From the Sent Folder: If the Church isn’t Christian, Can the Nation Be?

In December my friend Brad Littlejohn wrote a fascinating essay for the American Reformer about how America could actually be a “Christian nation”. Below is an email I sent to him wondering if his project was possible giving the current state of the American church:

Hi Brad,

Merry Christmas! I hope you and your family are having a joy-filled (and hopefully COVID free) season as we welcome Christ anew once again into our world through faith.

I read your piece at the American Reformer this morning through Mere O's link (I wasn't familiar with the AR site), and was nodding along as you laid out a compelling argument for a revitalization of Christian culture in America. As we discussed in the past, a Christ-imbued culture is a great desire of mine, and I spend a considerable amount of my time trying to create and embody one. The issue I came across when reading your essay was something I have experienced and seen over and over again in my life and in our country in general, that is, the problem of rival cultures. I was hoping you might be able to answer a question I have about this.

Now I don't need to lay out the types of rival cultures we see as they are, at least for me in Portland an overwhelming majority of what I experience day-to-day. There is one I will get to in a moment, but first I want to ask if you think what you laid out is a good theory, or if it could actually work in real life. I ask this because from my vantage point (which has enlarged recently because of graduate work in this area) the American church, by which I mean the forms of Christian practice you and I are familiar with, evangelical Protestantism and it's siblings, is not healthy enough to accomplish this goal, either spiritually or pedagogically. Now you're the last person I need to lecture about the lack of a robust Christian pedagogy in America, but it remains to say that Christians in our tradition (and I would imagine in others) have neither the virtue nor the habits of mind and spirit to be able to accomplish the rebuilding of a Christian nation. There is such a dearth of Christian discipleship in American churches that I can't help but be pessimistic about your call to build.

That isn't to say that American Christians aren't being discipled, they're just not being discipled in a Christian way. The forces of grievance culture, rampant consumerism, capitulation to popular culture (often in its most radical progressive forms), the Trumpist cult and their attendant institutions of social media, cable news, and instant consumer gratification machines like Amazon have deformed a wide swath of Christians in our country, and its toll has a seemingly endless horizon. I'm not the first or even the thousandth person to point this out so I don't feel the need to belabor the point, suffice to say that the church's relatively small footprint in comparison to these forces cannot compete in the way that nearly all churches function today.

One rival culture I briefly alluded to before makes your project, at least in my eyes, increasingly harder to conceive of, and that is the rival culture of Christian Nationalism. It is ironic that what you're describing in your column could easily be described as "Christian nationalism", and yet what is broadly known by that title is something so completely different, and so completely vile to the name of Christ that it's difficult to separate the two in the mind of the average American Christian. It's similar to the word "complementarianism" which outside of its context one would think was more akin to its theological rival than to the definition commonly associated with it. My concern is that the Church is so anemic that any attempt to turn our country into "Christian America" will end up transforming it into something that is neither. It will not be Christian because the American church is so infected by the libido dominandi that the outcome would surely be the destruction of our enemies rather than the love of them; it would look more like a Jesufied Babylon than the shining city on a hill. It will not be American because of the modern evangelical's unholy desire for a strongman to protect us, it will look more like Hungary than the U.S.

Until we can have a mature and healthy church that at least tries to look like Jesus, something like what Paul said about elders in that they should have a good standing with outsiders, and until we develop and embody a biblical, Christ-centered understanding of power we should hold off on trying to make America more godly and attend to our own house. We need to turn to Christ who says "everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." If we can't succeed in discipling those in our own churches, how do we think we'll be able to disciple our own country?

Thanks Brad, I always look forward to reading you and appreciate our friendship, however small it is.

In the service of Christ,

Jordan Andlovec