Matt. 6:24: No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth [Mammon].

The religion has two sacred texts, but they are not the Old and New Testaments. It has a figure who led his people to freedom, but was not Moses. It speaks of salvation via a man who was martyred on Good Friday, but was not Jesus. The religion is "Americanism," with its Declaration of Independence and Constitution, with Washington and Lincoln. Other quasi-religious rituals and symbols include the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the National Anthem. Also revealing are attempts to ban "desecrating" the flag, implying that it is sacred. For over 200 years, Americanism has functioned as a substitute religion.

If Jesus were on earth today, he would still declare that you cannot serve both God and Mammon, but in the U.S. he might add You cannot serve God and Uncle Sam. If other things occupy the throne alongside Jesus as recipients of our allegiance, whether it be wealth or a human leader or a nation, we are not truly following Jesus. If we treat "God and Country" as equally important objects of devotion, we are idolaters.

One need only attend a church service near the Fourth of July to see this false religion in action. In many places, Jesus and the cross take a back seat while national symbols and military power are celebrated. God Bless America may be sung, with its implication that blessing other parts of God's world is less important. Allegiance to Jesus and to the flag merge into a syncretistic jumbled mess. If it were only once a year it might not be so bad, but the religious system of Americanism is deeply intertwined with much Christian practice, like the permanent display of the flag in some sanctuaries or the promotion of "Christian nation" mythology.

As theologian Peter Leithart put it in his book Between Babel and Beast, "For Americanism, the American nation takes the place of the church as the sacred community." How did this heretical religion gain such influence in American Christianity? And how can we extricate ourselves from its clutches?

Maybe we can blame Constantine. In the early church under the Roman Empire, it was clear that Christ OR Caesar was a choice; you had to be devoted to one or the other. But what happens when Caesar becomes a Christian (or claims to)? What happens when the church gains access to the power of the state?

After more than two centuries in which the church was on the margin, sometimes tolerated and sometimes persecuted, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the year 312. Historians debate whether this was genuine or just politically expedient, but in either case it was a major milestone on the way to Christianity becoming the official religion of the Empire in 380. As many have observed, this alliance of church and state made the Empire a little more Christian, but it made the church a lot more Imperial.

One legacy of Constantine is exemplified by his (likely apocryphal) conversion story. Before a key battle, he supposedly saw a cross in the sky along with words traditionally rendered in Latin (originally it was in Constantine's native Greek) as in hoc signo vinces, meaning In this sign, conquer. Constantine did some conquering under the cross, but this should give Christians pause. The cross is not supposed to be a symbol of violent conquest; to the contrary, it is a symbol of how the Prince of Peace allowed the forces of conquest to do violence to him for our sake. Before Constantine, Christians had mostly opposed war, but afterwards national war often became a sacred cause.

Another example of the corruption of the church by the ways of Empire is Pope Damasus, who became Bishop of Rome in 366 and proceeded to massacre the supporters of his main rival. Murdering one's rivals was common practice for Roman Emperors consolidating their power, but now the methods of imperial power were adopted by the church.

While history is not so simple as a previously pure church suddenly becoming corrupt after Constantine, the church certainly became more like worldly empires after the thrones of Christ and Caesar were merged. One can trace a thread of Holy War from Constantine, through the Crusades, to the way the modern church often celebrates violence for national causes.

Maybe we can blame the Puritans. Contrary to popular myth, most colonists came to America for economic reasons, not religious ones. The Puritans of the 1600s were an exception, founding a consciously religious colony in which they could practice a brand of Calvinist Christianity that was not welcome in England. Lest we think of them as exemplars of religious freedom, it is worth noting that they did not give others the freedom they claimed for themselves. For decades, if you were a Baptist or a Quaker or (God forbid) a Catholic, you would be persecuted in their Christian colony.

More significant here is the story by which the Puritans (and other colonists to some extent) defined themselves: they were God's new Israel. Like the Chosen People entering the Promised Land, they were called to conquer in God’s name and create a new society that would be the chief vehicle for God’s work in the world.

There were at least two problems with this narrative. First, if the colonists were Israel and America was the Promised Land, that put Native Americans in the role of the Canaanites, obstacles to be cleared out of the way. Much injustice has resulted from the "new Israel" metaphor. Second, according to Christian theology, that title is already taken. God's new Israel is the church, the trans-national, trans-racial Body of Christ. It is a denial of basic Christian doctrine for any nation or ethnic group to claim God's special favor.

While a few colonial leaders such as Roger Williams rejected the new Israel narrative, most were happy to frame their subjugation of the land and native peoples as part of God’s grand plan. Conceptually, it is not a huge leap to go from seeing your nation as specially chosen by God to worshipping your nation alongside (or in place of) God.

Maybe we can blame the Founding Fathers. These men function as saints in the religion of Americanism, although most of them did not particularly seek veneration. While few of them were orthodox Christians, most at least respected religious belief, albeit mostly on the pragmatic grounds that religion was necessary to produce good citizens. America's founding documents were mostly non-religious, but in some sense the Founding Fathers saw the new country as sacred cause. While I think they would not have approved of the current excesses of America-worship, they may have paved the way for it by setting up a system in which it was expected that religious convictions would be subordinated to national citizenship.

