8. Foundations of American Spirituality

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

- The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Step 4

Consider these beliefs, so often held together in the same American Christian mind:

The Bible is God’s word and reveals what He will do in the future, especially shortly before the return of Jesus.

We are now living close to the end of the world and the return of Jesus.

The United States of America has a vital part to play in God’s plans today.

The Bible says nothing specific about the United States of America, the greatest and wealthiest nation on earth.

Whatever the reader may think about any of these beliefs individually, how can anyone hold them all in the same head without conflict? They simply cannot all be true. Either we are nowhere near the end of the age, or the Bible doesn’t say much about the great kingdoms present at that time, or the Bible has a lot to say about the United States of America.

How can otherwise sane people be so void of discernment?

In Alcoholics Anonymous, people become free of their addiction as they learn that finding out the bad news about themselves is how they get free (1 John 1:6-10). They come to realize that deluding themselves about their own goodness and the badness of others makes them crazy. To live that lie they need alcohol or some other drug. Many of them have tried and given up on church. And no wonder.

How do Christians and our churches handle the issues that ruin the alcoholic’s life?

Confront the average alcoholic with how he treats other people. He blames his wife, his kids, his boss, and the police. The alcoholic can prove to you that people around him don’t hate him for what he does - he drinks and beats his wife and kids because they make his life so tough. They hate him for the wonderful man that he is. He does nothing wrong, but if he does it’s all their fault.

Now call American Christians to “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Confront how we love invitations to the White House and for politicians to call us teachers and ask our advice (Matthew 23:6-7). Confront our devotion to the kingdoms of this world with all their violence, manipulation, robbery, and domination of others – and specifically our relationship to the United States of America in light of the Bible we profess to believe. We blame the secular humanists, the Muslims, the ACLU, the homosexuals, the liberals, the French – everybody but ourselves. As George Bush says, they don’t hate us for the things we do, even when they specifically document our abominations. They hate us for our freedoms, for the wonderful people we are. It must be so, for we all say so! United We Stand! And if we slaughter and torture innocent people, raping women and sodomizing little boys in our dungeons, it’s because all the bad people, the terrorists, make our lives so tough. If anyone tries to say different, they are negative, they are evildoers, they support the terrorists!

How can such people, having the minds of addicts and intent on staying that way, help an alcoholic or any other addict that walks into their churches?

Like their fathers who stoned the prophets for being negative, Americans in general and American Christians in particular are indistinguishable in their bombast, defensiveness, and finger-pointing self-righteousness from an alcoholic or any other drug abuser. Look no further to understand why America is drenched in drug abuse, alcoholism, pornography, compulsive gambling, and other such degrading addictions. In all of these, professing Christians are well represented, with no understanding of the way to liberty. If the churches had a clue, would we need 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous?

Alcoholics Anonymous tells us that the way to liberty is “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” because as the Bible says, “A curse does not alight without a cause,” and, “The truth shall set you free.” What has made us what we are? What lies have brought us not to freedom but to such bondage and degradation?

The Birth of American Christianity

Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, and say, "Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: ‘Your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan; your father an Amorite and your mother a Hittite‘”.

- Ezekiel 16:2-3

We’ve all heard about the godliness and virtue of the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England. There is some truth in this – for instance, they valued women more than any other Christians of their day, thereby blessing American culture to this day. But just as it was in the days of the apostles, when Moses had “in every city those who preach him,” the founders of American civilization do not lack for those who preach them. So as did the council of Jerusalem, I must leave their praises to these many others.

As John the apostle and Alcoholics Anonymous can tell you, dwelling on our virtues doesn’t help us. “Searching and fearless moral inventory” is about discovering problems, not about proving that we’re wonderful. Indeed, if we really were wonderful, we would not want to prove it. Consider these strongholds of evil established at the birth of American Christianity, which due to our unrepentant conceit hold us in bondage to this day.

