Keep This Nation
This is the fourth suffrage. Today I’ll address only the versicle (V); in a few weeks I plan to return to the response (R).
Here we ask God to keep our nation under his care. This requires that we have some understanding of what a nation is, in God’s eyes. What is the theological point of nations?
Christians had a rich tradition of reflection on the theological meaning of political realities and political authority that, unfortunately, largely disappeared from view in the middle of the last century. My dissertation traced this absence through the lens of John Paul’s social encyclicals. In the first part of the 20th century, the popes still wrote about politics as a realm over which God ruled as the supreme king—it was in this period that the feast of Christ the King was instituted. By contrast, for John Paul, writing in the 1980s and ’90s, God does not sit over rulers but in a sense is under them, Christ having united himself with every human being—with all the people who are under any given government. For John Paul, there is no special meaning to earthly governments.
The same disappearance has been noted by Oliver O’Donovan; he talks about this silence, this absence, in the beginning of his book on political authority, The Desire of the Nations. “[T]he relation of the contemporary political theology to the tradition can be summed up in a single bleak word: ignorance.”
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In its small way, this little versicle reminds us of the older understanding. Our nation, at least, is worthy of God’s attention, and we ask that he would care for it. God’s care is something more than care for the individuals who are citizens of the nation; it is for the nation itself.
My hunch is that Episcopalians, even though we live in a country about to celebrate its Semiquincentennial (how I have longed to use that word!)—we still harbor sentiments that come from the Anglican heritage as the established church in England. An established church has particular concern for its nation, a concern formalized in various ways both legal and informal. I am, personally, glad that we have never been formally established. Yet even under non-establishment, particular Christian concern for the nation continues as an Anglican emphasis.
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Why are nations important? For this reason: God decided to save humankind from its sins by establishing a nation. About a millennium after the Fall, when things got really horrible, God’s first idea was to wipe out the world and start over. That gave us the morally problematic (and ultimately unsuccessful) event of the Flood. After it, God decided to take a new way to save the world.
God’s new way involved making a nation out of a man he called into a particular relationship—ultimately a friendship—with himself. That man he trained in political leadership. His descendants he formed into a nation. God remained their true king, leading them, punishing them, and shaping them to live every part of their lives under his beneficent yet demanding rule. The goal was that through them the whole world would be blessed.
Nations, in other words, come into existence as part of God’s plan of salvation. And as God’s promises never fail, so it is that nations remain part of his complex salvific work.
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Does America have a special place in God’s plan? In one sense, every nation has a special place, which means that people in any nation anywhere could and should pray that God keep their nation under his care. If America did have a particular place in God’s plan, it was never quite what we thought it was. This, I think, is what Reinhold Niebuhr meant by “the irony of American history.” People can easily disagree on all such questions. But however high America might be valued, no Christian should ever say that America has superceded the biblical Israel.
It’s not, then, because we are special that we pray that God keep our nation under his care. It is because we should ourselves have particular care for our nation. This is worth our doing, even though the concerns of the rest of the world are worthy of prayer also (and not forgetting the preceding suffrage for peace throughout the world). I once noticed this Anglican difference in a dialogue with Roman Catholics. We were speaking of the ethics of immigration when it dawned on us: Those of us who were Anglicans spoke of “immigration”; Roman Catholics spoke of “migration.”
Both emphases are valid and important. In our time (and perhaps especially on the eve of the Semiquincentennial) it seems important to me to remember that God cares about both nations and individuals. Indeed, to be a human is never to be merely an individual; we are ever social beings, and one particular, significant means of our sociality is that we might belong to a nation.
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Out & About: Seminar this Sunday, March 23, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, on a remarkable (some say her best) novel by A. G. Mojtabai, Parts of a World. To find the seminar: park in the garage of the apartment building just to the south of the cathedral (where it says cathedral parking); when you exit the garage and see the green close, go to your right to Garrett Hall. We meet on the 2nd floor. (Our next book: April 27, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.)
I am to preach at St. Matthew’s on Sunday, March 30, at the 9 and 11:15 a.m. Eucharists.
On the Web: I was asked to review the book Deep Anglicanism. Writing my review helped me articulate a bit more clearly the particular character of Anglicanism and the needs of our current, cultural moment. https://crcd.net/review-deep-anglicanism/
This Friday, March 21, at 8 p.m. Central (I think) on PBS’s Great Performances is a new opera, “Grounded.” This opera has been recommended to me although I have not seen it yet. I did see, a few years ago, a performance of an earlier version, not an opera but a one-actress play, here in Dallas at Second Thought Theater, and it was gut-gripping. I’m not sure of the time; as they say, check local listings! Here is a link to a preview, compliments the NYC-area WNET station: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/great-performances-at-the-met-grounded-about/16602/