Christian America and the Kingdom of God

Foreword

Foreword I am a citizen of the United States and I love my country. I choke up sometimes when I sing about our land—the purple mountain’s majesty and fruited plain, the spacious skies and amber waves of grain, from the Mojave to the Okeefenokee to the oceans white with foam. I love the people, because they’re my people, Democrats and Republicans and independents, northerners and midwesterners, southerners and northwesterners, urbanites and suburbanites and ruralites, folks of all skin tones and accents, recent immigrants, long-term settlers, and aboriginals. I love our sports, our music, our jokes, our cooking, our holidays . There’s so much I love. But there’s something I’m not so fond of. The thing I don’t love is hard to name, hard to describe. It’s a flaw in our national character, I think, or maybe not a flaw as much as an immaturity, like an adolescent chip on our shoulder, something we need to grow out of. You could call it arrogance, a sense of exceptionalism, superiority , and pride. But I often think underneath what seems like conceit, there’s really a strong sense of insecurity. Maybe our real problem is a kind of inferiority that we keep overcompensating for, like the short guy who has the toughest attitude, or the preacher’s kid who cusses a lot so he won’t be taken for a goody-goody, or the lady who fears she’s too old and ugly and wears too much makeup to hide, not just her wrinkles, but also her fear. Why would we be afflicted with such an inferiority? Could it be because we’ve never faced some of the truths of our collective past? Could it be we haven’t faced the truth of land-theft and attempted genocide of our native peoples? Or the truth of slavery too long defended before finally overthrown? Or the truth of an expansionist tendency that wasn’t satisfied once we reached from xii foreword Atlantic to Pacific, but that tempted us to extend our control to Hawaii and the Philippines—and later to Vietnam and Iraq? I love my country, and I want my country to be even better than it is by maturing in our national character—maturing enough to face the uncomfortable truths that we try not to know. I don’t want us to be like the alcoholic-in-denial who tells himself he’s the life of the party, or the blabbermouth who considers himself friendly, or the gossip who sees herself as a good communicator, or the playground bully who mistakes his classmates’ fear for respect. That’s why I have come to admire the work of Richard Hughes. In Myths America Lives By, and now in Christian America and the Kingdom of God, Richard is trying to help us grow up as a nation. As a historian, he is well suited to inform us about our history— including the parts we are tempted to hide or spin, thus helping us face our denial. And as a sincere and committed Christian, Richard is well suited to confront— gently, delicately, but firmly—the besetting sin of religious hypocrisy to which we Christians in America are easily tempted. Imagine if Great Britain never faced the downsides of the British Empire, if Belgium never came to terms with the holocaust of the Congo under King Leopold, if South Africa practiced amnesia about the apartheid years, if Germany hid rather than faced the nightmare of the 1930s and early 1940s. That imaginative exercise reinforces the importance of the work Richard Hughes is doing—and asking us to do—in this book. It’s easy to demonize, and easy to lionize. In between comes the hard work of sober judgment, and Richard Hughes is one of the best people alive to help us in this national task. To do so, Richard has to explore the idea of a Christian nation, and then offer a solid explanation of what the phrase “kingdom of God” meant in the biblical text, which he does clearly and well in the book’s introduction and first three chapters. Then he has to explore the outworking of “kingdom of God” in relation to both church history and American history, which he does concisely and strongly in the fourth chapter. Finally, he must bring all this to bear on the present moment in the book’s final chapter. When I read the final chapter, and especially...