1) The leaven of the Pharisees. In the beginning the Christians who came here thought to start a new society, a nation better than others. They thought this possible because they judged themselves spiritually superior to the European churches they had left behind. This spiritual pride is precisely the pride of the Pharisee in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14), who prays with himself, “I thank you God that I am not like other people.” At this point, our forefathers dismissed the warning of Jesus to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and so this leaven of wickedness has leavened the whole lump of American Christianity to this day, just as Paul the apostle warned us (1 Corinthians 5:6-8).

American Christians have never repented of the iniquity of our fathers at this point. Instead they have heartily endorsed their conceit and found their identity in it. For these 400 years, it has poisoned our spirituality, making contrition and humility nearly impossible for American Christians, except to some degree in personal issues. As a group, our complacency and arrogance are infamous. “Unbelievers” – believing Jesus at this point more than we do - tell us early and often that this is how we make them want to throw up (Revelation 3:16). American Christians tend to feel persecuted by anyone who opposes anything we do, but who is against us for actually believing Jesus and doing as he says? Isn’t that the only opposition that qualifies as persecution on account of Jesus?

2) Rejecting persecution. Paul wrote to Timothy that "all who want to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution" (Timothy 3:12). It was fine for people to flee here to escape persecution, because Jesus said, “If they persecute you in one city, flee to the next.” But they also figured that they could build a society here in which they could live godly in Christ Jesus without suffering persecution – thereby expecting to disprove the Bible they said they believed.

Since they founded their society on this unbelief, and not on the Rock they claimed to believe, the New England Puritans were on the road to trouble. Their commitment to being godly while avoiding persecution led them to protect themselves by robbing and murdering the Indians, instead of bringing them the good news of God’s word. How could they, since they were failing to believe it themselves?

3) Loving this world. Since a model community in which Christians would avoid being persecuted by being in charge was not possible, it soon began to break down. Puritan New England, faced with the loss of its assumed identity, could not admit the truth, and so it began to rely on devices like the Half-Way Covenant to allow people not to be real Christians and yet to be part of the supposedly Christian community. In truth, Puritan New England was now no more Christian than the so-called Christian Europe which the New England Puritans had despised and departed from. But they were committed to the belief that they were better than others and that their community in this world was God’s light on a hill, so they held to the path of self-righteously denying their true condition. They had to equate their community in this world with God’s chosen people. To this day, American Christians persistently confuse the church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ, with the American nation. This usurpation of the church’s place by a kingdom of this world is the essence of antichrist, and it ensures in the end complete abandonment to the love of this present world.

4) Hating the cross of Christ. To not be persecuted while living godly required some very ungodly violence to stay on top. The Pequot War in 1636 featured, for instance, surrounding and burning a village and murdering everyone that breathed, down to the infant born yesterday – much like the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam over 300 years later. Such barbarity in warfare was unknown to the Indians before the arrival of these “Christians.” To justify such behavior required proving that its victims were abominable people, worthy of extermination, so the Indians became demons in human form, and dissenters within became heretics and witches. This reinforced the leaven of the Pharisees at the root of the whole enterprise in the first place, because like the Pharisees, those who did these crimes had to banish guilt feelings by thanking God that they were better than their victims.

Such self-protective violence is revealed in the gospels as enmity against the cross of Christ, inspired by Satan (Matthew 26:50-54, 16:21-23). In this way, enmity against the cross of Christ was incorporated into the foundation of American Christianity. Its chronic manifestation is a general abhorrence of or patronizing condescension toward all that are weak, sick, hungry and thirsty, lame, blind, poor, in prison, handicapped, ill-clothed, or embarrassing in any way. To fit in you have to look good and measure up, and if you’re spiritually healthy you will of course be skilled in business or a profession, drive a nice car, give plenty of money to the church, and generally have your act together. We say with our mouths that people need to come to Christ as they are, but we utterly deny it by our behavior and by our relentless pursuit of religious niceness.

