Patriotic Christianity

Mark Tooley: Hello, this is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy here and Washington, DC with the pleasure today of conversing with Dr. Richard Mouw the former longtime president of Fuller Seminary and the author of a very timely new book how to be a patriotic Christian, a very important question and one that we will answer over the next 20 minutes adopting bow great to be talking to you.

Richard Mouw: Delighted to be with you Mark, thanks so much.

Mark Tooley: And it’s great to learn about your ongoing recovery from a stroke early this year, so you’re looking good.

Richard Mouw: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Very grateful for that.

Mark Tooley: Now obviously Christian Nationalism is much discussed these days, which makes your new book very pertinent? Why did you write this book and how does one be a patriotic Christian?

Richard Mouw: Nice yeah well you know I became very concerned about the polarization even in the Christian community between two postures.  The one is a tendency to identify the cause of Christ with a specific a nation and nation states as being exceptional and especially blessed of God and, which is true, but kind of making patriotism identifying that with the American nation in a way that confuses I think faith and the political ordering of things.  And on the other hand, people of my generation, I was formed through the 1960s, who tend to look down on patriotism as idolatrous and the nation as idolatrous. So how do we have a healthy love of the nation and the biblical themes in the Old Testament when God’s people were taken off into captivity, and they didn’t know how to worship God if they don’t have a temple. They were worried about it. Jeremiah comes in and says look, here’s a new deal. God wants you to plant gardens and eat the fruit of those gardens or wants you to build houses and living in them. Marry off your sons and daughters and multiply in the land.  And then he says, but seek the welfare, the Shalom of the city in which you are exiled and pray to the Lord on its behalf, because in its Shalom, you will find your Shalom. And I think this is a call to all Christians that wherever the Lord has placed us, we need to have a special affection and a special relationship to the nations in which would find ourselves. It’s not bad to love your own country because it’s your own country, any more than it’s not bad to love your parents because they’re your parents, you know. I tell the story of my mother, when I was about 10 years old buying her my first day Mother’s Day card. And it said she was the greatest mother, which she really wasn’t, I mean she did a good job, but you’ve have mothers who have sacrificed for their children in amazing ways, but it’s okay to have a little hyperbolic affection for your own and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it can’t be idolatrous I mean she you know if I keep wanting to fight on her behalf, because she’s the greatest mother in the world, that can be kind of dangerous like that. My country is my country, and in biblical terms, the New Testament says that we need to honor the political ordering in which we find ourselves. We’re to honor those in authority, as in Peter I. But we’re to fear the Lord would and love the Church, but we’re to honor all human beings, and we are to honor the emperor. honor those in authority. So, then the question is patriotism. What does it mean to honor the nation in which we find ourselves?

Mark Tooley: And Dr. Mouw, what are the limits of patriotism, and do you draw a boundary between nationalism and patriotism, or can they be interchangeable terms?

Richard Mouw: Are yeah, I mean you know, the idea of a nation, as opposed to esteem. The United States is a nation that is a community of people. When we sing patriotic songs, I mean there’s no patriotic song saying how much I love the Department of Motor Vehicles. Or the zoning commission. Or even the IRS you know, what we love the purple mountains majesty above fruited plains. That’s one thing. Another thing is that we love certain parts of our history, patriots, your dream, various things like that. Then we also love ideals, liberty in law, justice, those things, and those are the things that bind together a people. And so, when we go to a parade and we are when we go to a stadium and sing the national anthem, with people of various ethnicities and political persuasions. We’re honoring of people but we’re not honoring the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, or the State Department. So, and many commentators have begun worrying about a lack of what Robert Putnam called social capital. The affection for the people of which we are part, and we need to try to recover that, and I think as followers of Jesus Christ, we can really work with that. And we got to serve with our own people who are our community, which is you know, pretty fragmented and then quite a bit of polarization today as well.

Mark Tooley:  And what do you think about displays of patriotism or references to the nation and the church flags and the sanctuary or the singing of patriotic songs, like the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or “My country Tis of Thee: around patriotic holidays?

