Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 84

Look on our shield, O God;

    look with favor on your anointed one.

The first equation of the biblical phrase “a city on a hill” with these United States occurs in the words of one of the very first writers in American literature, John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He used the phrase in “A Model of Christian Charity,” a sermon he preached before he even arrived on these shores. 

 The correlation which Winthrop created with that sermon (and Ronald Reagan quoted in his second inaugural)—that somehow the United States is especially favored by God almighty, a “city on a hill”—is so engrained in Americans that every year in American Literature I ask my foreign students in class to explain it. It’s the water in which American kids swim, the air they breathe. We are, we’re sure, a chosen nation, blessed by God, a Christian nation.

Throughout history, the marriage of nationality and religion has been rather fitful in fact, probably because patriotism and faith call upon emotions set so deeply within us that they may, from a distance, seem almost one. On what we used to call “Decoration Day” (now “Memorial Day”), my grandmother wouldn’t miss the annual “doings” in the local cemetery—color guard, marching band, a sermon by some local pastor, calling us all back to God, finally taps. My parents often didn’t feel like going, but they went—Grandma demanded it. She expected attendance, religiously, because our fallen boys needed to be remembered. But then, one of them was her only brother.

Whether or not this country is in a profound moral crisis is not a question that's easy to answer, but many of my fellow believers are confident the whole nation needs to be returned to its Christian roots. They're called "Christian Nationalists," but I'm certainly not among them, and neither were lots and lots of the founding fathers. John Winthrop was a Christian; but 150 years later, at the time of the American Revolution, most of the movers and shakers (Jefferson, Franklin) were deists, who could rather easily shrug off Christ’s divinity.

We’ve never been Islamic or Hindu or Buddhist, of course; but the idea that America is or ever was “chosen,” like Israel--or even “Christian”--is myth. 

 But then, myths have great power.

Not long ago, our denomination dropped a favorite hymn of many members because the music, Josef Haydn’s, was the German national anthem. Our denomination’s rich contingent of post-World War II immigrants from the Netherlands simply could not sing praise to God with the music because they kept hearing “Deutchland Uber Alles.”

The more time I spend with the psalms, the more impossible it seems to me to be a fundamentalist. This particular verse from 84, an incredibly beautiful psalm—Spurgeon calls it “one of the choicest of the collection”—is a roadside bomb. “Look on our flag, Lord,” one might paraphrase, “and think of our President.” 

 That’s an understandable interpretation, and I don’t doubt my grandma prayed that prayer during two world wars. But her devotion doesn’t make the sentiment any less fearful because we are no more a “chosen nation” than is Somalia or Iceland.

Winthrop, fine man that he was, could not have seen that, of course; but then, he and his Puritan compatriots were, like many Islamicists, interested in theocracy.

I’m not sure about Reagan, but I don’t think Grandma could have understood that either. “Look at this verse,” she might have said, her only brother missing for almost a year in the trenches of France. “Shouldn’t we be praying that way too?”

I know the answer to that question, but I don’t know how I would have attempted to explain it to her.