Some blame must also be assigned to the following generation. As Steven Green shows in his book Inventing a Christian America, it was only after the death of George Washington in 1799 that the Founding Fathers began to be venerated (including made-up stories about Washington like the cherry-tree incident or praying in the snow at Valley Forge), and mythology developed about America's special place as a "Christian nation." Coupled with this mythology was a growing "American exceptionalism," the belief that the U.S. is a unique force for good (for some, because God has specially chosen it) and does not need to play by the same rules as other nations. Once these doctrines are adopted, the temptation to idolize the nation is strong.

The faults of Christian nation mythology and American exceptionalism could be their own essay, so I will limit myself to one problem here. If we idolize what the Founding Fathers created, we revere a nation in which only white men mattered. This mythology can keep us from acknowledging, and seeking to remedy, some un-Christian things that have characterized the U.S., such as mistreatment of Native Americans and the fact that much of the country was built on slavery and perpetuated racism long after slavery's official end.

Maybe we can blame capitalism. As historian Kevin Kruse documents in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, in the middle decades of the 20th Century there was a concerted effort to associate God and Country, resulting in things like the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. This was pushed by wealthy individuals and corporations who opposed the New Deal. They used slogans like "Freedom in Christ," but rather than the Christian freedom the New Testament commends (freedom from needing to follow laws and rituals to please God) they mostly meant "freedom" from taxes and regulation, and sometimes freedom to discriminate against Black people. [This is paralleled today by some who advocate "religious freedom" but mainly mean freedom to treat gay and transgender people like Blacks in 1950s Alabama.] It was a sneaky attempt to link Christianity with a type of business-friendly government, and to some extent it worked. Devotion to Jesus became further intertwined with devotion to America (a vision of America that favored wealthy white people), and patriotism was portrayed as a Christian virtue. This contributed to the current situation where many Christians see no problem with making devotion to America as important as devotion to Jesus.

Maybe we can blame human nature. Humans are naturally tribalistic. We band together with those who are like us and are hostile to outsiders. Channeling these instincts into national devotion is by no means unique to the U.S.; for millennia people have found their identity in being an American, a Roman, an Egyptian, etc. The fervent nationalism that makes "country" an ultimate value meets a deep-seated need in the human psyche to find belonging in a group we can call "us" while rejecting others we can label as "them."

This is no excuse for nationalism, especially for the Christian. We are called to put to death our natural tendencies if they oppose God's way of self-sacrificing love. Sound theology rejects ethnic and national divisions, insisting that we love all of our neighbors. If we follow Jesus, we cannot so closely identify with our nation that we fail to love those outside it.

Maybe we should blame ourselves. By "ourselves" I mean the American church. For too long, the church has let itself be a cheerleader for nationalism (some sermons in Revolutionary times already expressed religious devotion to America). For too long, sanctuaries have held idolatrous display of national flags. For too long, the unspoken message has been that Jesus isn't enough, that a righteous life requires devotion to country that parallels our devotion to Jesus. For too long, churches have majored in the minors – we get all worked up about dancing, or musical styles, or whether somebody's doctrine of Hell or creation or the Atonement perfectly matches traditional orthodoxy, but fail to question a pervasive Americanism that draws us away from Jesus. Some of those "minor" things are not unimportant, but in the Bible God seems much more concerned about the evil of pursuing false gods (and about the pursuit of love and justice) than about fine points of doctrine and behavioral boundary markers.

Conservative Christians often complain, sometimes with good reason, about churches becoming captive to the culture. Yet the culture of Americanism has captivated many churches, and most American Christians unthinkingly accept it.

The false religion of Americanism has consequences beyond the danger of idolatry. It lures its followers into thinking that God has sanctioned values that lack Biblical support, such as military aggression or "the American dream." Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness cannot be ultimate values for Christians; the last of that triplet is particularly contrary to the way of Jesus. Devotion to Americanism can blind us to the country's very real flaws (such as the fact that in 1776 all men are created equal meant only white males, and that the legacy of white male supremacy persists), and can keep us from caring for and learning from the rest of the world. The marriage of the church to Americanism hinders its mission abroad, and it also harms our witness at home when we perpetuate false narratives about America.

As this essay nears a close, I see that I have mostly failed to answer a question posed above regarding this false religion: And how can we extricate ourselves from its clutches? Critique is easier than constructive solutions, but here are a few thoughts. First, it may get better with time because it is somewhat generational. Fewer young Christians have been trained in this substitute religion than those who grew up during the Cold War. Second, church leadership can purge worship services and sacred space of the symbols of American civil religion. This may mean changing a July 4 worship tradition, removing a flag from a sanctuary, or taking care that Americanist propaganda does not creep into sermons or prayers. Some of this may require gentle explanation – for example that removing a flag doesn't mean we don't love our country, just that other objects of devotion are inappropriate where the Body of Christ meets. Finally, good teaching on the centrality of Jesus is needed. The nation is just one of many potential idols in our world that tempt us to divert our hearts from Jesus.

Ultimately, it comes back to who and what we serve. For Christians, the throne must be occupied by Jesus alone. It is fundamentally idolatrous to look elsewhere for our salvation, whether to a golden calf or to the red, white, and blue.

2023 Addendum: Some of the material in this essay is now contained in my book, co-authored with Carl S. Hofmann, Christ or Caesar: Church and Nation in Christian Perspective.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are the opinion of the author of this essay alone and should not be taken to represent the views of any other person or organization.

Originally written August/September 2020. Page last modified May 4, 2023.

Back to Writings page