This general background hatred of the cross flares up in astonishingly explicit episodes of rage. Black slavery featured brutal flogging, recalling the flogging of Jesus by Pontius Pilate’s soldiers. The lynching ritual clearly re-enacted the crucifixion, in which devout white supremacist Christians poured out their raging hatred against Christ the crucified nigger. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized their victims with the burning cross, with the unspoken but often performed threat that they would be placed on it through lynching. At Fort Pillow in 1864, Confederate soldiers actually crucified black Union soldiers on tent frames. American soldiers from West Virginia, with its explicitly Christian culture, surely recognized Jesus Christ on the cross in the hooded Iraqi prisoner on a box, “lifted up” (John 3:14) with his arms outstretched, as did the rest of the world. They took his picture in order to glory in his helplessness, like those who mocked Jesus as he hung stark naked like the prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

In all of this, American Christianity at its birth repudiated the foundation of apostolic doctrine, summed up as follows by the apostle John:

This is the message we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and the truth is not in us.

The repudiation of apostolic doctrine by Christians that John warns us of here is called in the Bible apostasy, falling away. John says further, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us they would have continued with us.” “Us” is clearly John and the apostles, and departing from them is simply rejecting their teaching and following other paths. John calls these the paths of antichrist (1 John 2:18-19).

John clearly describes how this is all fulfilled in the religion of the beast in Revelation 13 – the love of money and reliance on economic coercion, killing with the sword to protect ourselves, and subjecting others to captivity and bondage in order to assure our own freedom. Here the Bible clearly sets forth how genocide, slavery, and the mad pursuit of money came to be at the foundation of American character from the beginning. And yet from the beginning, American Christians have read and believed the Bible intending to follow Christ in all things – while having to reject his most fundamental teachings in order to conform to the American church and nation which they kid themselves are God’s people. This struggle has been the constant anguish of America and its Christians for nearly 400 years. The resulting guilt and self-contempt have laid the foundation of America’s obsessive assertion of moral superiority and contempt for others. As Eric Hoffer wisely wrote in The True Believer 50 years ago, “Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us. There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness” (page 95).

The Rise of the American Nation

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name which is above every name . . .

- Philippians 2:5-9

To one who hates the cross, these words of Paul are foolishness. Christians may well say that they believe them, especially when they want to show that their faith is better than that of others because they affirm that the Bible is the word of God, but when have we actually shown that belief by doing these words? Do those who take on the form of a bondservant cross the sea to Africa to kidnap others, enslave them, and flog them with a whip? Does a bondservant massacre other people to dispossess them, as they did to the Indians?

Having so fundamentally rejected “this mind which was also in Christ Jesus” in their conduct with other people, the Christian founders of the American nation had truly gone out from the apostles into a religion of self-assertion and spiritual pride. Such religion makes people elect themselves as saviors, and to be a self-appointed savior is to be an antichrist. By rejecting the power of the cross, our fathers left themselves and their descendants the only alternative, “THE POWER OF PRIDE,” as their bumper stickers proclaim. This is the pride of life, the essence of the spirit of this world, originating in Lucifer and deriving its power from him (Isaiah 14:13-14). This pride, rooted in contempt for the humility of Christ, ensured that America would rise up in self-exaltation, like the great empires before us that likewise walked in that spirit, from the Tower of Babel to this day. And for us Christians, the point is not what any of this says about the United States of America, which in God’s view arose last night and will be gone tomorrow (2 Peter 3:8, Isaiah 40:15). What matters for us is what happens to our own souls if we conform ourselves to that proud, flag-waving, imperial spirit, fitting in beautifully in this apostasy with our fellow church members, walking hand in hand in the fellowship of the broad way.

America arose from the sea. The United States of America literally rose out of the sea, as we are told concerning the great beast of the end (Revelation 13:1). This is fulfilled in at least two ways. Most obviously, those who founded America crossed the ocean and stepped out of it onto this new land. In another more significant sense in Biblical thought, “The waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages” (Revelation 17:15). In this sense, America was populated from the beginning by peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages drawn from all over Europe and now the rest of the world. All agree that this migration from Europe is central to the American character.

