Country First?

One American political party has adopted "country first" as a campaign slogan. That same party is the party of political preference for the bulk of the evangelical community in our nation. I have been waiting for the significance of that statement to dawn on someone in the conservative evangelical community, but to date they seem to be blissfully unaware of the idolatrous overtones of their politics.

Christians are warned not to divide their loyalties. We put "God first" or else God is not God in our lives. Nothing in scripture authorizes God's people to equate their loyalty to God with loyalty to their nation. There is much that forbids it. Jesus commands us to be singlemindedly devoted to God and his kingdom (Matt. 6:24-34). His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

Christians should not even put "country second." Discipleship requires that we share the same priorities as our Lord. If God so loved "the world" that he sent his only Son to die for it, and the Son was obedient unto death, then the good of the world as a whole deserves more concern from his disciples than the good of any single nation. At best, then, country only comes in third.

That's not a message that most American evangelicals have ears to hear. They don't have ears because they have no desire to pay attention to the genuine demands of discipleship. The thought of self-conscious self-sacrifice for the benefit of strangers is completely foreign to them. They're looking for cheap grace. They only have ears for those who will tell them what they want to hear and who ask them to make sacrifices only for what is near and dear.

It would be hard for me to conceive of a more damning indictment of American evangelicalism if it weren't for the research that indicates how widely evangelicals defend the government's use of torture as an investigative technique.

Hats off to David Gushee, Bill Underwood and Mercer University for their prophetic witness against torture last week.