Hear this, O house of Jacob, who are called by the name of Israel,
and who came from the waters of Judah,
who swear by the name of the Lord and confess the God of Israel,
but not in truth or right.
For they call themselves after the holy city, and stay themselves on the God of Israel;
the Lord of hosts is his name.
—Isaiah 48:1-2 (ESV)
These descriptions mark the Israelites as God’s people: he’s the one who chose them, he’s the one who named them, he’s the deity with whom their nation is identified and in whose name they take their oaths. He is, we might say, the God of their civil religion, in the same way as our public officials and witnesses in our courts swear on the Bible and end their oaths of office with the words, “so help me God.” But just as we have a lot of people who say those words and mean nothing by them, so Israel’s outward participation in the rituals of their faith said little for the reality of their beliefs; and so God says, “Though you call upon me and take oaths in my name, it’s neither in truth nor in righteousness.” Their faith, he says, is false, because it’s not based in real knowledge of him nor does it produce any real willingness to live as he wants them to live.
This is a pretty strong charge. In contemporary terms, he’s saying that the faith of the nation as a whole—not of everyone in it, of course, but of the nation as a whole—is nominal. It’s a matter of outward show with no inward reality, of religious exercise without any real faith. This wasn’t an issue which was unique to them, of course; if we want to be honest, looking around at the church in this country, we’d have to wonder if God would say much the same sort of thing to us, if Isaiah were alive in our day. I think Michael Spencer would agree; though he doesn’t put it in the terms Isaiah uses, his indictment of American evangelicalism boils down to pretty much the same thing: on the whole, we invoke the name of the God of Israel, but not in truth or righteousness.
Now, whatever disagreements I have with Spencer’s specific predictions, I think he’s identified a real problem in much of the American church; I think we need to realize that Isaiah’s words to Israel hit a lot closer to home than we might like to think. It seems to me that verse 2 offers us something of a clue as to why. At first glance, this might seem like an odd follow-up to verse 1; but consider the description of the people of Israel here: “you who call yourselves citizens of the holy city and rely on the God of Israel.” Here as in verse 1, God is identified as the God of Israel; and what does the prophet say in response: “The LORD Almighty is his name.”
That’s subtle, but I think it’s a rebuke to the parochialism of Israel. Their concern is only for themselves, and they see their God as just “an amiable local deity who exists to keep track of Israel’s interests,” as John Oswalt puts it. Instead of seeing themselves as a nation formed by the only God of all time and space for the purpose of bringing all the nations to the worship of that God, they see themselves as a nation like any other nation, with a god like any other nation, out for their own best interests like any other nation; and since they’re a small nation, they must have a small god, and thus they keep running after the gods of the bigger, more powerful nations in hopes of improving their geopolitical standing. What God wants them to see is that the nation ought to be only of secondary importance; he’s promised to return them to their homeland, yes, but not because their political independence or political power are of any significance whatsoever. It is, rather, for his own sake, for the sake of his reputation and his glory. What matters is God’s plan for the world, and their faithfulness to serve him by doing their part in it.
The Israelites didn’t get that, and didn’t particularly want to; and it seems to me that many American evangelicals, whatever they might say about what they believe, functionally don’t get this one either. Spencer’s right that the evangelical involvement in American politics has gone wrong in some important ways, and I certainly agree that “believing in a cause more than a faith” is a bad thing; but while that has in some ways and in some cases been the effect of evangelical political involvement, I think the real error goes deeper.
The real problem here, I think, is that we’ve made our nation too important in our worldview and theology—to the point of idolatry, in many cases. Many of us who consider ourselves Bible-believing Christians have the American flag in our sanctuaries and sing hymns to our country on patriotic holidays, and we never even stop to ask whether doing so honors and pleases God. There may be a prima facie case for including such things in our Sunday worship—I don’t know, because I’ve never heard anyone try to make it. It’s simply assumed.
