How proud are you to be an American?
I posted that question on Facebook a few years ago on the Fourth of July. I wasn’t asking how proud or embarrassed my Facebook friends were of the global reputation of the United States, as the question might infer. Instead, I wanted to know how much weight my connections gave to their citizenship compared to other identifiers like race and, especially, religion.
The following is how I answer that question this Fourth of July.
Like many of my fellow Americans, I started paying attention to politics in 2016. (I majored in political science before that and even interned on Capitol Hill, but when that didn’t lead to a job, I lost interest in politics.) But, since Trump’s first term, I’ve observed a stupefying conflation of political and religious beliefs which has led me, once again, to become jaded by politics and dispassionate about the United States.
Specifically, and this won’t be novel to anyone, I saw church-goers consider the party on the right to be the right party, the one Jesus would have voted for. They called America a “Christian nation,” though a country has no soul. They appropriated God’s promise to Solomon in 2 Chronicles 7, claiming that if we Americans “turn from our wicked ways” (only ever referring to abortion and homosexuality), God will “heal our land.”
(Abortion and homosexuality are grievous sins, but they are the only ones I heard condemned and the pair became cliche to my ears.)
I confess that many of my current opinions on the United States, its government, and its politics I hold in reaction to that melding of Christians and Republicans. It’d be better to form an opinion after earnest study and thoughtful self-assessment, but none of us think in a vacuum.
In these spheres of cultural Christianity and Facebook conservatism, I’ve felt snarky and subversive by not putting my hand over my heart during the national anthem and by pointing out the many imperfections of the United States. As often as I can, I call it “the United States” instead of “America” because it feels more globally minded, and “America” sounds too much like “’Murica.” I’ve loved to loudly sing the lyric from The Avett Brothers, “Your life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected.” Because I’ve come to think that mine doesn’t.
The United States is too young for anyone to put their faith in it, but that’s what I see people in both parties doing all the time. This country will collapse—haven’t all empires throughout history? And when it does, we’ll see the poverty and injustice that, today, we keep oceans away from us.
But this doesn’t trouble me (in theory) because I know that there is coming—in fact, I am already a citizen of it—a kingdom “that shall never be destroyed…nor left to another people” (Daniel 2).
This Sunday, it happens that my pastor will cover the passage in Philippians that says “our citizenship is in heaven.” I expect his exposition will confirm, to my ears, that I have less obligation to the kingdom in which I was born than to the heavenly one in which I was born again. But maybe my pastor’s exegesis will correct my eisegesis.
I root for the United States during the Olympics because who else would I cheer for? I am a fan only by geographic chance; I was born here. I don’t consider the United States inherently superior to any other nation. It is merely one among two hundred some internationally and one among countless more historically. On other metrics, like the economy or foreign policy, I leave it to the experts to tell me who would win.
Of late, I’m open to the idea of pacifism. Yet, pacifism, as I currently understand it, reveals some of the hiccups in my indifference toward my birth country. For instance, I can’t ignore the necessity and sacrifice of the United States military. I admit the privilege and irony that lies in flirting with the idea that we shouldn’t have a military, even if Jesus advocated for it—did He?
And though I don’t think my life would change by the man that’s elected, I know that foreign affairs are not without consequences. It was an education for me to read last fall that Hamas backed off of Israel in anticipation of Trump’s reelection.
So, you see some of my beliefs are not ironclad, some raise immediate questions while others I’m still settling on. I speak as a man of my time. My opinions are not only informed by the ones I want to resist but also, I must admit, by my citizenship in the United States.
Yet, here I stand, this Fourth of July: largely ambivalent toward politics and government and my birth country. Still, I share the call from the prophet Jeremiah to Daniel and his contemporaries: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
– Scot Bellavia