American Idol? Try Idolatry...

Damon Linker's "The Idolatry of America" in the 23 April, 2008 The New Republic stunned me with a revelation I never considered. The rest of the article is interesting, but I have to first emphasize this:

Marsh makes his point with alarming ease, noting in one of his later chapters that although polls in early 2003 showed that an astonishing 87 percent of white evangelical Christians in the United States supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, "Christian leaders around the world--evangelical, orthodox, and liberal" expressed "dismay over the administration's case [for war]." Marsh quotes, to great effect, twenty-five of these critical statements, written by the leaders of Christian organizations from every corner of the globe, most of which the majority of American evangelicals have undoubtedly never seen or read. Regardless of one's position on the war, these pages of Marsh's book make a powerful and important point about the American evangelical difference: either the United States contains the only Christians capable of recognizing the fundamental compatibility between the moral message of Christianity and George W. Bush's foreign policy--or else evangelicalism in America has transformed itself into Republican Party propaganda.

The article is a review of Charles Marsh's Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from the Political Captivity. It raises many points I have considered and occasionally ranted about - one of which is whether the "conservative Christians" are capable of loving the Constitution and placing it first in their lives. Their very religion tells them not to.

Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, warned often against "the idolatry of America"--teach Christians that however much they may love their terrestrial homes, their families as well as their political communities, their true home lies elsewhere, in the next life, in eternal unity with Jesus Christ. They must always remember, in other words, that love for God comes first, conditioning, ordering, and limiting the scope and intensity of their other loves. For a devout Christian, then, patriotism can never be uncomplicated, never wholehearted.

I had never considered using the term "idolatry" though. I think it fits - especially when you consider the way these supposedly Christians prostrate themselves upon patriotic themes. Consider who Robertson was serving when he called for killing Chavez, Venezuela's President. Was he serving his God, or the geopolitical interests of his country? He might claim they coincide nicely, but let's ask some non-U.S. Christians to evaluate that argument.