A Christian Country

The Christian Church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars. Countries are about the acquisition, distribution, and sharing of power. Or the opposites of those verbs. By deliberately setting itself up as a state with no officially sanctioned church, America is the one nation under which the Christian values of its early intelligentsia, and undeniably Christian faith of the early masses were able to flourish unfettered by the intersection of secular power and religious belief. The founding fathers learned much from the aftermath of the 30 years war in Europe where battles for national and local power were carried out under the ostensible guise of 'Protestant' versus 'Catholic' and the uses of state sponsored religion to consolidate the secular power gains. However, it is a brutal mistake to mix the love of country with the love of God. Among many other things it allows the citizens to confuse their Christian morals into sometimes believing the the 'end justifies the means'. For example we condemn the Nazi death camps, Saddaam's gassing of the Kurds, the horrible inequities of Socialist states but we have a tendency to overlook the mass bombings of cities, firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, invasion of Iraq etc., as being necessities. Perhaps worse than the deliberate, scientific killing of civilians in the wars of the 20th century, was the sad, desperate attempt to pretend to ourselves later that it was right and justified. In this way the pain and damage were passed on to new generations who had no hand in the killing. War does terrible harm to civilizations, to morals, to families, and to innocence. How strange that we should make it the heart of a national cult.