As my country turns 250, I feel both inspired and disillusioned, much as I did two decades ago navigating an undergrad major in political science.
Political theory inspired me. I marveled to see how science and philosophy had led to the late eighteenth-century experiment that came to be called the United States. An attractive idealism informed the Declaration of Independence in 1776; an even wiser, hard-knocks Constitution arose in 1789. Poli-sci wasn’t simple, but lessons could be gathered from failed efforts in ancient history and recent generations. Theory shone with a certain luster. It looked so good on paper.
But it was hard to square the beauty of the theory with the mess of everyday politics. I had been a politically aware teenager in the nineties and observed the Clinton years. Then, as a poli-sci major, I was expected to keep up with the news out of Washington, D.C. Daily the clash played out between the pristine principles on paper and the frankly gross realities in the news. That was the disillusioning part.
In this vice grip between theoretical virtue and practical vice, I felt desperate for heart change from above to do what the best earthly maneuvering could not.
Happy yet Humbled
I am American. I’m happy about that. I didn’t choose it, but I embrace it. I haven’t yet sensed God’s prompting to relocate, though I have come to enjoy short-term visits to partner with pastors and churches in other nations. I don’t pine for the U.S. while away, but when the scheduled end of the trip comes, I gladly comply. I’m grateful to call this nation home.
I spent my first two decades pretty proud to be an American. I hope in my last two I’ve been more humbled to call this my earthly homeland. As the nation marks 250 years since declaring independence from Britain, I have two big reasons why my childhood pride in homeland has become, I hope, a more chastened humility in midlife.
1. America’s Deep ‘Party Spirit’
I often hear people bemoan politics when what they’re really lamenting is partisanism. Typically I find legitimacy in their reasons for groaning about the polarization and “party spirit” that are having such a long, ugly run in the United States.
Public partisanship has had its high-water marks in our 250-year history, some of them greater than the present one. For one, the 1790s. And of course the 1850s — which led to civil war. But don’t forget the 1890s, the 1920s, even the 1960s.
In my lifetime, we’ve seen the escalation of partisanism from 1994 to the present. Fresh unity in the wake of 9/11 was painfully brief. Especially in the 2020s, the pressure to “pick a side” has been relentless. One of the few things both parties agree on is that anyone not fully with them is against them.
If slavery was America’s original sin, the creation of political parties, during the first administration, might be her indwelling corruption. In theory, the Founders despised parties. The irony is that they couldn’t keep themselves from starting them. Hamilton and Madison warned about “factions” in The Federalist Papers; then soon afterward they pivoted on each other and founded opposing factions (Hamilton with Washington, and Madison with Jefferson). The two-party system polarized the nation even before it had its second president.
POTENT ENGINES FOR UNPRINCIPLED MEN
By 1796, the need to “moderate the fury of party spirit” was plain enough to be Washington’s first expressed hope in his “Farewell Address,” much of which Hamilton drafted. In just a few short years, both statesmen had seen how party spirit
serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
We’ve seen all that in just the 2020s.
Despite standing at the heart of one of the two parties, Washington cautioned that they are “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” So too we are watching that play out.
WE KNOW PARTY SPIRIT
Christians don’t need the Founders to realize the evils of “party spirit.” The apostle Paul catalogs “rivalries, dissensions, divisions” among “the works of the flesh,” and he adds this sobering warning: “Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19–21).
Because of the factions in Corinth, Paul says he “could not address [them] as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1). If entrenched factions didn’t reveal outright unbelief, they at least evidenced immaturity. “The factionalism and all the petty animosities it engenders,” comments Don Carson, “are characteristic of ‘mere men’ — not of men and women who possess the Spirit of God” (The Cross and Christian Ministry, 73).
Christians, of all people, should recognize the folly of party spirit, first and foremost in the church, and by extension in every sphere where we find ourselves and intend to do genuine good. Party spirit is a mark of carnality. It is worldliness.
Our unbelieving world may insist there are just two sides. Make your pick: liberal or conservative, left or right. That’s a lie. We’ve now heard it so frequently and for so long that many who once knew better have finally given in and let the poison into their souls. Tragically, instead of being light and salt, instead of helping heal one of the nation’s greatest wounds, some Christians give increasing thought, passion, and voice to adding fuel to the fire of faction.
To be clear, freedom from party spirit need not mean Christians rejecting all responsible engagement with politics. We may indeed exercise the privilege to vote, and Christ calls us to love our neighbors and have genuine concern for their good. And may God be pleased to increase the number of truly Christian lawyers and politicians who do not lose their righteous bearings in the enormous pressures of party spirit.
At 250, I am sincerely thankful to God that party spirit hasn’t yet undone the nation. So far, the experiment has endured the cancer. But we might anticipate that when that undoing does come, factions will be at the heart of it.
One resolution a Christian might make here at 250 is to not add to the madness. That our continent-spanning union is strong enough to handle the undulating “fury of party spirit” is one thing; it’s another to contribute my Christ-professing voice to the chaos.
2. The Church’s Greater Allegiance
Formidable nations are no threat to the God who made the world and authors its history. In his patient, perfect timing, he highly exalts himself over Pharaoh, rebuffs Assyria, humbles Babylon, uses Persia, and orchestrates Rome. A humbled yet genuine appreciation for national greatness is deserving and good. Christianity is no call to pretend earthly nations can’t be great; rather, it’s a summons to recognize how much greater is the God far above them.
When bombarded by the world’s feeds, we can be quick to forget that the one we worship is far above any nation. Christians cherish and admire and gladly give our supreme allegiance to one who is seated in honor “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named” (Ephesians 1:21).
And not only does King Jesus’s far above highness flavor our earthly citizenship, but it also accents for us the priority of his church. Paul’s next word is that the Father “put all things under [Jesus’s] feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22–23). The old confessions refer to this priority of the church in his providence as God’s “most special manner” of caring for his people:
As the Providence of God doth in general reach to all Creatures, so after a most special manner it taketh care of his Church, and disposeth of all things to the good thereof. (Westminster Confession of Faith 5.7)
We who bear the name of Jesus can echo his most special manner in our own hearts. In worshiping a Christ far above any earthly government, we are loyal to a people far above any earthly nation: the church. And bowing the knee to the man of heaven, who is our far greater allegiance, will feed our pride or humility in fatherland and the tightness of our grasp on immediate political outcomes.
Strangers for Good
Hebrews 11 tells us that the faithful did not, in this life, receive the things promised but by faith saw and greeted them from afar and “acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). And that acknowledgement, countercultural as it has always been, led them to let their voice be heard — not to champion one worldly party over another, but to let the world know they had another, higher, more fundamental belonging:
People who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. (Hebrews 11:14)
Those who raise their voice to tell of a greater loyalty than party politics won’t find themselves applauded by one side or the other. But they will testify to a greater allegiance than earthly nation, and in doing so contribute precisely to what might do their earthly country the most enduring good.
Desiring God