We Are a Someday People Living in a Someday Nation

This post might be for my Christian readers. But if you don't identify as a Christian, you're welcome here, today, too. Because I think we all feel it. The tension. The pull. The outright stress of this election day. It doesn't matter what your political or religious affiliation is, you're feeling it, too.

Growing up, I participated in two different worlds often at odds with each other. I attended a conservative church each Sunday with my family, whose ideals and doctrines did not always line up with my parents' or mine. But we loved the people. And the pastor preached from the Bible. And if you got sick or fell on hardship (we did), your church family showed up in numbers in the most beautiful ways. So, we didn't need to all agree to be in community together.

I also attended public school in a small mountain town where everyone knew everyone else, and these were our people, too. But I remember sitting in classes where teachers told us that the only people who still leaned on faith were people lacking a robust intellect. I was a top student in my class. My intellect was robust, and I had my public school education to thank for it, even though our town school's ideals didn't always line up with my parents' or mine. We loved our town. And if you got sick or fell on hardship (we did), your neighbors showed up in numbers in the most beautiful ways. So, we didn't need to all agree to be in community together.

The result of living in these two worlds, however, was a pretty conflicted teenage mind. Who was right? I didn't really think any of the adults teaching me how to navigate in the world were 100% right all of the time. I leaned on my parents a lot more than maybe other kids at that age did. They seemed to have an understanding of how to navigate these two spaces that were sometimes at odds with each other. I grew up unafraid of conflict and tension and disagreement. I grew up comfortable in the gray areas. Confusing though it sometimes was, I am grateful for the gift of that.

Growing up, I sometimes heard our church people bemoan a perceived loss of our Christian foundations as a nation. What happened to "In God We Trust?" they would ask. What happened to the sanctity of human life? In those spaces, it was often said that our founders were Christians and we were forgetting as a nation our national faith. I also heard a lot of school people bemoaning right wing conservatism that was unable to scoot over and make a little more room for diverse ways of being in the world, different ways of thinking. What happened to humanism and reason? So I wondered? Who were our founders? Were they Christians? Humanists? Deists? What were our founding ideals? Have we ever lived up to them?

I have no doubt that some our founders were Christians. But, some were not. And some who were Christians were also slave holders. Thomas Jefferson is perhaps one of the most troublesome players in our nation's early days. He penned the Declaration of Independence from a rented room at a portable desk. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he wrote. And as he wrote, a teenager, his wife's African-American half brother, attended to his needs. He knew his words would apply to some of his family members and not to others. Within the original drafts of the Declaration of Independence was a passage condemning slavery in the colonies and blaming the institution on the King of England for introducing it in the first place. But by that time, slavery was well-established in the Southern colonies who were economically dependent on its advantages. Southern leaders would not sign it, and so the passage was struck. This contradiction and hypocrisy was built into our original documents. We have never lived up to our founding ideals as a nation. And our founders, themselves, were people with deep connections to the enslavement of fellow human beings. The question, then, is not whether or not we have drifted so far from our founding [Christian?] ideals, but whether or not we have come any closer all these hundred of years later, to what we said we were about. 

When I hear fellow Christians express fear for our future, I am puzzled. Not much has changed really. There are still Christians in public offices, and sometimes they live up to the principles they promise to uphold, and sometimes they do not. There are also politicians who claim to be Christians, who use faith-speak to their own political advantage, and who live lives that look nothing like the Savior they claim to to follow. They are no different, then, than the original founders who managed to create a democracy with the deepest of contradictions. Who managed to write a shared dream for an infant nation that was both self-evident and completely unattainable for at least one-fifth of its citizens, and that, for some, continues to be unattainable.

If our nation has never been a true Christian nation, then what was or is it? What do our faith and citizenship actually share in common? 

What they share in common is this: Christians have always been a someday people. And Americans have always been a someday nation. 

What I mean is, Christians recognize that we are citizens of a fallen creation, that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Because we believe this statement describes all people, it also describes our nation. And always will. But we are a nation that hopes. And we are a people that hopes. 

What do we hope for? Who do we hope in? Let's not get the answers to those questions mixed up like Israel did--God's people who hoped for a king and hoped in a nation. God told his people that they already had a true King; they didn't need a human one. But they wanted to be like other nations. They put their hope of prosperity in the establishment of a strong nation. This was their error.

As Christians, we must hope for a nation, because we hope in a King.

It's so easy to mix up prepositions, isn't it? It's so easy to forget that we have always been a someday people, living in a someday nation. When and only when we remember this can we move forward. When we hope for a nation, because we hope in a king, we can step into uncomfortable spaces to have hard conversations in order to challenge practices, policies, and laws that only protect the privileged. We can call into question the assumptions (ie-"the faith of our fathers") that we may have wrongly assumed were givens. This is exciting work, not scary work. And it is our faith, not fear, that invites us to participate in it. 

Be not afraid.

Be the someday people of a someday nation that is striving to become a peace-loving, just society that truly lives up to its founding ideals: "That all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

These are beautiful words. Let us not be afraid to engage ourselves in the difficult and messy process of living up to them. The stakes are high. The future depends on it.