Richard Mouw: Now well you know I mean this is a big thing, and a lot of my students and seminary students and a lot of pastors get upset about the demand that on Memorial Day we’ve got to do something patriotic, and there’s the flag in the in the sanctuary. I do think that there’s nothing sure that we can confuse the worship of God and worship the journey with. The symbols that are there you know if you’re going to go into a church as a pastor and get rid of the flag, you’re going to get rid of yourself as well. So, I take a more pragmatic approach. Why not take those things as teaching opportunity? Suppose you sing “God bless America,” “America the Beautiful.” Why not in a sermon so you know, there was a wonderful line in that song that we sing. God mend our every flaw and God shed His grace on us as a nation. And we’re desperately in need of grace, we do need to admit our flaws, it can be a teaching moment nothing to you. There are times that I’ve wept in the presence of the flag, when I was in Normandy, it’s all those flags, you know I went. With you know there’s a danger when it’s in our worship space that will sort of confuse that with the sacredness of God’s word and the Lord Jesus Christ, and we need to think about that so that you’re not condemning when you’re using these things as a teaching moment. And there are a lot of teaching moments that we can engage in. In fact, Martin Luther King did a lot of that. He took that the language of on every mountain so high and combined with Isaiah.  And he was very good, he was one of the great, I think, great formulators or expressed of a kind of civil religion that honored the supreme authority of the Gospel but also wanted to find ways in which he could connect with the songs and the symbols of the American experience.

Mark Tooley: Well, I’m glad you brought up civil religion, because before the term Christian nationalism became such a preoccupation. There were many, many people who complained about the influence of Civil religion, I always thought silver religion properly understood with helpful in terms of foreigners forming the bonds that keep society together and allow for the expression of religious faith in the public square but what are your thoughts about civil religion?

Richard Mouw: Well, you know, it was very much influenced by a wonderful essay by Robert Bella back in the 60s and much debated in the 70s on civil religion.  He pointed out that John Kennedy and his inaugural address began by saying I’m taking sacred vows in the presence of God and then cites God in the middle of the speech and in the end, he says, we need to do God’s work. And you guys, we say we’re here to advance God’s work in the world, Bella said in the great national events, the great moments in American history. We do acknowledge the presence of God and then can be a very healthy thing because it’s saying beyond the given take of public opinion beyond the accounting of votes, there are transcendent standards and that the mention of God. Without getting into the specifics of Christianity, but I mentioned that there is a God, who, and this wonderful speech said Lyndon Baines Johnson gave when the Voting Rights Act, when it was approved and before the joint session of Congress, he said: God does not approve of everything that we do as a nation, far from it, but I believe that God approves what we have done here tonight.  A and when I heard that I said, I think it’s important not to see God has been on our side with the call for a healthy civil religion to honor Gd’s purposes in our life together as a national people.

Mark Tooley: And I asked you earlier about the word nationalism, I don’t think you answered that question directly, but do you think nationalism has any useful utility as Christians or is it, by definition, almost idolatrous?

Richard Mouw: Well, I think the love of the nation is very helpful, but the word nationalism, we always have three worry a bit about it. And once it’s nationalism it’s focusing on a specific nation and trying to elevate it and there’s always a danger that will see our nation is worthy of a kind of maybe worship, but I think the word idolatry it’s been misused a lot. It’s  an enormous commitment to a specific nation and honoring a nation and loving a nation is one thing. To see it as more closely aligned with the purposes of God and the world than any other nation, I think is a very dangerous, so I worry about the “ism,” I like nation, but I don’t like nationalism and I think that ought to be discussed more even in pulpits and then church discussion groups.

Mark Tooley: You’ve had a very long career, such that you could even recall speeches by Lyndon Johnson almost 60 years ago and you were called that many, at least in the upper reaches of Christianity back in the 1960s were uncomfortable with patriotism. Looking back over the last 50 years or more, do you Christians today have a more problematic attitude towards a nation than they did at the start of your career or is it just different, not necessarily better or worse?

