Christians should always live uneasily with empire, which constantly threatens to become idolatrous and substitute secular purposes for God’s.

The above quote from the same article that has spawned several posts from me this morning, also serves as an ironic twist to the oft-heard cries of the Religious Right about secularism. They fall prey to the most lethal of them all: the call to religious fervor over secular agendas that hoodwink them into supporting them by the carefully crafted inclusion of relgious language, thus adding energy and “public observance” (mob mentality disguised as “unity of ourpose”).

For all the cries about “Prayer in Schools” (and the lack thereof), they make no connection between the actions of their government and the ways in which these actions, and their complicity in and support of those actions, speaks volumes louder than the personal pieties that provide the fuel for the School Prayer debate. There is a deep chasm in American popular theology between faith and collective, political, and international behaviour. The power of the “annointing” of such has been handed over the “empire” Wallis describes. To question such is to invite shocked looks and blank stares, so deep has the chasm become and so deeply associated the Religious Right theology with the empire.