I love America, Wesleyan Style!

I am a Christian of the Wesleyan flavor. What's a Wesleyan, you ask?

1. Well, we believe that God created a world in which he gave Adam and Eve a choice. Love is meaningless if it is forced, so God gave us a choice. When you have a choice, some are going to make the wrong choice, which is why there is evil and suffering in the world. But there is also love and heroism and grace.

The Puritans didn't have a vision anything like this for their America. They only wanted religious freedom for themselves. They were glad to come to this new land to be free of the rule of others, but then they insisted that everyone in their reach live and agree with them. This is why people like Roger Williams (1635) and Anne Hutchinson (1637) were banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

After his banishment from Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams would end up founding a colony built on the concept of free will. Rhode Island would not be Puritan. It would not be Catholic or Quaker. It would be a place where Jews could freely practice Judaism. Baptists could be Baptists. He himself became a "Seeker," unconvinced that any of the various Christian churches had true Christianity just right.

This was also at the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe, where the Lutherans and the Catholics finally decided to stop killing each other and live together agreeing to disagree.

2. This is the principle that won out in the U.S. Constitution. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Within a few years, all the States had also divested the concept of a state established form of Christianity. Call it libertarian.

And this was all very Wesleyan. In this phase of history, God doesn't force anyone to believe in him. God doesn't force anyone to become a Christian. That's rather the kind of Islam that said, "convert or die." That's rather Sharia law where you have to follow Muslim laws if you live there. That's John Calvin's Geneva and the initial Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

It's not America, and it's not the way God runs the world.

3. In England, the king is the head of the church. Why? Because Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Roman Catholic Church wouldn't give him one. So he made his own church.

For good or ill, the interconnection of the Anglican Church with the politics of England has no real force. It's purely ceremonial. England is not really a Christian nation.

In pre-modern times, a state religion often led to persecution to those who didn't agree. Bloody Mary burns Protestants at the stake. Queen Elizabeth burned Roman Catholics at the stake. It doesn't seem to be a real quote, but in one anecdote, Charles Spurgeon was asked why the Baptists never burned anyone at the stake. His reply was allegedly that "We were never in power."

4. So it was wise that the Founding Fathers decided to let people choose their own religion. In the ideal America, our laws stick to a basic social contract. You can call it basic morality from a religious perspective. But for thinkers in the heads of the Founders like John Locke and J. J. Rousseau, this is a social contract: "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquillity... do ordain and establish this Constitution." 

This social contract says that we agree to live together peacefully by agreeing to certain basic rules. For example, I won't kill you if you won't kill me. I won't take your stuff if you don't take my stuff. From my Christian vantage point, this is morality. From the viewpoint of many of the Founding Fathers, this was a secular social contract.

5. The people who created the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were not perfect people, but their ideas were pretty darn good. This is the problem with limiting the principles of these documents to the details in the heads of the Founding Fathers. Jefferson could write "all men are created equal" and yet own slaves. It is a contradiction. 

"They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is a fantastic ideal that Jefferson himself didn't live out. 

Langston Hughes would write a poem in 1943 about the America he loved. It was the America that the dreamers dreamed. But he also had a line, "There's never been equality for me." I've always thought we've been working it out. We had that Civil War thing where we got rid of slavery. We had that Civil Rights thing where we made great strides. We let women vote in 1920.

Jefferson of course was not a Christian in any orthodox sense. The "Jefferson Bible" ripped all the miracles out. He did not believe Jesus was the Son of God. Like Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers, he was a Deist who believed God made the world and then went off to play golf somewhere. That's what was in his head.

And while I disagree with him strongly on his theology and practice, his Libertarian vision is why America has flourished as a melting pot for all the peoples of the world. It is no coincidence that Wesleyan-Arminianism flourished in the same period that America was founded. It is no coincidence that the Baptists used to have a fundamental principle called "freedom of conscience." 

These Christian theologies fit well with the ideals of America's founding. Has America always played out this libertarian ideology evenly? Of course not. We like rules. In our history, we have passed lots of laws that imposed more than a consistent application of the social contract would. Supreme Court judges have from time to time sided with culture over the fundamental principles. 

Take Plessy v Fergusson in 1896. It sounded very logical. Blacks can be "separate but equal." Of course, it didn't play out that way for the next fifty years. It was an intelligent-sounding way of justifying an underlying animus that "all men aren't created equal." The fundamentalist bias is to use the letter to undermine the spirit.

And still, God lets us make bad choices. He "gave them up," Romans 1 says. This is how God runs the world. The libertarian America is a mirror of the way God made the world. As Jefferson says, "That government governs best that governs least." We govern just enough to make sure everyone plays by the common, universal rules (which because of human tribalism and egoism, turns out to be quite a lot, unfortunately). We govern just enough so that the whole thing works (which turns out to be quite a lot, unfortunately). And that's more restriction even than how God governs the world.

5. There are many Puritans among us today. They don't like the vision of the Founding Fathers for America. They want to force America to live by a particular set of Christian rules. They have very intelligent arguments to make it sound like "No, no, no, Jefferson was the anomaly. That's not what they meant."

What did Paul say? "What is it to me to judge those outside? ... God will judge those outside" (1 Cor. 5:12-13). Similarly, Jesus said, "Repay to Caesar the things of Caesar and to God the things of God" (Mark 12:17). Both of them see the secular world as a different world than the realm of the kingdom. Neither had any thought in this phase of history to take over the government for Christ. In fact, that was the faulty understanding of the disciples (Acts 1:6).

I fear that you won't see the application to today if I don't spell it out, but I think I will still let you connect the dots. What is unAmerican? To try to make the laws of America or of any state within America specifically Christian. It doesn't matter if most of the Founding Fathers were Christian, this is not the framework they created in the Constitution.

Even Israel only ran well as a theocracy when Moses and Joshua were around. The book of Judges is a testament to the general effectiveness of a theocracy. Also take a look at Iran. The practical problem with theocracies is that they always require some human or group of humans to relay to us what God is saying. Someone always has to interpret Scripture. And therein the whole thing falls apart.

6. I love America, Wesleyan-libertarian style. It's how God governs the world. It tries to woo people to Christ. Making people behave a certain way doesn't make them Christians. Forcing people to say they believe a certain way doesn't make them believe that way. It actually pushes them away.

Let's love people into the kingdom of God. Because that actually works.