Under God.

The words, “under God,” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.  No doubt this was done out of a self-righteous desire to encourage Americans in their conflict with “atheistic” Marxism.  Before that we were just “one nation, indivisible.”    

But the Living God is not mocked or used.  God is not easily enlisted in anyone’s political agenda.  God is not anyone’s national mascot to be trotted out to pump up the crowd.  Inviting God’s influence into your common life has consequences.  Claiming to be God’s people or in some way uniquely “under God” compared with others, especially your enemies, is not something to do lightly.  The moral standards to which you subject yourself are exponentially higher when you claim a special relationship with God, as distinct from when you are just doing what is politically expedient.

We may have imagined that proclaiming ourselves to be “under God” would generate enthusiasm for preserving and defending our traditional way of life.  Unfortunately, the God we invoke is notorious for messing with and demolishing traditions and ways of life that do not reflect and express God’s will for justice and equality.  I wonder how many of the controversies that our nation has gone through since 1954 aren’t a result of God messing with us at our invitation.   

A lot of that has been what John Lewis called “good trouble.”  The Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, and three years later President Eisenhower had to send Federal troops to Little Rock to enforce a school desegregation order.  The civil rights movement was kicked off by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in 1955.  Emmett Till was lynched that same year; unlike the thousands of these unspeakable atrocities that had happened previously, this time people cared.  Bob Dylan even wrote a song about it.

Since then, social progress has been made in many areas… and vociferously resisted by exactly the people who insisted on adding this affirmation to the Pledge.  They thought that our claiming to be God’s special people would please God.  Perhaps they forgot that Jesus Christ said that those who merely proclaim with their mouths “Lord, Lord!” will have no place in his Kingdom.  Maybe God heard the Name invoked and didn’t like what we were doing in that Name.  Maybe bringing up God’s Name actually brought down God’s judgment on our injustices.  It’s not like the biblical Israel and Judah somehow got away with anything because they were God’s chosen.  Just the opposite.  The Hebrew prophets devote the bulk of their time criticizing and predicting disaster upon their own people.

In World War II, “Gott Mit Uns” (“God With Us”) was stamped on the belt-buckles of Nazi soldiers.  It didn’t go so well for them, either.

We cannot claim to be “under God” and continue to be ruled by our own fear, hatred, and anger.  We cannot allow lynching or racial segregation.  We cannot despise Gays or transgendered people.  We cannot unduly restrict immigration, or ban Muslims, or enact voter suppression laws, or continue to commit genocide against indigenous people, or poison God’s creation out of insatiable greed.  We cannot sink untold trillions of dollars into armaments and engage in pointless wars.  We cannot invent huge and obscene disparities of wealth.  We cannot do with impunity any of these things if we have decided to loudly proclaim that God is on your side.  Maybe if we’re not living according to the way God wants us to live it would be more prudent to just stay under God’s radar.

What if all our social advances since 1954 are actually God’s doing, getting us in line with what God says in Scripture about the poor being lifted up, and the meek inheriting the earth, and people who live by the sword dying by it?  What if those opposing those changes, supposedly in the name of “Christianity” are actually against what God is doing?  In the Bible, God liberates people from slavery and oppression; God is about equality and inclusion, compassion and social justice, forgiveness and love.  How well did we think 1954 America would stack up to that vision?

Accepting our invitation in the Pledge, perhaps God looked around and basically said, “Well, if you’re going to use my Name, we’re gonna hafta have some changes around here.  I have my brand to protect, as you would say.  So brace yourselves; you’re in for a bumpy ride.”

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We're Not "Polarized."

Anat Shenker-Osorio is a communications expert who was on the Pod Save America podcast last week.  She made a remarkable observation about politics in America.  We’re not polarized so much as dealing with a “faction” that has manifested itself historically in weighing against the basic American vision of “all people are created equal,” and “liberty and justice for all.”  They have a problem with the “all.”

I wouldn’t call it a “faction” so much as a pathology.  When a person has an illness, even if they were born with it, we don’t explain it as “polarization” in their body.  We understand the basic invasive nature of the disease as something contrary to the health, wholeness, functionality, and life of the person.  

Polarization on the other hand is the way we talk about when a unity has for some reason separated into two opposed and extreme factions, where the center isn’t holding, consensus has broken down, and compromise has become impossible.  The cure for polarization is finding some kind of centrist place where we can all come back together, inclusive of “both sides.”

Many analysts see the current situation in America in this light.  We used to have “bipartisan” agreement and be amenable to compromise.  Now, they say, we only have both sides gone to an extremism that excludes and demonizes the other.  

But that view assumes that both sides are necessary and good for the health of the whole.  What if that is not true?  What if one “side” is actually a pathogen that desires the death of the body by preventing its growth and maturity?

In the pledge of allegiance we say we believe in “one nation… with liberty and justice for all.”  The concern for the rights of “all” is constitutive of what America is.  That is the vision articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, when he wrote about the equality of all.  But the disease America was born with showed itself in Jefferson’s own actions.  For he did not in his own life act as if all people were created equal; he owned some.  

