As a Christian, I want my fellow Christians to be guided by informed ethical principles as we celebrate the diversity among all of God’s children. But I have no idea what Christian nationalists mean when they say America is a Christian country.
A more correct statement is that many Americans are Christians, but among them there are differences in practice and religious perspectives. For example, unlike many fundamental denominations, there are many Christian denominations which do not believe in a literal interpretation of scripture, which I see as the writings through the ages by God-loving people expressing — through parables, metaphors, myths and allegory — truths which cannot be expressed in mere words.
We are people of faith, who believe in God. We do not know, for if we knew, there would be no need for faith, which is based on what we believe, not on what we know. Believing, to me, is trusting in God, with an open mind.
To paraphrase what Reza Aslan wrote in “The Zealot,” faith is a conscience decision a person makes to believe in a power greater than oneself, which cannot be adequately explained in words. So, we rely on religion to give us vocabulary to help us explain the inexplicable.
The dark-skinned Jewish carpenter from Nazareth whom Christians worship began his public ministry proclaiming, “I have come not to abolish the law but to bring it to perfection.” (Matthew 5:17) And his followers, including the apostles and Paul, were Jewish. And I suggest that the most important teachings of Jesus were reiterations of basic Jewish teachings: love God, love your neighbor, feed the hungry, cloth the naked, and be honest in your dealings with others. (Compare Isaiah 55: 1-13 with Matthew 5: 3-10, Old and New Testament passages respectively)
I do not believe that the Ten Commandments should be displayed in every classroom, as Christian nationalists want to do, for there are wide differences among Christians about what the commandments mean. For example, I believe that privatizing public schools so that corporations can make profits at the government’s expense violates the first commandment: I am the Lord, do not put false God’s before me. In this case the false God is greed by those who would put profit ahead of providing good educations to our children.
And how about the commandment to honor our parents: would that not include caring for them in their old age with adequate health insurance, good housing, and adequate food? But some Christian nationalists want to shred social safety nets, reduce the size and scope of government in order that corporations can make more money. Christian nationalists worry about deficits but do not want to have the ultra rich pay their fair share of taxes to fund Social Security, public schools, health care and other humanitarian programs. And they want to exclude from school curricula subjects that feed the sense of empathy (spirituality) of our intellects, to make us all into compliant worker bees in an unbridled world of vulture capitalism. (And sadly, too many of us are compliant, advocating for STEM, supporting the privatizing of public education in favor of charter schools, and substituting an enthusiastic love for learning, with an obsession for a distorted meritocracy in which we all compete against each other.) I may be wrong, but that is what I believe with my whole heart.
I believe we all need to embrace the commandment that we love our neighbors, for the opposite of love is hate, and hate is to wish evil on others, which I will not do. I wish peace, love, and joy on my neighbors, even those whom I do not know, or whom I do not like: Love is deeper than liking. For that reason, I implore all people of faith to recognize that many corporations fail to see their employees and customers as people worthy of love. The former are a drain on profits and therefore should be limited in what they can earn, and be disposable if they can be replaced by cheaper labor and or automation. And their customers are too often exploited by unnecessarily high prices, by products that are addicting, and by aggressive advertising and sales pressure.
And the neighbors whom scripture calls us to love include people of all faiths, ethnicity, race, religion and gender identities. So, rather than promoting an alleged Christian identity, I prefer to promote an ethos that recognizes the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who long for righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, in accordance with Isaiah of the Hebrew Bible and Matthew of the New Testament, both of which we share with our Muslim neighbors. We all, indeed, are children of the same God.
Jim Palermo lives in Southampton.