Richard Mouw: I was different. I mean you know, again, I was formed in the 60s and kind of all the civil rights protests and antiwar protests and then there were a lot of people yelling at us, you know love it or leave it. America first, that kind of thing. So those were days in which there was a lot of polarization this isn’t brand new, but there are some new features today that I think are kind of dangerous and we need to reflect on them. And I wish we could find safe places to talk, you know. People asked me, you know, a reporter once asked me, you do a lot of interfaith dialog, what’s the most difficult group you’ve had the dialogue with, I said, my own evangelical Christians. And the problem is that when you are arguing with fellow Methodists about sexuality, or some other thing or I’m arguing with my fellow Presbyterians about sexuality, there is a vote coming up. And we really need it to find safe places, and I think that the local church, now that we’re not I mean we can only find places where we’re not always worrying. I was on National Public Radio one time with a queer theorist gay activist. And we went back and forth on stuff and, finally, I said to him, you know I wish that you and I could close the doors and your people weren’t cheering for you and my people weren’t cheering the. I wish that I could ask you the question, in all honesty and humility, what is it about people like me that threaten you so much. And then you can ask me what it is about my what my partner, and I want in life that you find so threatening. We could just have a safe place to talk about it in our deeper hopes and fears, rather than with what we’re going to vote on, you know and legislation.  He said we need that it was interesting because it was a call-in show on National Public Radio, first question person said, why do you have this Mouw guy on there, you’re going to have a slave owner tomorrow. My dialogue partner to his great credit, said so let me take this and he said to the caller you ought to be ashamed of yourself. We need to find those places where we can really talk about the deeper issues that are at stake here.  And I think the local church can be a place where we can begin to find safe places and also seeing vocabularies.  You know it’s so easy to say to the person we disagree with, why do you believe that. And they’re put on the defensive. What if you said he helped me understand better Is this the way you would put it, and you’re really trying to get their way of doing it and a way of explaining their position in ways that they would own rather than are setting it up, so that we can all do. I think we really have some work to do, and I think the local church can be a place where we learn that kind of respectful dialogue, because we really want to understand the people we disagree.

Mark Tooley: And then, finally, Dr. Mouw,as Christians struggle to understand the correct attitude they should have towards our country, besides reading your book, what are other resources or thinkers you would recommend in terms of grappling with these issues?

Richard Mouw: Well, I mean I really think that. Some of this stuff that that has been written about interfaith dialogue, for example, it’s helpful. That, again, then we entering into a dialogue with our Muslim neighbors really wanting to understand them, rather than to win the argument. There are there are guidelines there I think some of those discussions of civility and I think Robert Putnam his book, he’s written a couple, but I really enjoy Bowling Alone, where he talks about the dangers that we have these days with the absence of neighborliness. Yeah, and trying to get beyond for me, you know, and I love that line of the Christmas carol “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Jesus.” And we need to get nice.  Look at me. I make no secret that I did not vote for Donald trump. When I have really wonderful friends who did. It I need to see them not as Trump voters but as people who are worried about their grandchildren, what it’s like for them to go to public schools these days, to be raised in this in this culture and things that they’re exposed to on the Internet indicate, down to those deeper fears because it’s not all about political policy, it’s about how do we raise our kids. It’s about the deepest fears that we have about family and about safety and about who do we trust, and those are. Those are really good, and I really appreciate Mark the way in which you you have shaped ecumenical discussions with those kinds of deeper spiritual concerns in mind, because it really has a lot to do with Christian spirituality and spiritual formation, I do think that we have failed, more generally, in the area of educating God’s people, to really engage their neighbors and to try to understand their neighbors and look for opportunities to speak about our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Mark Tooley: Dr. Mouw, thank you so much and thank you for this very informative conversation about your new book How to Be a Patriotic Christian You don’t have a copy of it sitting there by you do? Otherwise I’d asked you to hold it up, but I commend it to our listeners, and we pray for your continued recovery and that you will be getting on an airplane sometime soon and coming to Washington DC.

Richard Mouw: I would love it Thank you mark, and God bless.