With all the critique I give of the idolatry of “our democracy”,  and how “America” and it’s “ideals” are elevated to deity status,  I actually have some sense of confidence in “what this country CAN be”;  but it has grown increasingly hard to feel confident that our “politics” is much more than lipservice to those “ideals”, and very little to show me that “the little guy” or “the working man” is really in the heart of our nation’s leaders.  Hell, right now,  that’s the furthest thing from the minds of “our leaders”. 

I do expect,  and hold them to it,  that some responsibility is undertaken when elected to government office.  And while these people are not being elected pope or bishop,  there is a minimal expectation that they are “servants” of sorts,  and that knowledgeable and passionate people will be assigned to care for various human and national resources,  and that we will have our basic interests looked after.  This is simply a public trust to keep some sort of civic structure operating and some sort of oversight undertaken to protect us from companies that would place profit above health;  who would otherwise exploit the inability of the weaker members of our society to fight back when they are endangered.

This Bush administration betrays all of that in just about ALL the areas of “public trust” to which they have been entrusted (or to which they have been elected by having duped the country by grossly misrepresenting what they are about,  and cynically use the religious and manipulate us with fear;  and callously pushing us via that fear into war and creating increased enmity wherever we set foot. 

Democracy,  with all its flawed representations here,  and cheap imitations,  has had its better days.  Never sufficient to moving us anywhere close to being a model or fulfilling us,  and as a Christians I believe that there is a politic beyond “politics as we know it in America”,  and a community that calls us to something deeper than a United States of America,  as dear as this might be to us as members of one nation among nations. Christians believe (or should believe) that this nation cannot be the church for us,  or function as such.  But it IS an order in which we can participate. And it is an “order” that cannot command our “allegiance”;  but as members of a nation,  we have a role to help make this one to be all it can be.  Certainly this requires our being what we are called to be as a church,  so that ,  as Hauerwas says, “the world might know  that it is the world”.  Too many times American Christians let the nation in to the space that has meaning  that is reserved for the church,  and so we end up with church gatherings where participants are more emotionally charged up over “God Bless America” and talk of our government and it’s freedoms and  “way of life” than they are concerning the Body of Christ and the narratives that are meant to confirm our standing as a people called.  Just consider how many churches yesterday featured content and attention on to the NATIONAL holiday of Memorial Day than they did to the event of Pentecost. “Honoring the veterans” must have appeared more important than observing and reflecting and yearning for the reality of Pentecost. 

I had much stronger emotional ties to “democracy” and “American tradition” and got goosebumps at certain “patriotic moments” BEFORE I read such things as A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  That seems to have brought home to me the realization that a lot of “national pride” and “belief in America” as some sort of set of “values”  has served as a cover under which those in power hid their deeper motivations to maintain their advantage and their wealth,  whatever the consequences to those who “stood in the way”,  and so “enemies” were made for some other reason (communism that would not stop until they had enslaved us, etc.)  of those countries that would not give us what we wanted.  And this was done also to the natives of this continent, over and over again,  making a mockery of promise after promise made to the native Americans.  All of this lays bare the manipulative uses of patriotism,  and the calls to “give our lives for our country”.  The claim on our lives belongs to the Kingdom of God,  not the kingdoms of this world.  Jesus didn’t resort to arms to force a “peace” that “is unfortunately the only way in this world to get things done”,  but instead gave his life rather than resort to the world’s solutions of “wars to end wars” and “violence to avoid greater violence”.  Surely Jesus ,  had he been “in power” ,  would have been the ultimate , righteous leader.  But to the world,  that way was , and still is,  nonsense.  But even such an ends could not,  for Jesus,  justify a means that renders meaningless his suffering servanthood.