcraft (New York: Penguin, 1998). For two superb accounts of the church’s tragic treatment of Jews throughout history, see J. Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston/ New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) and David Rausch, A Legacy of Hatred: Why Christian Must Not Forget the Holocaust (Chicago: Moody, 1984).

  18. For example, a 1493 Papal Bull justified declaring war on any native South Americans who refused to adhere to Christianity. In defense of this stance, the jurist Encisco claimed in 1509: “The king has every right to send his men to the Indies to demand their territory from these idolaters because he had received it from the pope. If the Indians refuse, he may quite legally fight them, kill them and enslave them, just as Joshua enslaved the inhabitants of the country of Canaan.” Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (London: Burns and Oats, 1977), 85.