America

One thing that I've never understood is when people get all upset about the American government doing things that don't mesh with Christian faith.

We were talking about this briefly at my small group on Sunday night, and one person made a great point: "When does the Bible ever promise that we'll have government backing for Christianity? Look at the government Jesus lived under. The early church." It's true - the American government is far closer to Christian morals than the governments that killed babies in effort to abolish the coming King, crucified a man who rightly claimed to be God, or persecuted Christians for their faith.

And yet, we as American Christians feel this sense of entitlement that the government should back us up. And when they fail, we moan and whine. We say we're getting away from the moral values of the founding fathers.

And can I just say something about the founding fathers? Their morals gave us mass killings of native Americans and the theft of their land. Slavery. No rights for women. Putting people in stocks if they didn't attend a 6 hour church service (while touting "freedom of religion").

Clinton wasn't the first President to cheat on his wife, you know. Remember Prez #3, Jefferson? With all the illegitimate slave children? How about all the woman Ben Franklin slept with, the many illegitimate children he may have fathered? No...our founding fathers were not ideal. We just didn't have the media power to shed the kind of light on it that we do now. There was no SNL to mock the shortcomings of our leaders.

All this to say: America doesn't really have a Christian past. It may have called itself Christian at one point, but it wasn't ever full of Christian morals. And I'm OK if it doesn't have a Christian future. Because that's not a promise we're given, and ultimately, it's the church's job to shine the light of Christ and do his work. Let's not abandon our responsibility by shoving it to DC.