The United States of America was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation. This is an indisputable historical fact. Those who claim the First Amendment was never intended to allow prayer in school should know that the authors of that glorious amendment returned home from the Constitutional Convention of 1789 to pass laws declaring official religions for their entire states. So, I think they would have been fine with our young adults gathering at the flagpole, before school starts, for an unofficial prayer.
For nearly 200 years, little changed about our self-perception as a religious nation. The cultural regression of the 1960s dented that, but America is still the most religious of all western nations. And in an age of open genocide against Christians in the third world, the unchecked onslaught of Islam against everything civilized, and the entropic decay of post-Christian Europe into nihilistic resignation, our distinction is more important than ever.
The Founding Fathers were largely Protestant. But the allure of our nation, both before and after, attracted Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Calvinists, and Presbyterians. Other denominations, such as Pentecostals and Mormons, are American-born sects. And while all these denominations differ in varying degrees in their eschatological approaches to the faith, one thing is certain. Every one of these denominations was born from a deep and sincere effort to get closer to God.
None of these denominations evolved from a group of slackers looking for a “shortcut” to God. None of them arose from an attempt to treat Christianity as a smorgasbord, where its congregants pick and choose which aspects of the religion they like and leave the rest. This Old Country Buffet approach is a purely modern perversion, with the added annoyance that its practitioners make sure to tell everyone in their vicinity that, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” But more on that tomorrow.
The point is, multiple overlapping (and sometimes competing) denominations living side by side in relative peace wasn’t always the norm. In Europe, it led to the French civil wars and the pan-continental Thirty Years’ War. But here in America, there has been very little, if any, inter-Christian violence. Racists and leftists, not Christians, attacked churches, both during the Jim Crow era and today. But that doesn’t make us faultless.
Read through the Comments section of any article about Christianity and you’ll find Christians of differing denominations at each other’s throats. Sometimes it’s expressed in crass mockery. Other times it's masked underneath benign theological jargon. But the message is the same.
Your church is corrupt and heretical, whereas mine gets it 100% right and is flawless.
No, YOUR church is corrupt and heretical, whereas MINE gets it 100% right and is flawless.
Can we please stop our pathetic little slap fight? No church, including my own, gets it 100% right and is flawless. It requires a grotesque lack of humility for any of us to assume we can wrap our pea brains around the infinite mysteries of God and His designs with any more precision than the next congregation of sad, ignorant creatures in the next church down the street.
And it’s not like our “leaders” are providing sound guidance.
The leaders of the Catholic Church support the unfettered mass importation of illegal criminals into hitherto peaceful societies. The leaders of the Anglican Church pre-emptively surrendered to Islam. The leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church (the biggest Orthodox denomination) are Putin sycophants.
The leaders of the Presbyterian Church long ago decided that the logical way forward was to turn itself into a blue-haired, nonbinary pride parade. And the leaders of the United Methodist Church are eager to follow suit.
In short, too many churches have turned away from love the sinner but hate the sin. They now preach normalize the sin and deify the sinner.
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But if our churches have collectively strayed from the path to God, it is due to the politicization of religion and the desire of church leaders to conform to the latest Quinnipiac poll rather than to the message of the Gospel. It is not due to our centuries-old eschatological divergences, and we need to stop behaving as if those divergences are cause for conflict.
My utter disappointment with the current pope and his immediate predecessor aside, I’m a practicing Catholic because, through inference and deduction via my extremely limited understanding of the world around me, I found Catholicism to be the best path to God. But does that make me a “better” Christian than non-Catholics?
Martin Luther King Jr. not only successfully led the movement for civil rights, but he did so with a message of peace and racial brotherhood in an era when so many other black leaders were screaming for the exact opposite. Oh, but he was a Baptist. Does that make him wrong and me right?
Andrew van der Bijl, also known as “God’s Smuggler,” spent decades smuggling Bibles to Christians behind the Iron Curtain, and he later founded the Open Doors foundation. Oh, but he was a Methodist. Does that make him wrong and me right?
Elizaveta Skobtsova was a Latvian refugee living in Paris during the Nazi occupation, during which time she used her home to shelter Jews and sneak them out of the country. After the Gestapo arrested her, she was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She ended up in the gas chamber after she volunteered to take the place of a Jewish prisoner. Oh, but she was Orthodox. Does that make her wrong and me right?
Thomas Byles was an Oxford graduate living in Essex, England. In April 1912, he sailed for America to attend his brother’s wedding. While crossing the Atlantic, disaster struck and his ship sank. Survivors last saw Byles praying with roughly a hundred passengers who were stuck on board. Byles himself didn’t need to be there. He was twice offered a place on the lifeboats, and twice he refused. He chose to give his seat to someone else, and went down with the RMS Titanic.
Oh, but he was Catholic priest. Does that make him wrong and you right?
Anyone with young kids knows that they color pictures for you. Your young son hands you a scribbled mess that he says is a lion in the jungle. Your young daughter hands you a scribbled mess that she says is daddy brushing his teeth. And those two scribbled messes mean more to you than anything, because they represent an act of pure love that your kids created for you.
To them, you are God.
But sometimes the kids fight about whose picture is better, about which picture you will like more, etc., and the act of love devolves into a yelling match fueled by pride. At which point you intervene and stop their pathetic little slap fight. And you remind your kids that both acts of love are acknowledged and cherished. Yes, you realize that one might grasp artistic ideas and talents more than the other, but that’s not the point. You’re their creator, and you want not only for both of them to know how much you love them, but you also want them to love each other as brother and sister.
And so it is with us. No gift or prayer or homage to God will ever compare to the act of creation with which He blessed us. Catholic and Protestant, Orthodox and Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian, we are all using the nanosecond of time we have to claw our way through the darkness and try to derive but a sliver of wisdom from an infinite abyss. The most we can offer up is our own scribbled messes based on our extremely limited comprehension of who God is and what He wants.
So let’s stop our pathetic little slap fight. When the congregation down the road offers up a scribbled mess that doesn’t look exactly like our scribbled mess, we need to overcome our pride and concede that God will recognize their loving devotion just as much as He recognizes ours.
Who among us would argue that this isn’t a good thing?
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