America arose like the Greek and Roman empires, and in their spirit. A striking feature of the two Biblical empires that the American founders acknowledged as forerunners – Greece and Rome – is that both arose out a despised frontier region like America, ridding themselves of that reproach through self-exaltation and by gaining dominion over their cultural betters. Alexander, the “large horn,” is called the first king of the Greek empire (Daniel 8:21). But he arose from Macedon, a despised frontier country that under Alexander’s father Philip subdued the old Greek city states.

Rome arose from the western edge of Greek civilization. In Roman legend the city was founded by Aeneas fleeing the fall of Troy, and certainly arose out of Greek civilization – across the Adriatic Sea from Greece. In the same way, the United States arose across the Atlantic Ocean from “Christian” Europe through people fleeing like Aeneas, so that America came out of European civilization much as Rome had from Greece. With some reluctance, and with the help of some Greek city states like Pergamos, the Roman republic gained dominion over Greece, from which it arose. In much the same way, the United States became the overlord of Europe.

The founders of the American republic greatly admired the old Roman republic, and explicitly founded their experiment on that model. Indeed, the upper house, the Senate, is named after the Roman Senate, the upper house of the Roman republic. People like to call it a Christian nation founded on biblical understanding, but the writings of John Adams and others refer much more to Cicero and other Roman statesmen than to any biblical figure. In fact, American popular culture still identifies with republican Rome, as we see for instance in the Star Wars movies, which open with a pretty Senator from a noble family fleeing from Darth Vader, who informs us that the emperor has seized total control and that “the last remnants of the old republic have been swept away.”

Roman in politics, America is surprisingly Greek in religion and culture. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel says it well in The Prophets, Volume 2, Chapter 12:

Among the strange legacies that have come down to us from Greek civilization is that great poetry comes into being through a state of madness. The oldest known exponent of this most influential conception is Democritus, who praised Homer as inspired and held that the finest poems were those written by a poet when driven by a god and a holy breath. He “denied that anyone can be a great poet without madness.” Similarly, Plato declared with assurance “that the poet, according to the tradition which has ever prevailed among us, and is accepted by all men, when he sits down on the tripod of the Muse, is not in his right mind.”

In Greece this led the philosophers, who believed in straight thinking, to reject the gods and revealed religion altogether, while others, notably the mystery cults, sought union with the gods by rejecting reason. The Greeks came to define faith and reason as fundamentally in conflict.

Sound familiar? In America, faith is understood by nearly everyone as believing apart from evidence and reason. The only dispute is whether that’s a good thing. George Bush openly acknowledges that facts do not turn him from his hunches and feelings when he prays, and his supporters admire this as bold faith. His opponents, accepting this view, dismiss faith as reckless contempt for reality. Look no further to understand the prevalence of anti-intellectualism in America, and especially among Christians, with a corresponding contempt for faith and revelation in those who value straight thinking. No one, including those who claim to believe the Bible, seems to accept the Biblical view that true reason and revelation are essentially one – the spirit “of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).

The Bible denounces this ancient Greek and modern American distortion of “faith” as laziness (Proverbs 26:16), folly (Proverbs 28:26), evil simplicity (Proverbs 22:3), and presumption which may even rise to the level of false prophecy – saying, “The Lord says,” when He has not said (Jeremiah 23:16-17). For the prophets and Jesus, faith is hearing the reasonable God who instructs his people, the Logos (John 1), the God who makes sense. If God revealed something, you can explain it so it makes sense. You can give good reasons to believe it (Proverbs 26:16). In Biblical thought, unbelief is not failing to believe some arbitrary religious dogma. Unbelief is rebellion against unwelcome truth when it strikes us unmistakably, as we prefer darkness to light (John 3:19-21, 1 John 1:5-10). The dogmatic assertions of religious people invite contemptuous dismissal of their irrationality. The claims of Jesus and the prophets invite stones, mockery, and crucifixion, because their opponents have no better answer to their wisdom.

The “culture wars” in America are not a conflict between faith and unbelief or between Christianity and secular opposition. It’s conformity on all sides to the Greek religious spirit. The strife replays the old Greek struggle between the philosophers and the mystery cults, each side inciting the other to stay in darkness in its own style.

Chapter 9

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