We have suffered from this disease since that fateful original compromise in which  the States sanctioning slavery were granted huge concessions so they would consent to join the union.  What we really compromised when we began our existence was that “all.”  In effect we decided that “all” meant “white males property owners.”  The Constitution was thus embedded with features ensuring that this disease would be dutifully fed, and slave-States would have extra clout.  America may therefore be compared to a crack-baby, someone born with a deadly addiction.  

For centuries we continued to accommodate this addiction, telling ourselves the usual rationalizations: we’re not really an addict, we can stop at any time, it’s not doing us any harm, we’re fine as long as we have our supply, it is something we need, it is part of who we are.  Most of all we reiterated our mantra: “liberty and justice for all,” as if our words and wishes alone made it true.  But unfortunately, we, like Jefferson, could not get over our actual practice of racial and social injustice.

After the pathogen devoured 600,000 Americans in war, we adjusted the Constitution somewhat to include more people, on paper.  But then we allowed ourselves to ignore it and fell into the rancid regime of Jim Crow for a century. 

My point is that this disease continues to take up a lot of energy that could be devoted to other, more positive, things.  And it is not about two different but legitimate perspectives and directions.  It is the true America of “liberty and justice for all,” against a pathological addiction to a caste system that only wants liberty and justice for some.  That should not be our national identity.  That is neither how we see or talk about ourselves, nor who we want to be.  It is a parasitic, crippling, and disgraceful demon riding on our back.  

And it must not be included, or at all compromised with, in our political conversations moving forward.  Every instance of its perverse influence must be resisted, from attempts to restrict or suppress the vote, to partisan gerrymandering, to anti-immigrant measures, to attempts to whitewash our history in the name of resistance to a deliberately misunderstood “Critical Race Theory.”  

And we have to start seriously adjusting the Constitution to remove the structural barriers to the equality of all.  We have to start taking our ideals more seriously.  There can be no compromise or bipartisanship when we are trying to extricate ourselves from the grip of evil.  

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We Are Pilate.

When we read the Bible we like to see ourselves as the heroes, the protagonists, the good guys.  We identify with the Israelites marching out of Egypt, and with the intrepid band who followed Jesus, (often ignoring or downplaying the weaknesses and failures of each).

It rarely occurs to us that the people depicted in the Bible are in many ways nothing like us.  And the ones who are like us are not necessarily the ones we want to be associated with.  

Take Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who oversaw Jesus’ execution.  He was a representative of the prevailing and dominant political regime.  He wielded the power of the most effective military in the world.  He was well-funded by the dominant world economy.  He managed the police as a conservative advocate of law-and-order.  He and his class and superiors lived off the labor of local workers, extracting the “resources” from the land and sea. 

Should we not recognize ourselves in him?  Isn’t he kind of familiar to us, with:

 

— His managing a corrupt and unjust legal system.  

— His cynical political machinations.  

— His willingness to condemn the innocent for the sake of “stability.”  

— His strength masquerading as weakness, like when he says he washes his hands of responsibility for Jesus, and tells them to take him and crucify him themselves.  

— His need to stay accepted by the people.  

— His replacement of the truth with expediency.  

— His delusion that he is a force for good in the world.

He might as well be a Presbyterian.  I have been at too many session, presbytery, and General Assembly meetings, and had countless conversations with church members, that involved exactly these kinds of considerations.         

What if,

whenever we say in the Creed that 

Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” 

we are unconsciously confessing that he suffered, 

and still suffers, 

under us?  

— Don’t we daily demonstrate that preserving capitalism and nationalism is far more important than following him?  

— Don’t we adjust “truth” to be whatever serves our psychological or political agenda?  

— Don’t we also daily participate in the oppression and murder of poor people of color like him, even if reflexively or unconsciously?  

— Don’t we still insist on displaying exclusive national idols in our worship spaces?  

— Haven’t we bound our church to a regime based on slavery from the beginning, and continue to defend it and attack those who try to tell the truth about it?  

— Don’t we call Jesus “king,” while, in effect, crucifying him by our loyalty to other considerations?

— Don’t we invariably back down when the trump card is played and someone reminds us that “we have no king but Caesar,” because that is the only truth that matters to us?  

Clearly, Jesus may be our personal hobby; but there is no doubt that Caesar is our king.  I mean look at the evidence.  Look at where we put our money.  Look at how we vote.  Look at what we share on Facebook.  

Jesus has harsh words for hypocrites.  What else should we call what we do when we pretend to be the Biblical good guys, but by any measurement we have more in common with Pilate and Pharaoh than with Jesus and Moses?  

Maybe this in part explains the decline of the main-line church over the last half-century.  It’s like when Gandhi said he loved Jesus, but it was Jesus’ followers he had a problem with.  Who can’t relate to that?  

At least Pilate had some integrity.  He knew who he worked for.  He knew who signed his paycheck.  He knew who he followed.  Do we? 

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