I’m all for patriotism, in its place; I grew up in a Navy family and I’m proud of the fact, and one of the reasons I don’t support the Democratic Party is because I don’t believe they give this nation enough credit. I don’t accuse Democrats of being unpatriotic, but I do think many of them are deficient in that respect. But if I’m all for patriotism in its place, I firmly believe that’s second place, behind our allegiance to the kingdom of God; and I think it’s all too easy to mix them up, just as the people of Israel did.
This sort of mindset was evident, for example, in the predictions of many self-proclaimed prophets last fall that John McCain would defeat Barack Obama in November. Why? Because Sen. McCain’s policies were God’s policies and God was on Sen. McCain’s side, because Sen. McCain would be a better President for America and God’s on about blessing this country. They missed the fact, as too many Christians in this country (and not just conservatives, either) miss the fact, that America is not God’s chosen nation. The Puritan colonists of New England may have been trying to found a city on a hill that would lead the English church to reformation, but for all the many ways in which our presidents have appropriated such language to describe this country, and for all that many have agreed with de Tocqueville in describing America as “a nation with the soul of a church,” the USA is not the city on a hill that Jesus was talking about. We are at best, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, God’s “almost-chosen people.”
To lose sight of this fact is to lose sight of the truth that we worship, not the God of America, but the Lord of the Universe and Creator of all time and space; it’s to come to see the Lord Almighty as functionally an amiable local deity who exists to keep track of America’s interests. Granted, this doesn’t pose the same exact temptation as it did for Israel, since in our case, we are no small nation on the edges of power, but are rather one of the dominant powers of the earth; but it does skew our understanding of who God is and what he’s on about, and what we’re supposed to be on about.
When this happens, it results in the phenomenon that Spencer decries, not exactly because we’ve exchanged our faith for a cause, but rather because we’ve identified the kingdom of God in our minds and hearts with the nation of America. It results in us coming to believe that we advance the kingdom of God in the ballot boxes, legislatures, courts, and executive offices of this nation, that our battle is in fact against flesh and blood and is to be fought with the weapons of flesh and blood; when that battle goes against us, the temptation is there to conclude (as I heard people conclude last November 5) that God has somehow failed and that his will has not been done. Those sorts of reactions lead many outside the church to conclude that what American evangelicals really worship is our political agenda—a conclusion which should make us deeply uneasy.
None of this is to say that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics, that the evangelical political agenda (broadly understood) is substantively wrong, that evangelicals should become liberals or retreat from politics, or anything else of that sort. But whether the substance of our participation is wrong or not, the spirit of our participation has been wrong in all too many cases, because—whether consequently or merely concurrently—we’ve lost the gospel focus to our faith. We’ve treated our faith as a this-worldly thing—whether it’s “God’s politics” or “your best life now,” it’s all the same mistake at the core—and ended up with a religion defined in this-worldly terms, as a matter of “do this” and “don’t do that” in which success can be quantified in this-worldly categories. In a word, we’ve ended up back in legalism; whether that legalism is focused on “thou shalt not,” on going out and doing good with Jesus as your role model, or on voting the right way and being politically active for the right causes, in the end, is only a difference in style. And whatever legalism might be, what it clearly isn’t is Christian.
Again, I do believe that there are things we should do, and things we shouldn’t do, and causes we should support, and votes which are honoring to God and others which aren’t. But none of those things is central to what the church is supposed to be, and none of them should be what we’re primarily about; none of them should be driving the bus. As Jared Wilson has been arguing at length for some time now, the church needs to be “cross-centered, grace-laden, Christ-focused [and] gospel-driven”; to be faithful to our calling, that must be the core of who we are and the purpose of everything we do. That should determine every aspect of our lives, in fact—which, yes, means that we should do certain things and not do other things, and certainly should shape our voting and our political involvement as it shapes everything else we do. But we should always be bringing everything back to the gospel, not to a list of do’s and dont’s, much less a political platform or agenda; that and nothing else should be the touchstone for our lives and our decision-making.If our politics is secondary to and derivative of our faith, we’re doing it right. If our faith is secondary to and derivative of our politics, we aren’t.
(The beginning of this post is excerpted from “The Stubborn Faithfulness of God”)